For L&D and HR Directors
Unilever has developed its leaders through its own centre, Four Acres, for over 60 years. BT runs the BT Academy with a dedicated leadership faculty. Morrisons has launched the Sir Ken Morrison Leadership School. Selfridges has its own Leadership Academy.
It isn’t only the giants. Paradigm Norton, a financial planning firm of 70 people, has set up its own Leadership Academy too.
Leadership built in-house speaks the organisation’s own language, reflects its own values, and grows the next generation of leaders from within.
An academy is also a statement. It tells your people, your clients and the talent you want to hire that this is a business that builds its own leaders. Morrisons named its school after the man who built the company. Your academy carries your name, your values and the way your leadership team leads, and it’s the part of the business that will still be shaping leaders long after today’s team has moved on.
But the economics of leadership development have just changed. Since January 2026, government funding for Level 7 apprenticeships has been withdrawn for anyone aged 22 and over. That includes the Senior Leader apprenticeship many academies relied on, which attracted up to £14,000 of funding per person. New Level 7 starts fell by 93% in the first month. Senior and middle leadership development now has to come out of your own budget.
And an academy is only as good as the programmes within it. Writing a programme in-house takes months of design time and specialist skills most L&D teams don’t have spare. Buying places on external programmes gets expensive as numbers grow, and your managers learn someone else’s language under someone else’s brand. Bespoke design from a consultancy is slow, expensive and starts from a blank page.
We can offer you a simpler route. Organisations including ASDA, the BBC and the NHS have trusted us to develop their leaders, and we’ve been doing it since 1987. Our programme has been described as life changing, consistently has an NPS of 98, and led Beijer Ref to name us their UK and Ireland Supplier of the Year.
License the Quarterdeck Leadership Programme as its foundation. Brand it as your own, adapt it to your values and competency framework, and deliver it with your own facilitators, whom we train and certify. Or we deliver it for you.
Most academies are built from several sources: an apprenticeship partner, a business school, an e-learning library. The Quarterdeck Leadership Programme slots in alongside them as one of your academy’s programmes, under your academy’s brand, delivered by your facilitators or ours. You keep everything you’ve built and add a programme with an NPS of 98 behind it.
One annual licence covers your whole organisation, with no limit on participants or facilitators, for less than two funded Senior Leader apprenticeships used to cost.
We can also support the wider academy: 360 assessments built on your own values, values development, leadership handbooks and academy design. That’s where your leadership team’s own principles get written down and taught.
For your organisation, this means a leadership academy that’s recognisably yours, built on a proven programme, at a predictable annual cost, without a long design project.
Checked 13 October 2026.