In our work supporting the development of excellent professional development programmes with our Walkthrus toolkit, we find that schools and colleges often go through a similar set of decision-making processes. As our experience has grown working in different contexts and across several large systems with multiple schools, we’ve been trying to capture this process in a way that will help to support future programmes. Each of these elements varies from place to place and they all interact but essentially there are six key design decisions for leaders to consider.