Education Leaders | Evidence Informed School Leadership cover art

Education Leaders | Evidence Informed School Leadership

Education Leaders | Evidence Informed School Leadership

By: Shane Leaning | School Leadership & Organisational Development Coach
Listen for free

Strategic school leadership insights for education leaders who want to drive meaningful change and build thriving school communities.


What if the most powerful leadership strategies were hiding in plain sight? Education Leaders uncovers the evidence-based approaches that separate truly effective school leaders from the rest. Through compelling interviews and strategic deep-dives, organisational coach Shane Leaning reveals the real challenges facing today's education leaders, and the practical solutions that actually work.


Every other Tuesday, discover how renowned educators and thought leaders tackle school improvement, staff development, and cultural transformation. You'll learn actionable strategies you can implement immediately to build confidence in your leadership and create lasting impact in your school community.


On alternate weeks, Shane delivers focused episodes that address the leadership challenges you face daily: managing diverse teams, driving innovation, building organisational identity, and implementing sustainable change. Each episode offers clear, research-backed frameworks for developing your leadership capacity.


Whether you're a department head questioning your next move, an assistant principal navigating complexities of a big team, or a superintendent driving district-wide change, Education Leaders provides the strategic insights you need to lead with confidence.


Consistently ranked #1 schools podcast in Education category across multiple regions.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Education Leaders Ltd. Economics Management Management & Leadership
Episodes
  • Beyond 'Research Says' | A Conversation with Andrew Watson

    Beyond 'Research Says' | A Conversation with Andrew Watson
    Jun 8 2026

    When someone tells you "research says you should be doing this," what should you actually do with that? Andrew Watson, educator, author, and founder of Translate the Brain, has spent fifteen years studying how cognitive psychology research does and doesn't apply inside real classrooms, and his answer might surprise you. In this conversation, Shane and Andrew tackle one of the most persistent tensions in school leadership: how to take research seriously without letting it override your professional judgement, your school's context, or your teachers' expertise. Andrew draws on everything from retrieval practice to the thoroughly debunked learning styles debate to show why "research-based" is a starting point for a conversation, not the end of one.

    You'll learn the single question to ask whenever someone cites a study (and why it's more useful than pushback), why phrases like "all the research shows" are actually a red flag rather than a reassurance, and how to help a teacher who brings you exciting new evidence think it through rigorously without dismissing their enthusiasm. Andrew also shares his core mantra for working with schools: don't just do this thing, think this way. If you're a leader trying to build a healthier relationship between evidence and practice in your school, this conversation gives you a practical framework for doing exactly that.

    Resources & links mentioned

    Andrew Watson's Translate the Brain

    Andrew Watson on LinkedIn

    Andrew Watson's Learning and the Brain blog


    Episode Partners

    International Curriculum Association

    Sisi

    Join Shane's Intensive Leadership Programme at educationleaders.co/intensive




    Shane Leaning, an organisational coach based in Shanghai, supports school leaders globally. Passionate about empowment, he is the author of the best-selling 'Change Starts Here.' Shane is a leading educational voice in the UK, Asia and around the world.


    You can find Shane on LinkedIn and Bluesky. or shaneleaning.com

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show More Show Less
    31 mins
  • What can leaders learn from cuttlefish?

    What can leaders learn from cuttlefish?
    Jun 1 2026

    This episode tackles one of the quietest drains in school leadership: performing a version of yourself that isn't real. Shane introduces the cuttlefish dilemma, the pattern where leaders adapt their identity to fit a borrowed picture of what leadership is supposed to look like, and explains exactly why that performance compounds cognitive overload and leaves you running on empty by midweek. It matters now because leadership development programmes often reinforce this by handing leaders a mould to fit rather than helping them lead from what they already bring.

    You'll learn why starting with your values before any strategy or change project is the move that changes everything, and how your classroom experience holds more leadership instinct than you've probably been shown how to use. Shane shares what he saw across twenty leaders in his last coaching intensive, where the shift from performing to genuinely leading as themselves produced the most significant breakthroughs of the ten weeks. If you've ever felt like the job is heavier than it should be, this episode will help you work out exactly why.


