The Journal for Executive and Governance Leaders
The Journal for Executive and Governance Leaders
April 2020 edition
We find ourselves in unprecedented times. Our schools have risen superbly to the occasion and are doing a remarkable job in carrying on the education of the children in their care under the most challenging of circumstances. In the spirit of this we wanted to go ahead with the circulation…
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Recently I wrote an article in TES about the path from crisis to recovery in the COVID-19 response. In this article, I talked about the need to build resilience and plan for recovery, as well as focusing on the here and now. I also talked about the tenacity of the…
March 2020 will be seen as a watershed moment for education in this country. It was the moment that concerns about public exams, the new inspection framework and staff recruitment were put on hold as leaders faced the true implications of the Coronavirus and COVID-19. My role these days is…
I want to start by expressing sincere gratitude to everyone working in education at the moment, in all capacities; you are supporting our young people and your communities during a time of national crisis. I applaud your commitment and professionalism in supporting them whether this is within their home environment…
Life in a school or trust is always busy and full of challenges but a global pandemic has brought new problems for schools to wrestle with. Over the last fortnight, teachers and school leaders across the country have made a significant and historic contribution to society. In just a few…
When I was asked to write this piece, the world was a different place. The original article that I had written was about how we were working across REAch2 to deliver a truly exceptional education to every child in our care, and how trust leadership is about transforming lives. Roll…
With Covid-19 declared a global pandemic, school trusts need to be prepared for homeworking. Organisations where agile working is the norm will already have adopted systems and equipment to maintain business operations and manage the risks of working “beyond the perimeter”. For many schools and MATs, this will be a…
As part of our COVID-19 resilience and recovery planning it is important to give consideration to the other global threat we face, that of the climate emergency and to give thought to how we can take a lead in reducing carbon emissions and transform the way schools use and manage…
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…
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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…
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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…