Educational Leaders Forum (ELF)

Educational Leaders Fora (ELF) is an online meeting for all Oxford Brookes University programme leaders and subject coordinators on the first Wednesday of each month. Join us in an interactive discussion about your activities and priorities with key speakers highlighting essential information from across Oxford Brookes and the wider HE sector. Supporting OCAED's ambition to enable and sustain educational and educational innovation leadership, ELF offers a platform for a community of practice that aims to be supportive, productive, and constructive in programme leadership.

After each ELF session, resources are shared through the programme leaders' forum on Google Space. So, if you cannot attend, you can still catch up with the recording, resources and notifications when you can. If you still need to join our Google Space, please email m.kitchener@brookes.ac.uk

You might also be interested in our leadership and management workshops available via the staff portal to support and enhance your CP

DEAL supports OCAED's strategic ambition to enable and sustain educational and academic leadership. It aims to develop your programme leader competence (Lawrence and Scott, 2022) to benefit you, your teaching teams, Oxford Brookes, and, ultimately, our students.

Programme Leading is emerging as a role central to contemporary academic career progression (Lawrence, Morrell and Scott, 2023) and one recognised as crucial to institutional success (Lawrence, Moron-Garcia and Senior, 2022; Lawrence, 2024). To enable this kind of educational leadership OCAED hosts an Educational Leaders Forum and the OE&D team has developed a Leadership and Management Framework sympathetic to the role. 

We recognise that educational leaders find funding for academic CPD hard to access because of the demands on their time and energies (Senior, Moron-Garcia and Lawrence, 2022), yet it is integral to your academic career (Lawrence, 2024) and so for the third consecutive year, we are thrilled to open a call for funding specifically for Programme Leaders at Oxford Brookes.

We fund opportunities for programme leaders to:

• expand educational and academic leadership experience
• build knowledge of educational and academic leadership
• nurture self-awareness of individual leadership capabilities.

This may be in the form of: 

• a small project to enhance your programme/s, or 
• presentation or attendance at a conference or networking event
• engagement with other academic CPD that is not provided at Oxford Brookes.

Available funding is up to £1,000 and must be used by the 1 July.  If your application is successful, you must provide a brief summary (up to 400 words) at the end of your activity. This summary will outline what you have learned from the funded activity, how you will disseminate this information, and the potential impact of your academic CPD.

Note all applications should be supported by your Dean of Education.

Your application will be assessed using the DEAL Funding Rubric. 

If you have any questions about DEAL, please contact ocaed@brookes.ac.uk.

• We will continue to accept funding applications until all available funds have been allocated.
• Complete CPD: up to 1 July 2025
• Submit a summary: by 31 July 2024.