National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) are a set of prestigious, trusted and transferable qualifications accredited by the Department for Education.
Leadership NPQs are an 18-month course and Specialist NPQs are a 12-month course. You will access face-to-training, asynchronous self-study, virtual sessions and an assessment at the end of the course to gain your DfE accredited qualification.
Northern Lights partners with Ambition Institute, known for its quality clinics and conferences, to offer a high-quality CPD experience and to offer the full range of Specialist and Leadership NPQs. NPQH - NPQSL - NPQSENCO - NPQEYL - NPQLBC - NPQLT - NPQLTD NPQLL - NPQLPM
We also partner with The Society for Education and offer the following NPQs: NPQSL - NPQSENCO
We can offer these NPQs as a standard cohort or a Flex offer. Flex allows your Trust or group of schools to run your own cohort of an NPQ, allowing you to lead a cohort which can be contextualised to your schools. For further information about this, please complete the form below.
The NPQs from both providers are available for teachers and leaders who want to develop their knowledge and skills in school leadership and specialist areas of teaching practice.
We are excited to announce details about the Autumn 2026 NPQ cohort which can be found in full on GOV.UK. Please see the summary below:
Funding for the Early Headship Coaching Offer will continue to be available if the participant is also:
Scholarships for all other NPQs (all specialist NPQs) will continue to be based on disadvantage criteria.
The Registration Service, which enables applicants to express their interest with the DfE, will open on 23 June 2026.
Our range of NPQs includes:
We offer 4 leadership NPQs. All our leadership NPQs are 18 months long, include online study which you can access flexibly, include coaching and help you to develop your leadership and broaden your whole school impact: NPQH - NPQSL - NPQSENCO - NPQEYL (Ambition only)
1. Specific to school leadership
The frameworks map out what best practice looks like and the evidence base for school leadership so that leaders in schools can make decisions that are most likely to have positive effects.
Leadership NPQs are organised around ten areas of leadership that are all specific to school contexts. The areas attend to both the specialist areas of school leadership like ‘curriculum and assessment’ and approaches to school improvement like ‘professional development’. This means every part of the NPQs is as relevant to schools as possible.
The ten leadership areas covered by the frameworks are:
The frameworks for Senior Leadership, Headship and Executive Leadership all cover these same 10 areas. While these areas remain the same across the leadership NPQs, they are adapted to the area of specialism for two of the NPQs.
The NPQ in Early Years Leadership also covers child development, curriculum and assessment while the the NPQ for Special Educational Needs Co-ordinators covers the areas of identification and assessment, and provision and intervention.
This commonality between the leadership NPQs provides the golden thread of learning by which a school leader can continue developing their knowledge and expertise as they move through their career.
Building on the Initial Teacher Training Early Career Framework, the current suite of NPQs completes the Department for Education's golden thread of professional development throughout every stage of a teacher’s and leader's career.
From those early days of training to be classroom teacher through to specialising in an area of interest or moving into school or trust leadership there are now joined-up professional development options which provide a consistent approach to developing teaching and leadership expertise.
Schools and trusts can have confidence that all their educators, from early career teachers to leaders of multiple schools, are building and developing their practice from the same evidence-based framework.
NPQs are designed to develop knowledge and expertise so that teachers and leaders build mental models which guide decision making. This means that when faced with challenges in their leadership role they can draw on these mental models to make better decisions. This professional development is based on the NPQ frameworks. The frameworks are set out as a series of ‘learn that…’ and ‘learn how to…’ statements that emphasise knowledge and skills which are most important to school leadership. This is to ensure school leaders are secure in the formal knowledge that is required in education, such as which teaching approaches are most effective. They also provide practical knowledge of how to lead and manage in a school setting, such as how to create the conditions for staff and pupils to thrive.
If you want to learn more about why we think developing school leaders’ knowledge matters, read our hidden knowledge of experts blog.
The leadership NPQs are longer than their specialist counterparts (18 months) and cover more leadership areas, because the work of senior leaders in schools is more complex and multi-faceted. Senior leaders can benefit from a well-rounded view of school leadership, beyond just their current areas of responsibility, and a clear understanding of how the different areas of school leadership interact.
The breadth of leadership areas covered by the leadership frameworks – from ‘teaching’ through to ‘organisational management’ – provides an opportunity for leaders to develop expertise in areas where they might not already have it. We know all people come to learning with different areas of expertise: NPQs are a good opportunity for leaders to think about areas that are not part of their experience to date. School leaders can benefit from studying a wide range of leadership areas in preparation for progressing into more senior and strategic roles.
It is also important for school leaders to develop deep knowledge in some areas of education leadership. Read Specialist NPQs: The next step in your leadership development? for more information.
