Webinars - Spring 2026
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 pleased 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. Below is a list of our webinars for the Spring and Summer terms.
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.
3.00 p.m. Thursday 26 February 2026 Leading Change
We live in a world of constant change and this certainly plays out in our schools – from new policy directives and curriculum changes to the integration of new technology and changing student intakes. Yet many school leaders face a range of both internal and external barriers to effectively managing change. They are charged with maintaining stability whilst also implementing reforms and expected to balance urgent operational needs with long-term strategic changes. In this one hour webinar with leadership coach Jo Lally, we will explore the nature of change today, your own particular relationship to change and how to build change-readiness and overcome resistance amongst your team. We will examine:
- The nature of change and why it is important
- Common relationships to change and how to build greater change-readiness
- How to inspire your colleagues to action around your change priorities
- Why people resist change and the three elements that are needed to overcome this
Thursday 26 February
3:00 p.m.
to 4:00 p.m.
Leading Change Reserve your slot
Sign up below to attend this webinar.
3.00 p.m. Tuesday 17 March 2026 Authentic Leadership
Do you feel like you have to put a mask on when you go to work? We know from coaching so many school and trust leaders that many do, feeling like they have to live up to a model of leadership that is all-knowing, endlessly cheerful and utterly dedicated, for example – the stereotype of a superhero leader. But although we may think that people want strong leaders, in actual fact, people generally thrive the most when their leaders are simply authentic, open and self-aware. In this 60 mins webinar with leadership coach Jo Lally we will:
- Consider the case for authenticity in leadership and why it matters
- Explore the idea of ‘blind spots’ and ‘shadows’ and how we can gain new awareness of these
- Learn how to start to integrate a fuller picture of ourselves as leaders, shadows and all and balance authenticity and adaptability
Tuesday 17 March
3:00 p.m.
to 4:00 p.m.
Authentic Leadership Reserve your slot
Sign up below to attend this webinar.
3.30 p.m. Tuesday 28 April 2026 Empowering your team
At the heart of every successful school or organisation is a culture that values, develops, and empowers people. As a school, college or trust leader, your ability to create such a culture directly impacts not only staff engagement and retention, but ultimately student success. Yet building truly people-centric organisations - where leadership is shared, initiative and innovation are encouraged, and everyone feels ownership of the mission - requires us to examine and often reshape how we think about power and relationships.
Many leaders face a common challenge: while they genuinely want to empower their staff, unconscious patterns in how they communicate and share power can create barriers to genuine empowerment. Sometimes our very efforts to support colleagues can be interpreted as micromanagement and what we intend as guidance might feel like control. Our desire to maintain high standards might accidentally suppress innovation.
In this 60 mins webinar with leadership coach Jo Lally we will:
- Explore how different power dynamics impact empowerment
- Invite you to consider how power dynamics influence your relationship and impact your school or trust’s culture
- Explore communication patterns that may be limiting genuine empowerment and how to change these
Tuesday 28 April
3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Empowering your team Reserve your slot
Sign up below to attend this webinar.
9.30 a.m. Thursday 21 May 2026 Building a culture of trust
Of course, most school, college or trust leaders are all too aware of the importance of building the right relationships, but many still find it tricky to strike the right balance between ‘being professional’, building personal connections and creating a collaborative culture. Whereas in the past you could simply put on a professional persona at work, nowadays people expect to be able to talk about a range of personal, sensitive and even controversial issues – and they expect leaders to be real. In other cases, leaders strive for a ‘culture of nice’ but this can come at the cost of patching over tensions, softening feedback and avoiding challenge. Unintentionally this can create relationships where things are left unsaid and problems pushed below the surface. Over time the niceness of the culture can become a roadblock to improvement or forward progress.
In this one hour webinar with leadership coach Jo Lally we will explore what it takes to build a culture of trust where connecting more authentically and building more open and trusting relationships enables staff to acknowledge their concerns and vulnerabilities and for everyone to be able to successfully broach important topics that previously had seemed too difficult. We will:
- Explore the transactional and the relational elements that contribute to building trust
- Share four core principles for managing a ‘difficult’ conversation that will help to unlock genuine, two-way dialogue
- Share practical tips that will help you to challenge others in ways that will strengthen the relationship rather than create distance
Thursday 21 May
9:30 a.m.
to 10:30 a.m.
Building a culture of trust
Reserve your slot
Sign up below to attend this webinar
3.00 p.m. Thursday 2 July 2026 Influence and leadership
Much of what you will need to achieve as a school, college or trust leader, will come down to your ability to influence without resorting to your positional authority. Whilst you may be able to issue a directive and expect that, in the main, your staff will comply, many of your stakeholders, including parents, governors/trustees and your peer leaders in your trust or system will require a very different approach to gain their buy-in.
In this 60 mins webinar with leadership coach Jo Lally we will explore the nature and inter-personal dynamics of influence and what it takes to embrace influence as a key part of your leadership toolkit. We will cover:
- The mindset of a great influencer and how this unlocks new ways to find the best way forward and bring others with you
- Common influencing styles and how you can maximise your personal effectiveness as an influencer
- The barriers that can prevent an influencing conversation from moving forward and the transitions and leadership practices needed to break through these and make progress towards a shared solution
Thursday 2 July
3:00 p.m.
to 4:00 p.m.
Influence and leadership
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.
