Schools with Design Strength
Start date
18 september 2026
Duration
6 months
Costs
€ 24500
Rankings
Executive Education - Open Programs
Introduction
How do you shape education that is future-oriented, suits your students, and is feasible for your team? Many schools recognize the tension between long-term ambitions and daily practice and are looking for ways to realize their ambitions without resorting to isolated projects or temporary solutions.
Schools with design strength are thriving work and learning environments for students, teachers, support staff, and school management. Creative designs and scientific insights form the basis for challenging and effective education. Collaboration and knowledge sharing, both within and between schools, lead to well-thought-out solutions and joint value creation.
With Schools with Design Strength, you create space for innovation that really works: supported, feasible, and in line with your educational vision. The program strengthens your team's design skills and innovative power, with visible impact in practice, and is designed to support secondary school leadership teams in working on school development in close connection with the professional development of teachers.
Participant profile
The Schools with Design Strength course has been developed for broad leadership teams in secondary education. Participating teams consist of 5 to 8 people. Participation in the course is most effective when there is an active design group of teachers within the school, supported by experts. This can be a professional learning community, but also a department, team, or working group: a group that works together concretely on designing education.
Why this program
Schools can use this course to strengthen distributed leadership and embed educational development in a sustainable way. Participants translate scientific insights into their practice through exchanges with other schools and design sessions. The actual change lies with the leadership team itself, but the program offers the expertise, inspiration, and working methods to support that development.
This course not only provides you with tools for team development, but also creates the opportunity for in-depth integration of educational development into the school organization, leading to long-term improvements and broader impact.
What will the program bring you?
Contribute to sustainable development in your school by focusing on redesigning the organization to strengthen the design of education.
Encourage a professional learning culture by drawing inspiration from scientific insights and engaging in new ways of discussing design power, education, and school development.
Work together to find balance and coherence in transformational, educational, and shared leadership, with school management and teachers with specialist tasks working closely together to develop education and organization.
Increase the impact of educational development by collaborating across schools and sharing knowledge.
About this program
The program consists of an introductory meeting, four modules, a ‘strategic outing,’ and three learning-working meetings, supported by an online community and virtual campus.
The program starts with an introduction and the formulation of a specific design question by the participating leadership teams. In four modules, they work on strengthening leadership, student-centered education, professional development of teachers, and a strategic HRM policy that stimulates co-creation. In addition to in-depth content, there is room for a strategic outing for board members, focused on dealing with external pressure and strengthening cooperation. During learning-working meetings, teams directly apply the insights from the modules to their own issues, supported by guidance and intervision with fellow schools.
The program in brief:
- Kick-off meeting
- Module 1 – Leadership and school development
- Module 2 – Focus on the learning student
- Module 3 – Making room for the designing teacher
- Module 4 – The supporting organization
- Strategic excursion
- Learning-working meetings
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