News story

Local leaders of education (LLE)

Changes to the local leaders of education programme.

Local leaders of education (LLEs) have made and continue to make a significant contribution to supporting schools since the programme was introduced in 2008. LLEs provide a range of school-to-school support and coaching and mentoring for head teachers.

As part of our move towards a school-led system, the National College for Teaching and Leadership (NCTL) will no longer designate LLEs, and instead we‘ll give teaching schools the freedom to recruit and designate school leaders in this role as they already do with specialist leaders of education (SLEs).

In 2014 to 2015, we successfully piloted a more devolved and system-led approach to the LLE programme with teaching school alliances (TSAs) managing the programme.

NCTL will continue to designate national leaders of education (NLE) and their national support schools (NSS) to ensure that there is sufficient high quality school-to-school support to enable schools everywhere, particularly those under-performing or coasting, to access the support they need to improve.

Whether local system leaders or NLEs, we are clear that all system leaders, working with teaching school alliances, have an important contribution to make.

Continuing the great work of system leaders

  • If you’re an existing LLE, you may wish to consider applying to be an NLE as the eligibility criteria has recently changed – more information (including the benefits) can be found in the National leaders of education: a guide for potential applicants.
  • If you are a Pupil Premium reviewer and/or coaching Women in Leadership then this will not be affected by the changes to the LLE programme –you’ll remain listed on the school-to-school support directory, but we do encourage you to contact your TSA
  • If you wish to provide local system leader support it is important you contact and work through a teaching school, details of your local teaching school(s) can be found on the school-to-school support directory.

LLEs designated through the LLE pilot are unaffected by these changes.

Published 19 January 2017