Master of Arts in Educational Leadership in Practice

The programme costs £17,800 in total. Various discount schemes and scholarships are available; please contact our admissions team for details.

This is a part-time master’s programme that takes 24 months to complete, with a workload of around 20 hours per week alongside your existing job.

This programme is for teachers and educators who want to move into a leadership role in an educational organisation. It’s designed to build the skills and confidence needed to lead teams, influence policy, and drive change.

You’ll typically need a good honours degree (minimum 2:1) or the equivalent. A teaching qualification or at least one year of professional experience in an educational organisation is preferred but not required. You’ll also need a reference, a CV, and a personal statement of about 500 words.

No. There are no examinations; all assessments are based on individual coursework.

The Manchester MA Educational Leadership in Practice combines online learning with face-to-face conferences, giving working educators a way to study without leaving their jobs. Most of the coursework happens online, so you can study around your schedule and apply what you’re learning at work right away. Twice a year, the programme brings everyone together in person for a multi-day conference, where you work through practical activities in small, multinational groups alongside industry peers and academics. This blend of online flexibility and in-person networking is designed to build both the theoretical grounding and the practical confidence needed to lead in an educational organisation.

The programme takes a critical approach to educational leadership, rather than simply teaching standard management techniques. Units cover models of educational leadership and how they apply in different international contexts, how to lead change within an organisation, and how education policy is created and shapes leadership decisions. Throughout, the focus is on questioning established ideas and applying them directly to your own workplace, rather than learning theory in the abstract. This approach is built around one core idea: real change in an educational organisation starts with leaders who can think critically about the systems they work in, not just manage them.

The programme is led by Dr Paul Armstrong, Programme Director, and Dr Bee Hughes, Deputy Programme Director, who together bring over 22 years of combined teaching and research experience in educational leadership. Students learn from academics with real research backgrounds in this field, not just industry practitioners, which grounds the programme’s practical exercises in genuine academic study. This pairing of research expertise and practice-based teaching is central to how the programme approaches leadership education.

Standard educational management courses tend to teach fixed models and processes for running a school or organisation efficiently. Manchester’s programme instead takes a critical approach, encouraging you to question why current systems and policies exist in the first place, and whether they actually serve students and staff well. This matters because educational leaders are increasingly expected to respond to policy pressures like standardisation, rather than simply follow them. Graduates come away better equipped to lead genuine change, not just maintain existing systems.

Yes. While the programme is offered through the University of Manchester South East Asia, the small multinational group conferences mean cohorts already include educators from a range of countries, not just Malaysia. The critical, research-based approach to leadership is designed to apply across different national education systems, not just one country’s policies, making it relevant to educators working anywhere in the region.