Leadership training course – Autumn 2025
A 6-week training course for university leaders working in student recruitment, widening participation, school liaison, or outreach roles.
A 6-week training course for university leaders working in student recruitment, widening participation, school liaison, or outreach roles.
Every Friday from 12 September to 17 October 2025
10am to 11:30am (online)
Online for the first 5 weeks, with a full-day in-person finale in Birmingham on Friday 17 October from 9.30am
£750 + VAT
10 spaces
Do you lead student recruitment, schools liaison, widening participation, or outreach activity?
This new leadership training course will help you grow your knowledge, network, and confidence to allow you to succeed in your role.
It is designed for:
Leadership is a lot, but this carefully curated training course will help you survive, thrive, lead, and succeed in your university role and beyond.
This leadership course will take place every Friday over a 6-week period between 12 September and 17 October.
Weeks 1 to 5 will take place online between 10am and 11.30am on Teams.
Week 6 will take place in person in Birmingham between 9.30am and 4pm. This is a celebratory finale, allowing all participants to gather for a final day of learning and socialising.
Meetings won’t be recorded to allow participants to feel fully comfortable when sharing personal stories and sensitive challenges about their leadership journey.
This leadership course is intimate and interactive, with a high level of group discussion. For this reason, there are only 10 spaces available.
There won’t be any slide presentations. Instead, we will facilitate learning through peer-to-peer networking, access to senior leaders, sharing (and solving) challenges, ongoing self-reflection, and takeaway tasks.
Week 1 will bring all participants together, without a guest speaker. It is an introduction, a safe space, where we will each share our career journeys, leadership challenges, and expectations for the weeks ahead.
Weeks 2 to 5 will each focus on a different leadership topic, with insights from a guest senior university leader experienced in student recruitment, widening participation, and outreach activity. These weeks will be structured as follows:
Week 6 is a full day in Birmingham, with guest speakers, followed by a celebratory lunch and a social activity. All activities are included in the cost of the leadership programme, with the exception of your travel to and from Birmingham.
In this first week, you will meet your fellow participants and leaders. It is an opportunity to begin building relationships with people who will support you throughout the course, and potentially the years ahead too.
We’ll discuss expectations for the course, share our leadership origin stories, and reflect on the leadership challenges we wish to overcome.
This first week will end with the launch of the optional course WhatsApp group where you can seek connection, camaraderie, and counsel in between the weekly sessions.
Imposter syndrome is a common barrier to effective leadership. New and experienced leaders alike will frequently feel out-of-place and out-of-depth during trying moments throughout their career. How do we overcome that niggling, naysaying voice?
Our guest speaker will help us (re)discover our confidence with insights from their own leadership journey. We’ll explore proven methods for silencing our doubts, practicing positivity, and recognising our abilities, so we can operate as strong, resilient leaders.
A curious challenge of leadership is finding yourself managing managers. As you move from an operational role to a strategic role, you will likely have managers reporting to you, each with their own vast skillsets and teams to lead.
Our guest speaker will offer advice on this complex dynamic. They will help you achieve the fine balance between being hands-on and hands-off with your staff. You will learn how to give your managers the freedom to find their own authority, and when to intervene.
As a leader, you will become more visible throughout your university, especially with more senior colleagues. This newfound visibility requires credibility, so your directors, chiefs, and executive board feel reassured by your plans, priorities, and presence.
Our guest speaker will offer insights to help you lead your leaders. You’ll discover how to empathise with their challenges, undertake strategic alignment exercises to support your goals, and gain their buy-in for your projects through proposal-writing and reporting.
Decision-making is a critical responsibility in any leadership role. You will need to make (and sometimes unmake) decisions that affect colleagues, budgets, and workloads. In an age of data overload, how do you choose and champion the best way forward?
Our guest speaker will explain how to gather insights from multiple sources when faced with a difficult decision, and when to rely on data, experience, and instinct. They will also advise on how best to communicate change, defend decisions, and monitor their impact.
The most successful leaders in the world are those who have a ground-breaking vision, a disruptive idea, an inventive solution. However, creative thinking is often seen as a risk in the education sector. How can you pioneer innovation in a university environment?
Our final guest speaker will help you find ways to bring your imagination into the workplace. They will offer guidance on steering your ingenious plans through traditional channels, and the balance of thinking outside the box, whilst staying inside the boxset.
Each guest speaker will be a university professional with experience as a director in student recruitment, widening participation, and outreach. The guest speakers for our Autumn 2025 cohort haven’t yet been confirmed. However, previous guest speakers have included:
Martyn Edwards
Director of External Relations, University of Leicester
Lorraine Westwood
Interim Associate Director UK Student Recruitment, Middlesex University
Kenon Man
Director of Marketing and Student Recruitment, Imperial College London
Rebecca Trengrove
Consulting Fellow, Halpin
Nicola Anderton
Director of Digital and Marketing, University of Nottingham, 2017-2024.
The early-bird price for this course is £750+VAT.
The early-bird deadline is Friday 1 August. After this date, the cost will increase to £900 + VAT.
This includes:
Simon has approaching 20 years of experience in the higher education sector. This includes student recruitment, marketing, and events roles at four different universities in the UK: Nottingham, Birmingham, Warwick, and Coventry.
Simon has also worked at Pickle Jar Communications, a content strategy consultancy for the international education sector. He helped schools, colleges, and universities share their stories through digital communications.
Simon is an international speaker. He has spoken at a variety of conferences, including CASE, ContentEd, EFMD, IDPE, FindAUniversity, HELOA, HighEdWeb, PSEWeb, SU Digital, SU Marketing Conference, and Utterly Content. He was Chair of the Newcomers Track at CASE Europe Annual Conference from 2020 to 2023.
As a published author, Simon is particularly interested in storytelling in the education sector. He spends his free time reading, writing, running, and finding new ways to make his children laugh.