Upcoming Webinars - Autumn 2025
Leadership webinars for our school, college and trust leader alumni
Join us for these free webinars to gain fresh insights, useful tips, and actionable strategies on some hot leadership topics and challenges
We are delighted to offer an ongoing webinar series with our expert leadership coaches and other guests. See below for a summary of upcoming sessions and to book your place. We will then send you a calendar invite with the Zoom link and a reminder nearer the time. Our webinars are intended to provide practical tips and strategies and most of our speakers and facilitators will invite you to join in the conversation and to reflect on your own experience and the insights shared in the context of your own leadership. Some will also offer opportunities to practise key tools and approaches with your peers in breakout rooms, so please come along prepared to participate. You'll find bios of the webinar speakers and facilitators at the bottom of the page.
Topics are drawn from the leadership challenges that we know school, college and trust leaders often find tricky. If there's a particular theme you would like us to cover in a future session, please feel free to email us with your request. And if you'd like us to deliver a similar webinar for staff in your school or trust, please email Denise Barrows
Do check back regularly for new webinars. If you'd like to invite a colleague to a particular session, please email us their details and we'll send them an invite directly.
1.30 p.m. Monday 6 October 2025 Enabling Performance
In this practical and interactive 90-minute session with leadership coach, Jo Lally, we will explore six key drivers of staff performance and how you can use these to diagnose root causes when performance falters. We will examine some typical leadership challenges relating to staff performance and share some practical tools and strategies you can use to address the issues at the heart of the performance concerns. Over the course of the session you will be able to:
- Understand six key drivers of staff performance and how to use these to understand what is behind particular performance issues
- Explore a practical process and toolkit that enables performance improvements
Monday 6 October
1:30 p.m.
to 3:00 p.m.
Enabling Performance Reserve your slot
Sign up below to attend this webinar.
4.00 p.m. Wednesday 15 October 2025 AI + Human Coaching - The Future of Leadership Development
Leadership development is at a turning point. AI is reshaping how we work, learn, and grow - and the real opportunity lies in how we combine it with the uniquely human power of coaching. That’s the focus of our upcoming webinar with Josh Valeri, Director of BTS Spark Australia. In this interactive webinar we'll explore:
- How AI coaching tools let you rehearse high-stakes conversations, presentations, and decision-making anytime, anywhere - with immediate feedback.
- Why AI alone isn’t enough - and how human coaching ensures the learning sticks.
- What this new balance means for the future of leadership growth.
3.00 p.m. Thursday 6 November 2025 Building Psychological Safety
How do we create high performing, inclusive school and trust cultures where people feel able to speak up, share ideas and admit mistakes and where creativity and innovation can thrive? In this interactive 90 mins webinar with leadership coach Jo Lally, we will explore the benefits of psychological safety and flag some watch outs too. You will have an opportunity to assess the extent to which your own team culture feels safe and enables all team members to fully contribute and to identify some practical strategies you can use to further enhance psychological safety in your team or setting. The session will include:
- Understanding the benefits of building psychological safety.
- Assessing the extent to which your own team culture feels safe
- Learning practical strategies you can use to reframe conversations and build inclusivity
Thursday 6 November
3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Building Psychological Safety Reserve your slot
Sign up below to attend this webinar.
10:30 a.m. Monday 1 December 2025 Powerful Coaching Conversations
It can be easy to think that, as a busy school or trust leader, you don’t have time to coach others or perhaps that you don’t have the skills needed to effectively coach others. In this interactive 90 mins session, professional leadership coach Jo Lally will share simple but powerful coaching techniques that you can build into your everyday conversations to help develop and empower those around you. You will have a chance to practise some key skills and leave with greater confidence in your ability to coach others. Join us to:
- Bust some common coaching myths
- Discover the ingredients and power of even a five-minute coaching conversation
- Experience and practise some core coaching skills
Monday 1 December
10:30 a.m.
to 12:00 p.m.
Powerful Coaching Conversations
Reserve your slot
Sign up below to attend this webinar
Our webinar speakers and facilitators
Jo Lally, Leadership Coach and Facilitator
Jo has a wealth of experience as a leadership consultant, coach and facilitator, working across both corporate and education sectors. For BTS Spark she regularly supports trust leaders and their teams, and delivers webinars and workshops on a huge range of topics including powerful conversations, trust and collaboration, leadership presence, coaching skills, focus and prioritisation, feedback, and visioning and strategic execution, to name a few. Jo is a highly personable and engaging facilitator who mixes natural high energy with the ability to slow down and enable genuine connection and curiosity amongst participants, whilst bringing key concepts to life and eliciting important new insights.
Josh Valeri, Director BTS Spark Australia
Josh heads up BTS Spark in Australia and specialises in building leadership and learning capability at scale, ensuring organisations can navigate complexity and change with confidence. With a career spanning teaching, leadership development, learning design and digital learning, Josh has driven learning strategies that transform workforce capability, leadership pipelines, and digital education ecosystems. Josh holds two master’s degrees (in Education Policy and Applied Linguistics) and has led projects across school systems, government, universities, and industry to develop evidence-based, high-impact learning programmes.
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Denise Barrows, Head of BTS Spark UK
Denise is an experienced leader with a strong track record of leading far-reaching education, social impact and leadership initiatives, grants programmes and organisations. Prior to joining BTS Spark, Denise worked for ten years as Head of Education for two national grant-making bodies, leading a number of innovative philanthropic initiatives and grants programmes, and as a consultant and advisor to grant-making foundations. Her career prior to that included roles as Director of a national youth development charity, as founding Director of an education-business partnership which provided a range of careers, work-related learning and enterprise programmes for schools and colleges in the London Borough of Hackney, and as Assistant Director for Bristol Education Action Zone.
Alyssa Gallagher, Head of BTS Spark US (West/Central)
Alyssa is an experienced leader across both education and business sectors. She spent twenty years in the public education sector, as a teacher, school principal and District Assistant Superintendent. Under Alyssa’s guidance, Los Altos School District became a nationally recognised leader in educational innovation. She also led the first ever Khan Academy pilot in classrooms, scaling the practice across the entire school district. Alyssa then spent five years as the Director of Global Leadership for the Wiseman Group, working with both educators and business professionals to build Multiplier mindsets and improve their leadership capabilities. Alyssa is an accomplished speaker, facilitator and author, most recently co-authoring our BTS Spark book on MESSY Leadership.
