NPQ scholarships for the Spring  2025 Cohort are extremely limited, so please apply as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.

The limited funding will target those teachers and leaders who work in the most challenging schools or educational settings, serving more disadvantaged communities. The limited scholarships will cover the full NPQ course cost and will be available to teachers and leaders from:

• The 50% of schools with the highest proportion of students who attract pupil premium funding
• 16 to 19 educational settings identified as having high disadvantage 

Scholarships will continue to be available through Best Practice Network to all teachers and leaders from publicly funded schools and 16 to 19 educational organisations for the following:

• NPQ for SENCOs
• NPQ for Headship
• EHCO (Early Headship Coaching Offer)

Outstanding Leaders Partnership is a national, school-led partnership recently rated an ‘exceptional training provider’ by the DfE Quality Assurance Agent.  It is supported by Best Practice Network.

The quality review was based on the DfE National Professional Qualification (NPQ) Quality Framework.  The reviewers examined leadership and governance, face-to-face delivery, online courses, participant, facilitator and tutor support, assessment, organisation, quality control, marketing and recruitment, as well as the DfE metrics and impact. The reviewers identified exceptional performance in most areas of the Quality Framework. 

Read the full summary of our DfE Quality Review results here.

Our Impact

Outstanding Leaders Partnership has trained over 12,000 school leaders since 2017 and together with Best Practice Network is the leading training provider to education professionals in England.

In addition to the National Professional Qualifications, we offer school leader and early years apprenticeships, Early Years Initial Teacher Training, the National Award for SEN Coordination, Higher Level Teaching Assistant status and the level 4 diploma for School Business Managers. 

We are also excited to be able to add training and support for Early Career Teachers and their Mentors to our programme suite as a DfE approved national provider for the Early Career Framework reforms.

 We exceed a 93% pass rate across all our programmes

  We have exceeded DfE metrics for the NPQs for school leaders for the last 5 years – see metrics here

  97% of candidates would recommend us to a colleague

Key Principles of the Outstanding Leaders Partnership

Personalisation and choice

Flexible delivery to focus on the development needs of learners

Quality and relevance of qualification design and delivery

Empowering self-improvement and leadership impact

Contributing to the strategic improvement landscape

The partnership is supported by Best Practice Network (BPN), an accredited and award-winning national organisation that specialises in professional development training for schools and nurseries.

Why choose us?

By choosing us, schools can be confident that the programmes their staff will follow are founded upon the following four pillars:

1. The content of our programmes are based upon the latest research into effective teaching and leadership strategies.
   The processes underpinning our programme design encourage participants to rigorously explore and test these research findings in their own contexts.

2. We know that providing teachers and leaders with evidence of effective strategies for improving outcomes for children and young people is essential, but alone this is not sufficient if planned changes are to become deep-rooted and sustained. Leaders also need to understand the complexities involved when implementing change. Our programmes provide high-quality guidance on the tools and techniques available.
3. We constantly challenge our participants and ourselves to ask 'what difference is this making to children in your school?' This is a theme visited at regular intervals during our programmes and culminates in an individual end of programme impact review. We know our programmes do make a difference as evidenced through our Annual Reviews and through DfE Reviews which commended OLP's 'exceptional performance' against most areas of their Quality Framework.
4. By consistently choosing OLP, schools can be confident that their staff are developing shared understandings and a common professional language which will support, enrich, and enhance their school improvement strategies.