Womens’s Leadership Network Launched

The Women’s Leadership Network (WLN), supported by the Centre for Excellence in Leadership (CEL), was launched at the House of Lords earlier this month. The network is for women who hold or aspire to leadership roles in further education.

Some 60 women from the education sector and government heard Lady Amos and Lady Prosser speak about the importance of women’s contribution to society and business.

To mark the launch, CEL and WLN published their report on gender-related factors in career progression, based on research carried out for them by the Learning Skills Network (LSN), which identified some key trends in the FE system.

Women, as well as men, are contributing to leadership and management of the FE sector in substantial numbers and at every level. Compared with the national picture for all occupational sectors, women are well represented in education management. More detailed consideration revealed, however, that there is still a significant ‘glass ceiling’ effect in the FE sector within senior management and governing bodies. The research also revealed under-representation of black and minority ethnic (BME) managers.

The research report, Gender-related factors in career progression, may be downloaded from the publications area of CEL’s website.