Education Leaders | Evidence Informed School Leadership

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 PartnersInternational Curriculum AssociationSisi

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.

Three-quarters of children are worried about the state of the planet and Clare Garey argues that makes sustainability not just an environmental issue, but a wellbeing one. In this conversation, Clare, founder of Sustainability at School, challenges the idea that hanging up an eco poster or marking Earth Day is enough. Drawing on her work with international schools across Spain, India, Singapore and beyond, she makes the case that young people who learn about climate change but have no opportunity to take real action become disempowered and that school leaders have the ability to change that. You'll learn why trying to tackle every sustainability issue at once leads to overwhelm and why choosing one focused theme in year one is the most powerful thing a school can do. Clare walks through the four pillars that stop sustainability becoming just another initiative; a clear "why", a representative team, a simple action plan, and treating it with the same strategic weight as any curriculum change. You'll also hear why language matters more than leaders realise (calling it a "project" is, in Clare's words, "curtains"), how students in Hyderabad reduced their school's energy consumption by 11% by asking the operations team for monthly data, and how a school in Barcelona is on track to eliminate 250,000 single-use yogurt pots in a single year. If sustainability has felt overwhelming or abstract for your school, this conversation will make it feel both urgent and entirely achievable. Resources & Links Mentioned:Sustainability at SchoolClare Garey on LinkedInClare Garey's WorkbookEpisode PartnersInternational Curriculum AssociationSisi

If you've noticed that students seem different since the pandemic and you're not sure what to do about it, this episode gives you real answers. Nancy Weinstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Otus and co-founder of MindPrint, shares findings from a longitudinal study of 35,000 students aged 8 to 21, tracking cognitive skills from 2015 through and beyond the pandemic. The data reveals something most school leaders haven't yet seen: the biggest change in students isn't attention, which is what teachers almost universally report, it's verbal memory, with the average student now retaining roughly half of what they would have five years ago. You'll learn why flexible thinking has dropped significantly and what that means for how students respond to feedback in the classroom, why AI may be compounding these challenges, and where to find evidence-based strategies that already exist and work. Nancy also shares a surprising finding: teachers showed similar cognitive shifts to their students, particularly in flexible thinking, which helps explain some of the staffing and morale challenges school leaders have been navigating. If you want to move from "kids are different" to actually knowing what to do about it, this conversation is essential listening. Resources & Links Mentioned:MindPrint Learning strategies and resourcesNancy Weinstein on LinkedInThe Empowered Student by Nancy Weinstein (CAST Publishing, 2018)John Hattie's Visible Learning

Saying yes is one of the most common habits among school leaders, and most of the time it happens automatically, without conscious thought. In this solo episode, Shane reflects on a conversation with a fellow educator that revealed they shared the exact same challenge: both had said yes far too much, and both were feeling the weight of it. Drawing on Adam Grant's Give and Take and the recent work of Cornell researcher Sunita Sah, Shane looks at why school leaders are wired to say yes, four specific psychological reasons that drive that habit, and the real costs it creates for your team, your relationships, and your own visibility as a leader. You'll learn how to replace the automatic yes with what Shane calls the trade-off response, a four-step approach that gives your boss more information rather than a flat refusal. Shane walks through the steps, acknowledge the priority, make your current load visible, name the trade-off, and hand the decision back, with real examples from his own career, including one during COVID when even the trade-off response didn't get him off the hook. If you've ever walked away from a conversation thinking "why did I just say yes to that?", this episode is the honest, practical starting point you've been looking for. Resources & Links Mentioned:Adam Grant's Give and TakeSunita Sah's DefyShane Leaning's Education Leaders IntensiveEpisode PartnersInternational Curriculum AssociationSisi

What does it really take to step into public thought leadership as a headteacher and what do consultants and trust leaders get wrong when they walk into schools? In this episode, Shane is joined by Chris Passey, Headteacher at Kimichi School and co-host of the Coaching Unpacked podcast series, and Sam Crome, Interim Headteacher and Director of Education for Xavier Catholic Education Trust, for an honest conversation about professional voice, courage, and the assumptions that undermine good support. Both guests have built a presence beyond their schools through writing, podcasting, and public commentary, and they share what it actually took to get there. You'll hear Chris reflect on the moment he deleted a tweet and "ran away and hid under a rock" and what he'd do differently now. Sam makes a compelling case that assumptions are the death of good advice, drawing on his coaching training to explain why curious questions outperform confident recommendations every time. If you're a school leader wondering whether your voice has value, or a consultant wanting to support schools more effectively, this conversation will give you something genuinely useful to take back to your desk. Resources & Links Mentioned:Chris Passey on LinkedInSam Crome on LinkedInKimichi SchoolThe Power of Teams by Sam CromeSucceeding as a Deputy Head by Chris PasseyEpisode PartnersInternational Leaders ConferenceSisi

