Education Leaders is the podcast, academy and community for school leaders worldwide who are tired of consultants who don't get it, and frameworks that fall apart the moment they touch a real building.
Most schools have been told the same story for twenty years: change is something you buy in. A consultancy. A framework. A new acronym. A different acronym.
It's exhausting. And it doesn't work.
Education Leaders started with a simple counter-argument: the people who know your school best are the ones who teach in it. The work of leadership isn't to import expertise, it's to lead the expertise you already have out of the corners it's been kept in.
Everything we make, the podcast, the Academy, the Circles, runs on that one idea. We don't sell certainty. We build the systems and the community that let your team do their best work.
Organisational coach, podcast host, and co-author of Change Starts Here (Routledge, 2025). Based in Shanghai, working with schools across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, both international and local.
Shane spent over a decade in classrooms and middle leadership before moving into organisational coaching. He's currently Regional Head of Teacher Development for Nord Anglia Education's China bilingual schools, a CollectivEd Fellow, and a TEDx speaker. He sits as a member of the EMCC and adheres to its Global Code of Ethics.
He works with leadership teams using the Double Diamond framework and has worked with leaders from 30+ countries. The Education Leaders podcast, which became the #1 education show in Hong Kong and Ireland in 2024, grew out of those conversations.
Education Leaders is where the products live, the podcast, the Academy, the Circles. Anyone in international education can engage here, regardless of whether they ever speak to Shane directly.
shaneleaning.com is where Shane works as a person, bespoke consulting engagements, speaking and keynotes, and the book. If you're looking for one-off work with leadership teams, you want that site.
Different doors. Same philosophy.
Shane's book with Efraim Lerner (Routledge, 2025) lays out the full philosophy and the Double Diamond approach for school leaders. Forty questions and real case studies from schools worldwide, built on one idea: the answers are usually already in your community. If you want the thinking behind the Academy in long-form, start here.
30 minutes. No agenda. We talk about where you are and whether anything we do would actually help.