Leadership training · For programmes, school groups and boards
Lead a whole school before you lead a real one.
Aspiring and new school leaders run a synthetic school for a term or a year, inside your programme. A coach leads a debrief at the end of each term, built from a record of every decision they made.
Why it is needed
Most school leaders learn the job on real students.
- 27%
- of new principals in New Zealand felt prepared or very prepared when they started (ERO, 2023)
- 46%
- of US principals reported an internship that gave them real leadership responsibilities (Darling-Hammond et al., 2022)
- 64.7%
- of new secondary headteachers in England, aged under 50, were still in the same post or higher three years later (DfE, 2025)
- 49.7%
- of 177 international school leaders in a published survey were in their first headship (Morrison, 2025)
Preparation programmes teach the knowledge and rehearse single moments, such as a coaching conversation or a branching scenario. None that we found lets a new leader run a year-long school and compare two versions of it side by side.
What a term holds
The pressures a real term would bring.
The first two packs hold 25 pressures, 13 of them shared. A pressure director deals each term from the pack's base rates, the school calendar, your programme's focus and the trainee's current load.
| Pressure | What it tests | Pack |
|---|---|---|
| A child protection concern buried in the inbox | Prioritisation and procedure | Both |
| A winter wave of staff absence | Cover planning and morale | Both |
| Attendance sliding in one year group | Reading data and choosing an intervention | Both |
| Notice of inspection | Honest self-evaluation and readiness | Both |
| A parent complaint spreading through a group chat | Communication and fairness | Both |
| An allegation against a member of staff | Procedure and fairness | Both |
| A department's results falling | Accountability with support | Both |
| Exam duties, with a suspected malpractice case and AI misuse | Integrity under results pressure | Both |
| Suspension or expulsion of a student with additional needs | Procedure and inclusion | Public system |
| A workload dispute with the union | Negotiation | Public system |
| A board member reaching into operations | Governance boundaries | International schools |
| The owner asking for a higher margin | Values under commercial pressure | International schools |
Weighted to your focus
A programme can weight a term towards its focus, such as governance for a cohort of aspiring international school leaders.
Paced to the trainee
Load control holds back a new pressure when a trainee is swamped, unless the programme asks for practice under overload.
Shaped by trust
Where staff trust the leader less, bad news arrives later, because it travels through channels that trust governs.
Your standard
Every moment maps to the standard you teach to.
In the public-system pack, the school leader's seat maps to the national Standard for Headship. In the international-schools pack, the planned map is to the four domains of the national licence for school leaders, with the regulator's leadership indicators as a second lens. A programme chooses the standards a term should exercise, and the term is weighted towards them.
| Moment in play | Standard for Headship · public-system pack | Licence domain · international-schools pack |
|---|---|---|
| The vision set at the start of the year, beside where time and money went | 2.1.1 Strategic vision; 3.1 Curriculum, Pedagogy, Leadership and Strategic Vision | Strategic |
| The budget and the equity plan | 3.5 Resources; 1.1 Professional Values: Social Justice | Operational |
| Self-evaluation set against inspectors' grades | 3.4 Self-Evaluation | Strategic, with the regulator's indicator 6.2 |
| Lesson visits, feedback and curriculum change | 3.1 Curriculum, Pedagogy, Leadership and Strategic Vision; 3.2 The Learning Context | Instructional |
| A capability case or an allegation against staff | 1.1 Professional Values: Integrity, Trust and Respect; 2.2.3 Judge wisely and decide appropriately | Professional and ethical |
| A conversation with the authority, the board or the press | 2.2.1 Political Insight; 2.2.4 Communicate effectively | Professional and ethical |
| Workload and wellbeing choices for staff | 2.2.2 Self-awareness, and inspiring and motivating others | Operational |
| Professional learning set up for staff | 3.3 Professional Learning | Instructional |
Sources: GTCS, The Standard for Headship; Gulf News on the licence (14 July 2025). The international-schools mapping is still to be confirmed with a serving principal in that system. Each new pack maps to its own system's standard.
The debrief
The learning happens between runs.
The evidence for simulation is strong in general and thin for school leaders, and it points at what happens between runs. Debriefs improved performance by about 25% across 46 samples (Tannenbaum and Cerasoli, 2013), so the debrief is built around that evidence.
A coach leads it
The system prepares the material and drafts a synthesis, and the coach decides what to raise.
The trainee speaks first
They write their own account of the term, then read accounts from the people in the school, each limited to what that person saw.
The log is the evidence
Every claim links to the decision log, so a coach can open the cause chain behind any outcome and replay any scene.
Prompts fit experience
Novices get worked examples and cue flags. Experienced leaders get reflection prompts, and fewer of them in settings they already know.
Reflection stays private
A branch replay asks the trainee what they could have done differently. Nobody they report to sees that reflection.
Judged on something new
Learning is judged on a new scenario, never on a replay of one the trainee has already played.
An AI-led debrief will run without a coach only after a trial against human facilitation. No study yet compares the two. School leaders who practised classroom observation in virtual reality benefited from leadership coaching to use what they observed in conversations with teachers (Militello et al., 2021).
Running a cohort
How a programme runs it.
Single seat
One trainee leads the school, and every other role is an agent.
Senior team play
Each member takes their own seat in one school, turn by turn within the week.
Board sessions
The school leader and the board play the same school together. The shared run shows only their joint decisions.
Who it is for
For the people who prepare school leaders.
Leadership programmes and associations
Headship and principal preparation, run as cohorts with a coach.
School groups
A group pack layers your own policies and standards over your regulator's pack, for your own leadership academy.
Boards
Sessions that put a school leader and the board in the same school.
Incoming and aspiring school leaders
Individual seats are planned, with the evidence for a coach made clear to anyone playing alone.
Formative only
Never used to judge a leader
Nothing leaves the system as a score or a ranking. The trainee owns the play record, and contracts bar any use of it to select, appraise, promote, discipline or rank a leader.
Safety and privacyThe evidence
What the research supports
Training studies back structured debriefs and realistic task demands. No study yet links simulation-based leadership preparation to leaders' practice or students' outcomes. The pilot trial starts with the first: leaders' practice on new scenarios.
Does simulation training work?Cost
Free or at cost for pilots
Pilot places are free or at cost while Synthetic School is validated. Prices for later cohorts will be set with the first design partners.
What a pilot involvesRun your next cohort in a synthetic school.
We are looking for leadership programmes and school groups to run the first cohorts. A pilot in a new system starts with building that system's pack together.