Chantelle Asante

From dance workshops to educational leadership: A journey of growth, learning and leadership

Chantelle Asante is a strategic leader with more than 13 years of experience driving performance, culture, and outcomes across complex, multicultural environments. She has designed and led high-impact professional development and capacity-building programmes across diverse teams and is recognised for her transformational leadership, using data-driven strategies to improve engagement, collaboration, and accountability. Now, her aim is seeking to bring her expertise to mission-driven organisations in consulting, leadership development, and organisational strategy.

For Chantelle Asante, becoming a teacher was never part of a carefully mapped-out career plan. In fact, she describes teaching as something that was “somewhat innate” – a natural progression that emerged from her early experiences leading dance classes and workshops.

Today, alongside her school leadership role, she is continuing to develop her education consulting business, leading and attending workshops within the education sector.

Her journey into teaching began shortly after university, when she joined a school as a Higher-Level Teaching Assistant. At the time, she was unsure where her career would take her. However, the leaders at the school quickly recognised her natural ability to connect with children and encouraged her to return to university to gain her teaching qualification.

She took their advice – and it proved to be a defining moment.

“I started out in schools as a Higher-Level TA, straight out of university, not really knowing what I wanted to do with my career,” Chantelle reflects. “There were leaders at the school where I worked who saw that I had a great relationship with the children and encouraged me to go back to university to obtain my teaching degree. So I did.”

From there, her career has taken her across three different countries, giving her the opportunity to experience different educational systems, cultures and approaches to teaching. Each international move brought its own challenges, but also opened the door to new ways of thinking about education.

When she moved to the United States, she faced one of her biggest professional transitions yet. Having previously taught Year 5 in the UK, she found herself teaching Kindergarten – a completely different age group and stage of education.

“Not only was I out of my element, but my curriculum knowledge of that area of the school wasn’t something I was overly familiar with,” she says. “But I absolutely loved it! It was like learning all over again.”

The experience gave Chantelle a renewed appreciation for the transformative power of teaching. Watching children progress from being unable to read and write at the beginning of the school year to reading fluently by the end was, in her words, “actually AMAZING.”

Her next international move, to the UAE, brought another period of adaptation. Having never worked in an international school or for a private educational institution before, she had to adjust to a very different organisational structure and set of expectations.

Yet, rather than seeing these transitions as obstacles, she embraced them as opportunities to learn.

“I guess the adaptations and/or transitions always come with excitement mixed with challenges,” she explains.

It was this appetite for growth that eventually led Chantelle to The University of Manchester-Dubai, where she joined the University’s part-time MA Educational Leadership in Practice Master’s programme to help deepen her understanding.

After several years in the UAE, Chantelle had reached a point where she knew that her next step needed to involve further professional or personal education. She was passionate about remaining in education, but she also knew that she wanted to move beyond the role of classroom teacher and develop her leadership potential.

The programme offered her the opportunity to explore education from a wider perspective and to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to lead effectively.

For Chantelle, the Master’s was about more than gaining another qualification. She wanted to understand the foundations of educational leadership and ask challenging questions about the kind of leader she wanted to become.

“How could I be a different leader to the leaders I had come across already in my career?” she asks. “Was leadership about character, personality, pedagogy – and how much of each is needed to make a positive and respected leader?”

The programme helped her begin to answer those questions. Through exploring different leadership styles and examining how individuals lead, she developed a greater awareness of leadership as both a professional practice and a deeply personal one.

Perhaps the most significant impact of the programme was the confidence it gave her to contribute at a senior level. She recalls attending meetings with senior leaders, executives and inspectors and finding herself able to speak with confidence and eloquence about teaching and learning, drawing on her growing pedagogical knowledge.

“That was the point where I knew I had exercised the learning from the programme,” she says. “The table was blown away by my knowledge.”

Importantly, the learning did not remain confined to the university environment. Chantelle was able to apply what she was learning immediately within her school setting, connecting theory with practice as she continued teaching and developing professionally.

“I was able to implement what I was learning as I was learning,” she explains. “I would align my practical teaching with what I was learning, which is a great aspect of the course.”

Returning to education as a student while already working as an experienced teacher was not without its challenges. “Going back to school as an adult – is not really fun,” she laughs. Yet, she found that learning alongside other educators created a particularly rich environment for discussion and reflection.

Her cohort was an important part of that experience. With students from diverse professional and personal backgrounds, the conversations brought multiple perspectives to the programme and helped her to challenge and broaden her own thinking.

“Everyone sharing their insights, understandings, views and opinions supported not only discussions during the class but also helped when writing papers because you then had different perspectives to use.”

Balancing postgraduate study alongside the demands of teaching and leadership also required discipline and careful time management. For Chantelle, the key was establishing routines and maintaining a clear balance between competing responsibilities.

“It is a balancing act,” she says. “Keeping to routines to ensure you are fulfilling the needs of both commitments is key.”

Since completing her Master’s, Chantelle’s career has continued to evolve. Her move into educational consulting has developed organically, while her progression into senior school leadership reflects a long-held ambition.

“Taking on a senior leadership role in a school has always been a goal, and so this role is exactly where I need and want to be, right now.”

Looking ahead, Chantelle is excited to continue growing her consulting business and to lead and participate in workshops across the education sector. Her ambition remains rooted in a desire to deepen her understanding of education, strengthen her knowledge of pedagogy and psychology, and use that expertise to support others.

Her advice to teachers and prospective candidates considering the MA Educational Leadership in Practice is clear: if you want to understand education at a deeper level and explore the foundations of what educators do, the programme is worth the commitment.

For Chantelle, the value of the programme is not simply measured by career progression or the promise of a higher position. Instead, it lies in the knowledge, confidence and credibility it gives educators when they find themselves “at greater tables” – contributing to important conversations and having the expertise to make their voice heard.

Looking back on her journey, she sees education as a career defined by continual growth. From leading dance workshops, to becoming a classroom teacher, moving across continents, studying educational leadership, entering consulting and stepping into senior leadership, her path has never been entirely predictable.

But perhaps that is what makes her story so compelling.

Chantelle’s career is a reminder that professional journeys do not always begin with a clear destination. Sometimes, they develop through the people who recognise your potential, the opportunities you choose to embrace, and the courage to become a learner again – even when you are already an experienced educator.

And for this Manchester alumna, the journey is far from over.