In the autumn of 2006 Echelon was approached to provide consultancy advice on a project being launched within the UK’s urban education centres to improve the capabilities of teachers and the leadership skills of head teachers.

Our advice consisted of developing supporting e-knowledge and e-marketing materials and developing the content for a public website. This public site acts as a parent to individual sites developed by Echelon for each school who adopts the programme. These latter sites act as a repository of knowledge about the programme and as a platform for tracking and analysing teacher development and their profiles.

The Urban School Leadership Model and Urban Leadership Pathway together provide a framework for the identification, recruitment and development of the urban leader at all levels:

• The Urban School Leadership Model sets out the competencies that distinguish successful school leaders in urban areas and identifies twelve competencies that are common in outstanding head teachers.

• The Urban Leadership Pathway is an innovative format for developing leadership skills and professional standards at all levels in the school.

This project illustrates Echelon’s capability of understanding a complex brief and rapidly designing learning materials and platforms which enable content to be easily distributed and accessed, and usage monitored.