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…

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.…