The current frameworks have been developed by looking at a wide evidence base including how children learn, what impacts their behaviour and how they are assessed, and what makes effective professional development for teachers and leaders. The frameworks have been approved and endorsed by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF).
This common evidence base is a major part of the golden thread, which brings a shared terminology and experience to the national conversation on leadership development for schools. This has the potential to reduce the inequality in education that many young people from disadvantaged backgrounds still face.
When senior leaders step into their first roles as headteachers, they go through what is acknowledged to be a particularly challenging career transition. Now, on top of the standard NPQ for Headship programme, the Early Headship Coaching Offer is on offer for participants new to headship.
We use small group coaching to help you apply your learning to the real world
You’ll meet other leaders from schools in your local area, or on the Executive Leadership programme, as part of our national cohort. This helps you to build your professional networks and expose yourself to other contexts and ways of thinking
We lead in an ethical way with values at the heart of all we do
You’ll learn through a series ‘teaching cycles’, covering two units of learning in each. In each teaching cycle, you will attend an online webinar per unit, complete self-study activities, attend a coaching session and face-to-face knowledge application sessions. On our Executive Leadership programme, these are delivered in three 2-day residentials.
To find out more click here to access the Society of Education Website.
Specialist NPQs can help school leaders at every level to improve their leadership of literacy, teaching, teacher development, primary maths or behaviour and culture. If you are a school leader who wants to develop your leadership capabilities, doing a specialist NPQ is a great choice – whether it’s your first NPQ or following a leadership NPQ.
They are valuable way to deepen your expertise in a specialist domain, and will support you to become an even better school leader.
So, why should you consider a specialist NPQ?
School leadership is challenging for many reasons. Leaders need to know about lots of different areas. A headteacher might find themselves talking to a colleague about curriculum one minute and discussing health and safety the next. An assistant head might consider curriculum, literacy and leading teaching in the same meeting.
Leadership is full of moments like this: shifting from thinking about one subject to another. It’s complex and multifaceted. And that’s why NPQ leadership programmes, and the frameworks they are based on, focus on breadth. They provide school leaders with foundational knowledge across nine key domains.
But genuine expertise requires more than breadth: it requires depth too.
To make the best decisions when faced with challenges, you will benefit from more specialist knowledge. Challenges like how to support pupils to read and write, or how to motivate and support staff to be even better teachers, are complex.
On a specialist NPQ you will have more time to dive into the detail of a narrower topic. In fact, a specialist NPQ offers six times as many modules on one area as a leadership NPQ does.
Doing a specialist NPQ gives you a more expert edge which makes them a fantastic career development tool.
Because they are focused on areas that represent the most pressing areas for school improvement, specialist programmes help you to develop the deep – and valuable – expertise leadership teams need.
For example, the NPQ for Leading Teacher Development (NPQLTD) helps leaders to develop the knowledge and skills they need to support their staff to get better through professional development. Professional development is a cost-effective school improvement solution, if done well, when compared to alternative strategies (Education Policy Institute, 2020). But it is far from straightforward. Getting people to change long-held habits is hard. Making those changes stick is even harder.
The NPQLTD has 18 modules dedicated to helping leaders understand how they can create great professional development experiences for their staff. This includes learning how to sequence professional development curricula and individual professional development sessions, and creating an environment which enables staff to take new ideas and run with them.
Investing in professional development is crucial to school improvement: all schools want and need their teachers to keep getting better. By completing the NPQLTD, you can become the expert schools are looking for to make those investments pay off.
The quality of leadership in a school goes a long way to determining outcomes for its pupils (Kraft & Papay, 2014).
As a school leader you are well-positioned to implement the changes that a specialist NPQ might push you to think about at whole school level. This means the depth of learning you get from your NPQ can be used improve things for all staff and pupils in your school.
To unlock the potential of leadership to improve outcomes, schools need their activities to be expertly planned, evidence-informed and implemented with energy and skill. These are approaches you can learn on a specialist NPQ.
A good example is the NPQ for Leading Literacy. On this programme, leaders will gain knowledge to build their school’s approach to reading and literacy around the best available evidence. They will explore evidence in great depth, discuss it with other passionate leaders of literacy, and learn from expert facilitators. Combined with the breadth of knowledge they may have already built on a leadership NPQ, this leader has the potential to develop a truly rigorous, rich and successful approach to literacy in their school.
And great literacy, like great behaviour and great teaching, underpins so much of children’s success at school. It’s particularly important for schools in areas of high disadvantage where poor literacy skills drive much of the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers.
By becoming an expert in combination with your broad leadership knowledge, you will have even more potential to transform the life chances of pupils in your school.
Are you facing a specific challenge in your school? Do you want to deepen your knowledge in an area that you know something about? Or to expand your understanding in an area that you have less experience in? If so, consider making your next move into one of our NPQ specialist programmes.
To learn more, visit our programmes page.
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