The Journal for Executive and Governance Leaders
The Journal for Executive and Governance Leaders
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…