    Episode Partners

    International Curriculum Association

    Sisi

    Join Shane's Intensive Leadership Programme at educationleaders.co/intensive




    Shane Leaning, an organisational coach based in Shanghai, supports school leaders globally. Passionate about empowment, he is the author of the best-selling 'Change Starts Here.' Shane is a leading educational voice in the UK, Asia and around the world.


    You can find Shane on LinkedIn and Bluesky. or shaneleaning.com

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show More Show Less
    9 mins
  • Education Leaders LIVE | May Reflections

    Education Leaders LIVE | May Reflections
    May 28 2026
    This is a bonus episode. Every last Thursday of the month, Shane sits down with Chris Scorer to pick apart the themes from the month's podcast guests, the stuff that stuck with them, the bits they disagreed on, and where it all leads. If you listen to the main feed, this is your chance to hear those conversations chewed over properly.This month was a big one. Chris and Shane get into four very different episodes and find a thread running through all of them: the gap between what we know we should do in schools and the time and space we're actually given to do it.They start with the new heads, Chris Passey and Sam Crome, and why so few serving leaders feel able to talk openly about the job. Shane makes the case that there's a real, legitimate barrier there, you can't always speak freely when you feel beholden to a school's brand. Chris reflects on the moment he became a deputy head and people simply stopped being honest with him. Then there's Sam's line that keeps coming up: assumptions are the death of good advice.From there it widens out. Is the relentless workload unique to education, or is it just how most of us work now? Shane pushes back on the martyrdom narrative (his wife's a journalist, he knows plenty of nurses and doctors living the same way) and gets genuinely excited about four-day weeks and flexible working done properly. Chris, ever the firebrand, wonders aloud whether schools are built for administrative comfort rather than pedagogy, with a nod to Ken Robinson and a cheerful threat to wear a Che Guevara t-shirt.The Nancy Weinstein episode gives them plenty to dig into. Her data on 35,000 students shows verbal memory roughly halved and flexible thinking dropping off a cliff since the pandemic, and worryingly, teachers are struggling to think flexibly too. The hopeful bit: the tools already exist. We don't need new tricks, we need the time to use the ones we've got. Shane introduces his favourite term, the iatrogenic effect, the idea that every change you make carries a side effect somewhere else (with a brilliant tangent about a chiropractor fixing his jaw and wrecking his back).They close on Clare Garey and sustainability, where three-quarters of young people are worried about the planet and 22% are very worried. Clare's argument is that this makes climate a wellbeing issue, not just an environmental one, and that the answer is student-led, bottom-up change. The yogurt pot story is worth the listen on its own. As Clare puts it, the change isn't the event, the habit shift is.Episodes mentioned in this conversation:Heads Who Lead Beyond School (Chris Passey & Sam Crome) → https://shaneleaning.com/podcast/159Why Saying No Feels So Hard (solo episode) → https://shaneleaning.com/podcast/160What the Pandemic Did to Student Brains (Nancy Weinstein) → https://shaneleaning.com/podcast/161Sustainability in Schools (Clare Garey) → https://shaneleaning.com/podcast/162Coming up next month:Andrew Watson on the science of learning and his Goldilocks Map, and the wonderful Patrice Bain on the power of community. Keep an eye on the feed.Join us live: We broadcast Education Leaders Live on the last Thursday of every month on LinkedIn and YouTube, or at educationleaders.live. Come and bring your thoughts, your pushback, and your own stories from the field. That's what the show's for.Join Shane's Intensive Leadership Programme at educationleaders.co/intensiveShane Leaning, an organisational coach based in Shanghai, supports school leaders globally. Passionate about empowment, he is the author of the best-selling 'Change Starts Here.' Shane is a leading educational voice in the UK, Asia and around the world.You can find Shane on LinkedIn and Bluesky. or shaneleaning.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Show More Show Less
    49 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet