Leadership Academy

<< Background >>As one of the means to achieve the European Education Area by 2025, the EC highlights the pivotal role of education and training leadership, which should be taken into account when developing favorable environments and conditions for the development of competences and motivation of teachers, trainers and educational staff, thus ensuring that education and training institutions operate as learning organisations. In CEE countries, the management style applied in most schools is still clinging to an outdated and inflexible hierarchical leadership paradigm; the leader/follower binary model of leadership (Kezar & Holcombe, 2017). In addition, following from the results from a recent survey among school leaders in our partner countries, called for joining our forces to build a transnational cooperation partnership to involve as many key stakeholders as possible (associations and unions of school principals, training providers, coaches, technology partners and a leading provider of educational resources) to develop an innovative approach which will support principals in a relevant and meaningful manner. << Objectives >>The Leadership Academy objectives were:• To develop an innovative approach for addressing school leaders’ needs through the use of participatory approaches, coaching and distributed leadership practices, as well as increasing their effectiveness for the benefit of the school community;• To support school leaders to be ready to integrate good practices and new methods into daily activities (incl. strategic planning of professional development for staff in line with individual needs and organisational objectives) and to be open to synergies with organisations active in different fields.• To improve school leaders management competences.• To contribute to a more modern, dynamic, committed and professional environment. To achieve these objectives we are developing the following core project results:- The Leadership Academy Handbook- The Leadership Academy Platform- The Leadership Academy Professional Circles Methodology<< Implementation >>The Leadership Academy is a 36 months project, which started in May 2022. With regard to project management activities, so far, we designed and launched our project website and social media channel, conducted 4 transnational project meetings, partners produced two cycles of internal reporting, produced six newsletters, and assessed the school leaders baseline competence levels. Two external evaluations were conducted on our project results. The work on the core project results started by the team designing the format, structure, layout and topic areas of the Leadership Academy Handbook. The first version of the Leadership Academy Handbook was tested among 30 school principles (10 per country). We used the feedback received from the testing to develop the final version of the methodological guidelines. We continued developing the Platform and then the Professional circles methodology. Project platform was developed, tested and finished together with all partners, all results were published here. Professional circles methodology was tested at 18 meetings of principals. << Results >>We aimed to achieve long-term for target groups those: SCHOOL LEADERS (SL, principals):increased sense of initiative/leadership; increased motivation, satisfaction levels and wellbeing; more active involvement in peer learning/ practices exchange; enhanced skills to apply innovative methods and leadership styles in everyday work; enhanced overall efficiency; positive effect on continuous professional development. SCHOOL COMMUNITY: enhanced quality of the education process; more active participation of teachers in strategic activities by applying distributed leadership approach; boost digital transformation. The desired impact of the LA project at European, national and local level is to: directly support development of stronger school leadership; assist digital transformation by supporting SLs to enhance their capacity/readiness to manage an effective shift towards digital education; increase effectiveness/relevance of the education system through enhanced management competences of SLs; adequately respond to the unprecedented crisis affecting all sectors of our social life at a time. To achieve these objectives we developed following core project results: The LA Handbook, The LA Platform, The LA Professional Circles Methodology.