Competencies
Whatever their background or experience, all Future Leaders have undergone a rigorous and highly competitive selection process that looks for evidence of the key competencies that are required for leading a challenging school, including the ability to deliver good or outstanding lessons.
Future Leaders recruits participants using a multi-stage selection process looking for the following 13 competencies under the following headings:
Underlying all the comptencies we also look for individuals with moral purpose.
Find out more about moral purpose
Thinking
Analytical Thinking
- Analysing complex data and understanding the connections that exist between issues through breaking down problems into their component parts.
- Organising parts of a problem in a systematic way, prioritising issues moving forward, as well as establishing causal relationships between issues that may or may not be obviously related.
Conceptual Thinking
- Identifying patterns between potentially unrelated concepts, drawing on past experience to understand a situation.
- Simplifying complex issues, being highly innovative, taking a broader view and bringing in additional information.
Curiosity and Eagerness to Learn
- A curiosity and willingness to develop or acquire new knowledge, skills or experiences regardless of the challenges involved.
- Making the most of opportunities despite being outside of one’s comfort zone.
- Enjoys discovering different ways of doing things both within and outside of education.
Being
Self Awareness
- Aware of one’s personal strengths and areas for future growth and understands how own behaviour impacts on others.
- Being aware of one’s own emotional triggers and identifying ways to manage these more effectively.
- Taking ownership for what one can do and sharing out responsibilities when others are better placed to accomplish particular tasks or objectives.
Resilience and Emotional Maturity
- Demonstrating a level of emotional maturity that enables the individual to remain tenacious and focused when faced by increasingly challenging circumstances.
- The ability to respond appropriately, manage uncertainty and bounce back even in the most trying of situations.
Integrity
- Honest, transparent and principled when interacting with others.
- Standing up for personal and organisational values even in difficult situations.
- Being able to gain the respect of others by acting in line with their own values, as well as making decisions or choices with the best interests of education and pupils in mind.
Personal Drive
- Sets own targets and achieves the highest standards within their role.
- Self motivated, energetic and willing to take on new challenges to improve own levels of performance.
- Makes decisions having assessed what will be in the best interest for students and the school.
- Seeks out opportunities and new challenges showing a desire to improve.
Leading
Holding to Account
- Clarify expectations, setting high standards for others and ensuring that goals or objectives are achieved.
- Holding others to account for performing in line with expectations.
- Using one’s own position or authority to get others to do what is asked of them, and at times, this will involve making tough or unpopular decisions. However, these choices or actions will always be instigated with the best interests of students and schools in mind.
Developing Others
- Develops and empowers colleagues so that they experience real, significant personal growth.
- Looks for ways to develop others even when they are not required to do so.
- Continually seeking out opportunities to develop colleagues through activities such as mentoring, supporting, championing and guiding, in order to bring out the very best in them.
Inspiring Others
- Leading through motivating and energising students, colleagues and other educational staff, uniting them around shared goals or objectives.
- Articulating a compelling vision.
Impact and Influence
- Have a positive impact on students, colleagues and the wider community through persuading, convincing and bringing others round to the speaker’s perspective.
- Understanding others perspectives and priorities.
Relating to Others
- Build relationships through being able to pick up on and understand the thoughts, emotions and feelings of students and colleagues, identifying reasons for why others behave the way they do.
Collaboration
- Working with a range of people in schools and the wider community to build a culture of co-operation and achievement through team working.
- Understands the importance of creating and maintaining a network of diverse people to share expertise, achieve common objectives and improve the learning environment for all.
Underlying the competencies we also look for evidence of Moral Purpose
Moral Purpose
- Acts in ways that are principled, built upon a clear set of personal values.
- Contributes value as a leader and is passionate about making a positive difference to the lives of children and families.
- Believes that schools have a crucial role to play in changing lives and improving life chances.
- Energised and motivated by the prospect of making a difference.