April was a packed month on the Education Leaders podcast. Five episodes, four guests, and a thread that quietly ran through all of them: the value of small, listened-to, incremental change.Chris Scorer joined me for our monthly live show to make sense of it all. Here's what landed.Listening before leading. Richard Wheadon's episode on his leadership journey hit hardest here. Richard's been honest about arriving at a new school full of confidence in approaches that had worked before, only to find the school wasn't ready to hear them. Chris reflected on his own version of that story from his deputy head days. The lesson Richard pulls out, that the relationship has to flip and you're the one who needs to understand them first, is something most leaders quote at interview but find genuinely hard once the pressure to deliver kicks in.Cognitive load isn't only a classroom concept. Meg Lee's episode on the science of leading drew the parallel cleanly. We'd never overload our students the way we routinely overload our teachers. Chris had sharper questions about where standardisation tips over into removing teacher agency. There's a real risk that well-intentioned alignment becomes content delivery dressed up as consistency.The story I shared that fell apart in real time. I told one from a large primary school I worked in years ago, where they standardised planning to save teacher time. Some teachers delivered the lessons rigidly. Some scrapped them and rebuilt from scratch. Only a handful actually did what the school intended. Good intention, awful side effect. Wise leadership might have started with a consultation rather than an assumption.Curiosity as a North Star. Melati Wijsen, founder of Bye Bye Plastic Bags and Youthtopia, took us across to the Netherlands and Bali. Chris flagged the bit that surprised both of us: Melati's gratitude to teachers who didn't let her off the hook, even when she was already running a charity in her teens. There's a real lesson in how Green School Bali holds structure and freedom together. Her book, Change Starts Now, came out a month before mine and happens to be the same colour, which I'm still slightly bitter about.Vulnerability isn't optional. Julia Bialeski's episode on leading through imposter syndrome went live on Tuesday and is already the most downloaded of the month. Chris and I both copped to feeling it ourselves. Julia's framing of the panic, the public face, and the modelling cost we pay when we hide it from staff and students ties straight back to Richard's journey and to my solo episode on post-decision doubt. The thread underneath all of it: if we can't sit with not knowing, we end up performing certainty instead of building it.Episodes mentionedMeg Lee | The Science of Leading: shaneleaning.com/podcast/154Richard Wheadon | The Danger of Getting Comfortable: shaneleaning.com/podcast/155. Richard's book Learning Habits (Routledge) is well worth your time.Melati Wijsen | How Schools Can Grow Young Changemakers: shaneleaning.com/podcast/156. Melati's book Change Starts Now collects 100 lessons from over a decade on the frontline.Solo | The Science Behind Post-Decision Doubt: shaneleaning.com/podcast/157Julia Bialeski | Leading Through Imposter Syndrome: shaneleaning.com/podcast/158. Julia is also the author of Leading with Grace.Join us liveWe do this on the last Thursday of every month at educationleaders.live. Come and bring your questions. The live chat is genuinely the best part of the show.

Most school leaders have felt it at some point: that quiet, nagging suspicion that everyone else is more capable, better prepared, and more deserving of the role. Julia Bialeski knows it well. In the spring of 2019, she walked into her first principal job with a smile on her face and panic in her chest, presenting excitement to the world while privately wondering when everyone around her would figure out she wasn't good enough. In this conversation, Julia, educator, district leader, career coach, and author of Leading with Grace, talks honestly about why imposter syndrome hits school leaders so hard, why the loneliness of the job makes it worse, and why the profession's retention crisis has everything to do with the leadership models we put in front of the people coming up behind us. Julia shares two practical strategies that have worked for her over years in leadership: a daily learning log that helps you end the day focused on what you gained rather than what you still don't know, and the "smile file", a simple physical collection of notes, cards, and messages that she has carried with her for over a decade and reached for on her hardest days. She also shares the question that changed how she thinks about new roles and challenges: not "am I good enough for this?" but "why not me?" If you've ever sat in a leadership role quietly wondering whether you really belong there, this conversation is worth your time. Resources & Links Mentioned:Julia Bialeski on LinkedInLeading with Grace by Julia BialeskiEpisode PartnersInternational Leaders ConferenceSisi

That sickly feeling after a tough leadership call isn't your intuition warning you that you got it wrong and this episode explains exactly why. Drawing on Leon Festinger's 1957 work on cognitive dissonance, a 2021 meta-analysis from Hebrew University, and Kahneman and Tversky's research on loss aversion, Shane reframes one of the most common experiences in school leadership: the quiet panic that shows up on the sofa after a hard decision. If you've ever drafted a softening email at 11pm or lain awake running alternate endings, this one is for you. You'll learn why that post-decision discomfort is a receipt, not a warning, proof that your brain is doing the work of committing, not evidence that you chose wrong. Shane also explains why the loudest complaints after a change are predictably loud (loss aversion means losses feel twice as heavy as gains), and why suppressing the discomfort actually makes you a worse leader in the room. The practical takeaway is a single written exercise you can do this week that won't make the feeling stop, but will change what it means to you. Resources & Links Mentioned:Leon Festinger's A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957)Episode PartnersInternational Leaders ConferenceSisi