The Revival of the LLE!

Last year the Department for Education made the decision that Local Leaders of Education (LLE) were no longer to be part of the school led system and the list that they kept of LLEs was to be closed. At this point, the Teaching Schools in Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire decided that LLEs were an excellent resource (albeit an underused one) and so we needed to take action!

A smaller group of Teaching Schools, 1 from Solihull, 1 from Warwickshire and 3 from Coventry, joined by local authority personnel, have spent a significant amount of time developing a process by which we can interview and appoint our own local leaders to help with school to school support. We are pleased to say that in the first round we were able to appoint 16 new LLEs across the sub-region. Following appointment we have held some training to help the LLEs understand the current school landscape and to hone their skills of analysis, planning for change and evaluation.

In the past, some LLEs have made the point that they were not deployed and their talents were not used. With the imminent arrival of the School Improvement Fund, and the support and challenge that we will need to help schools targeted under that bid, there should be more than enough opportunities to share leadership expertise between schools. In the light of this, we are intending to open another window for applications next year. So if you are a leader who would like to get involved in working with schools, please do look out for notification of that, or do get in touch with gwen.temple@lawrencesheriffschool.com. And if you were an LLE in the ‘old days’ and would still like to be designated, then do also get in touch. We don’t need you to go through the application process but do need contact details.

Finally if you would benefit from having the help of an LLE for any aspect of school leadership or development, then do contact a Teaching School who will be able to broker that for you.

Many congratulations to our new LLEs.

Final list of the new LLEs and the Teaching School they will be commissioned by 

Gwen Temple

Senior Deputy Headteacher at Lawrence Sheriff School and Deputy CEO of The Sheriff Trust