Developing leadership deliberately and at scale is one of the hardest challenges schools and trusts face.

Too often, leadership development is fragmented, overly theoretical, or disconnected from the daily realities of school life. Leaders attend training, reflect thoughtfully, and then return to environments where sustained change is difficult to achieve.

Everyone Succeeds, and its leadership cycle, which underpins it, was designed to address this gap. The Leadership Cycle provides a clear rhythm for leadership development through three core stages: Diagnose, Learn and Lead, with seven practical steps built into this cycle to support sustained change.

Rather than focusing on leadership style or personality, the framework is built around 54 clearly defined leadership behaviours identified and codified through close observation of highly effective school leaders and grounded in research and real school practice. It provides a shared language and a practical structure for turning leadership development into an everyday habit.

This page explains the main ways schools, trusts, and individual leaders use Everyone Succeeds, and helps you decide where to go next.

Three ways organisations use Everyone Succeeds

Schools and trusts engage with Everyone Succeeds in different ways depending on their context, scale, and priorities. In practice, most use one of the following routes.

1. Using Everyone Succeeds across a school

This is the most common starting point for individual schools.

Leaders work collectively on a small number of agreed leadership behaviours aligned to current school priorities, before adding personalised development later in the year. This approach builds shared language, consistency, and credibility, while protecting leaders from overload.

→ Go to: How to introduce in your school

2. Using Everyone Succeeds across a trust

Trusts use the framework to create alignment across schools while respecting local context and professional judgement.

Common behaviours provide coherence, while diagnostics and development cycles allow leaders at different levels to focus on role-specific challenges. Over time, this supports progression, consistency, and capacity building across the trust.

→ Go to: How to introduce in your trust

3. Using Everyone Succeeds as an individual leader

Many leaders and aspiring leaders use Everyone Succeeds independently.

The Leadership Cycle can be followed at an individual pace, using diagnostics, the book, workbook, toolkits, Coach and Practice frameworks, and the 90-Day Leadership Planner to focus deliberately on real leadership challenges.

This route supports personal growth and reflection and often serves as the entry point before introducing the framework more widely.

→ Go to: The Everyone Succeeds Framework

What this looks like in practice

Understanding the framework is one thing. Seeing how it unfolds across a real year, in a real school, under real pressure is another.

The worked examples below show how the same Everyone Succeeds framework, behaviours, and annual rhythm are used to address very different leadership challenges. They are not prescriptions. They are worked examples designed to support professional judgement and adaptation.

→ Go to: Worked examples in different contexts

Bespoke diagnostic tools built into the framework

Everyone Succeeds includes a set of purpose-built diagnostic tools designed to work together:

Used together, these tools create a shared evidence base that supports collective focus and meaningful individual development.