The Journal for Executive and Governance Leaders
The Journal for Executive and Governance Leaders
February 2020 edition
Welcome to the new edition of Trust. With the ever present backdrop of some of the key challenges facing the sector, not least the issue of teacher recruitment and retention, this edition brings together a number of different strands of current thinking about the leadership of schools and trusts. Tom…
Also featured
In the last edition of Trust, I wrote about school trusts as an insurgent mission. This is a bold mission, requiring spikiness and limitless horizons. It involves collective action – leaders who are brilliant at leading their organisations and building trust, but who are also civic leaders who work with…
In Robert MacFarlane’s ‘Mountain of the Minds’, he tells the story of cartography through the ages. MacFarlane describes how explorers were able to codify their growing knowledge of the world through the form of maps. These maps became increasingly accurate and sophisticated through the centuries, enabling others to understand new…
“Good leaders change organisations; great leaders change people.” (Hoerr, 2005) Why school leadership matters Successful school leadership is, in essence, about leading change. The past 20 years have witnessed remarkably consistent and persisting efforts by educational policy makers to raise standards of achievement for all students through various school reforms.…
Despite all the turbulence around us with the election, Brexit, new Ofsted framework, education funding and so on, as we start the new year one issue remains a significant challenge and that’s the recruitment and retention crisis in our sector. Trust leaders are aware of the continuing challenges and it…
One of the most important challenges facing any school leader is deciding how best to create working conditions that maximise staff motivation to perform well in their role. Central to this is the complex challenge of ensuring that decisions are made at the appropriate level, and are informed by the…
Since the publication of Making Data Work (the DfE Workload Advisory Group’s report on data use and workload) I have been invited in to explore workload in a number of schools. The following three lines of questioning have often been helpful in encouraging constructive explorations of teacher and leader workload.…
School trusts are facing unprecedented reputational challenges in a post truth world. Whilst the requirement for schools to have an online presence is nothing new, the rise of social media combined with the proliferation of misinformation has made reputation management more difficult than ever before. An ill-informed or abusive post…
Trust boards discover they have a leadership vacancy in one of two ways. But whether planned or unexpected, it’s a supremely valuable moment, where the status quo can legitimately be questioned, and alternative directions can be explored. School trusts are a relatively new arrival on the civic landscape, and a…
December 2019 edition
Welcome to the new edition of Trust. I am pleased to provide my synopsis of the range of topical subjects covered in this issue. In her lead article, Leora Cruddas, CEO of CST refers to Zook and Allen’s book The Founders Mentality in which they talk of the insurgent mission…
Also featured
In their excellent book, The Founder’s Mentality, Zook and Allen talk about the insurgent mission as one of the key features of the founders of successful organisations. I believe there are useful insights here for school trusts. In this article, I will apply Zook and Allen’s thinking to trusts, so…
The government continues to find it challenging to meet its recruitment targets for teachers – not least in shortage subjects. Meanwhile, a significant increase in the secondary school pupil population is expected over the next few years, which will create additional pressures. Since 2010, overall teacher numbers have been static,…
At the beginning of the original Academies Programme many curious school leaders looked across the Atlantic to learn from the US Charter schools movement, which was by then, much more established. The first cohorts of Future Leaders (a predecessor of Ambition Institute) would make an annual trip to the US;…
The premise of Patrick Lencioni’s excellent book, The Advantage, is that the single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organisational health. Yet it is ignored by most leaders – and in education – most leadership development programmes. At Dixons, we have made organisational health central to everything we do.…
Do you know how well your school trust is positioned to achieve its goals or what elements influence its ability to implement change successfully? I’ve always been fascinated about what makes a business a success and how organisations evolve to maintain a competitive advantage. I think that’s why I studied…
To put this in some context: academisation is still relatively young. And in this short space of time, those who academised have had to formalise collaboration with relatively little support, and create the most sustainable way of existing outside of the local authority. The DfE didn’t mandate multi academy trusts…
As education leaders, but also as parents, I think we can all agree that reading is at the heart of all learning. So I found it encouraging that, since 2018, the results of KS2 SATs have shown a small but promising increase in the number of students leaving primary schools…
In a period of political uncertainty, many trusts find themselves facing forceful intervention by the DfE when one of their academies gets into trouble. However what precisely are the powers of the DfE to intervene when an academy is “causing concern”? The revised September 2019 version of the DfE’s “Schools…
October 2019 edition
Welcome to the first edition of Trust for the new 2019/20 academic year. I am pleased to provide my synopsis of the range of topical subjects covered in this issue. In her lead article, Leora Cruddas, CEO of CST, builds on her previous Trust article ‘Changing the Story’ to counter…
Also featured
Earlier this year, I was delighted to give evidence to the UPP Foundation Civic University Commission. It was a privilege to have the opportunity to think hard about the civic role of universities and the role they play in their localities by making a strategic contribution to the greater social…
The growth of multi-academy trusts provides the opportunity for organisational added value. However it presents too, the risk of non-value-adding bureaucracy and control. This is a challenge faced by multi-unit organisations whether they are businesses, charities or public bodies. There are lessons to be learnt across all sectors. Firstly, in…
So….I used to be responsible for evaluation in Ofsted. I’ll just get that out there before I say any more as it is relevant to virtually everything that comes next. But I’d like to think I would say the same even if I hadn’t. Now that I am in Ormiston…
Reflecting on the word ‘Trust’ – the ‘T’ of our Multi Academy or Single Academy Trust designation – centres our thinking on the importance of our relationships with one another, and the extent to which they reflect our vision and values. Trust is created between institutions, teams, individuals and children,…
In 2010, the coalition Government invited parents, teachers, businesses, charities and existing schools to establish new schools across the country, and the free school programme was born. Since 2009, NSN (New schools Network), the organisation that I run, has sought to empower local groups to demand something different and better…
Teaching is stimulating. You use your brain in numerous ways: as an academic, a communicator, a parent and an actor. Teaching makes your synapses fizz and crackle like a sparkler. Those at the beginning of this exciting career have a lot of information to absorb: in addition to knowledge of…
Online technology in education is evolving, with cloud-based applications, social media, and great educational resources online all becoming commonplace in the classroom. As a result staff and students have access to a much greater range of knowledge but they are also more exposed to online threats. Earlier this year RM…
Like every organisation, school trusts are made up of lots of different teams. Whilst the board and the executive are teams within their own right, they also jointly make up an incredibly important team. In this article, I briefly explore two key areas where it is important for the board…