Tara Moore is a role model for the Aurora – Leadership Foundation for Higher Education
Aurora has been designed to help address the issue of the reducing numbers of women in senior posts in the higher education sector as outlined in the Leadership Foundation’s Stimulus Paper ‘Women and Higher Education: Absences and Aspiration’ by Professor Louise Morley (January 2013). Launched in November 2013, Aurora is the women-only leadership development programme. Over the last two years, 1473 women and 128 institutions and higher education sector bodies have engaged in Aurora.
Many influential stakeholders including vice-chancellors, Hefce and the Equality Challenge Unit agree the situation calls for immediate action to halt this decline. Feedback from the sector tells us that HEIs would like to encourage more women to apply for leadership roles and feedback from the women suggests that early leadership development would facilitate this.
However the research suggests that developing women will not be enough to halt this decline on its own, so Aurora has been designed to take a partnership approach with institutions. This involves the HEIs making a commitment to provide mentors and role models from within their organisations as well as participants so that the issues and challenges of leadership progression for women are recognised more widely across the institution. The Aurora content itself will include many of the features identified by the research as significant factors in the successful development of women leaders.
Aurora addresses core areas associated with leadership success:
- Understanding organisations and the sector
- Developing leadership behaviors, skills and knowledge
- Identifying and overcoming barriers and obstacles
- Growing confidence and a leadership identity
- Building networks, coalitions and support processes
Aurora will address these areas by using a combination of development days (four, at approximately monthly intervals); self-directed learning that follows the interests, needs and time constraints of participants; action learning sets organised and delivered locally and in-house mentoring.