Welcome to Highland Leadership

Introductions by Tony McCulloch

This initiative is about you as a professional, reflecting, discussing with significant colleagues and developing experiences. We will support you in this in order that you can take yourself further forward in your leadership capacity.

We would expect you to be the key person driving this forward. Leadership is not something that will be done to you externally or from above. It will be grounded in your needs and experience within your own environment as identified by you. It is not an isolated activity but instead works best within a web of local, national and international support.

For outcomes, we are looking for you to be more confident and skilled in what you do. We wish this to have a positive effect on your pupils and clients through improved learning, teaching and wellbeing. We are keen that, using your existing expertise, you will feel able to help others develop their own leadership attributes. We hope that you may wish to take on posts of increased responsibility at a future date.

Highland’s commitment is to invest in your leadership potential through human and resource support. We will devolve funding to you to help you pursue individual projects, we will provide dedicated training and we have developed a virtual environment to help you communicate with the cohort of leadership participants. We will also put you in contact with relevant and up to date national and international materials and expertise in relation to your chosen area of development. We will match consultants and supporters to you in response to your identification of development areas.

Of fundamental importance is that you direct your own leadership growth and that you take central responsibility for its realisation. It is for you to describe your own process of development and outcomes together with your own initiative in accessing appropriate resources. You will be responsible for the spending of your allocated budget together with its accounting.

We will require that you keep a record of your experiences, successes and failures which will constitute a reservoir of narratives, that will help yourself, other participants and staff in Scotland take their own leadership capacities further forward. All types of media may be used in the narrative. We learn best from ourselves.

We will also require you to evaluate the experiences through this evidence and submit this to the Scottish Executive as proof of positive use of the public investment granted to us.