Developing leaders

Mott MacDonald has developed a range of coaching and mentoring programs to encourage and motivate leaders at all levels to drive continuous learning improvement. These programs are available to individual schools, groups of schools, and on a district, state, or nationwide basis.

Our highly experienced consultants bring practical strategies, underpinned by research, to build a culture of high expectations, collective responsibility, and a commitment to the success of all students. They work with you to identify the leadership actions that contribute most to raising student achievement. They also explain how to identify and mitigate the pressures likely to work against a focus on high standards.

The leadership or executive coaching we provide is an ongoing, structured process of one-to-one professional conversations to help people become more confident and competent. This is not counseling: our coaches do not give advice and solve problems for people. Instead they get them to own the process and by doing so, positively change their beliefs and behaviors.

We've developed successful training for leaders on how to tackle potentially contentious areas of appraisal and performance management. We provide advice on good practice in writing job descriptions and objectives, and making prereview plans ahead of interviews. Our courses are always kept up to date as new regulations are introduced.

Our long experience of developing fair and reliable systems for evaluating effective teaching and improving student learning was honed in the UK. This multifaceted approach to enabling the professional growth of teachers and principals is also being used increasingly across the United States, where we incorporate Tripod Student Survey assessments. Similar help in developing high-quality evaluation and performance management systems is now also available in Australia.

Our specialized education finance consultants and accountants can help your own staff fulfill their roles as effectively as possible.

We can call on administrators and qualified accountants who are experts in the complex operation of school operations and finances. They understand how multiple funding streams work, so we can support your own staff in this challenging environment.

The whole issue of getting value for money from the school's undertakings has never been more important. Is the budget allocated to information and communication technology generating the returns you want to see in terms of enhanced teaching and learning? How do you measure that? Our consultants will work with your managers to build their expertise.

Let us help you deal with staffing challenges, reorganization and change, and establishing new terms of employment. Our long workplace experience covers everything you need to establish new educational facilities or make wholesale alterations to existing ones. With a thorough understanding of labor law and current regulations, we can draft the job descriptions, pay structures, and conditions of employment to enable a new human resources department to begin operations.

Schools use information technology to collate, store, and communicate data: everything from basic contact information to pupils' assessment results.

We work with you to get the best out of your investment. We can run the entire procurement process in environments ranging through small and large schools and multisite academies up to global school networks. We factor in your educational vision, the functionality, and the technical design, and put together the documentation to acquire exactly what you need.

We make sure you end up with what you intended, because installation and configuration present their own challenges. Installers might provide what they think you need not what you actually need. It is easy to be overwhelmed by technical vocabulary. We convert jargon into practicality. We can also customize your asset management software so that information is relatively openly accessible or more centrally controlled, as you wish.

Schools are very data-rich but the question is whether they employ the information effectively. That is where we come in.

School leaders should be using their own internal monitoring of children's progress in combination with external comparison material to identify children, and perhaps groups of children, who are underperforming. Identifying them is only one aspect of the process. Crucially, they have to use that information to look at what the children need. They can then put together a personalized curriculum to address the areas of weakness.

Some schools are very good at understanding their data and knowing how to use it. Our highly experienced consultants are there for those who are in danger of being overwhelmed. The focus always is on developing school leaders' capacity not only to acquire correct information, but then to analyze it and weave it into improvement plans. The goal is to establish a sustainable regular cycle of review, analysis, and action.