Cathie Paine is the chief executive of the REAch2 multi-academy trust (MAT) - a role she was appointed to in December and started in April after serving as deputy CEO and which she joined as its first employee in 2012.

It marks the latest remarkable moment in a career that has also seen her hold the title of England’s youngest headteacher - at just 28, in 1998 - and also turn a school around from “special measures” to “good” in Ofsted inspection in just four terms.

She chatted to Tes about her own time in education and the people whose actions have helped shaped her career path, what she thinks needs to change in the system and who she thinks has had the biggest impact on education in the past 12 months.

1. Who was your most memorable teacher and why?

The teacher that stands out the most is not a positive memory but it is, nonetheless, a memory that really shaped me.

I was at primary school in the 1970s and we were in an assembly, and the headteacher had this particular sort of discipline where he was whacking this boy really hard in front of the whole school and my year had to count the times he was being hit.

I remember feeling this bubbling outrage and shame about what I was witnessing and I remember wanting to shout out but being too scared to. But I was also thinking, “when I’m the headteacher, I’m going to be really kind to children” - and that was the moment I knew I wanted to go into education. It was a like a lightning bolt in the sky moment.

2. What were the best and worst times at school?

The best things were the opportunities for performance and having things put in your path you never dreamt you’d be able to do.

I’ve got incredible memories of being in Year 7 and singing in Vivaldi’s Gloria as a soprano in a church in Gainsborough. Then, at the other end of secondary school - at A level - I played Feste the jester in Twelfth Night and won the drama prize for that - I had the proper jester hat and everything.

And the other best thing is I met my future husband at school!

On the not-so-good side, wellbeing just wasn’t really a phrase people used but I had a pretty bad time at secondary school when my parents split up. The school approach was “well, we all have our problems and you’ve got to you just got to pull yourself together”.

I look back on that now and think I would fare much better in a system where talking about not being OK was welcomed and encouraged in a way that it just wasn’t then.

3. Why do you work in education?

There was the incident I mentioned earlier but, also, I am the oldest of my siblings and step-siblings, so there was always that sense of taking the lead and organising and taking care of them, which was one thread.

The other was performance, because a big part of teaching is being in front of people and engaging them.

4. What are you proudest of in your career? And what do you regret?

My proudest moment would definitely be my first headship at Usher Junior School in Lincoln. The school had just gone into special measures when I became the deputy and, within six weeks, I was acting headteacher and then head at just 28 - I was the youngest headteacher in Britain.

I was very aware of imposter syndrome but I just kept asking questions all the time to try to find out how to do the role and I also led in a way that tried to make it personal.

I had a two-year-old when I became headteacher there and so I would walk around the building asking “would this be OK for Billy?” If the answer was yes, then I encouraged that and helped to make it happen more. And then there were things that were really wrong that I would not want him to be around. I called it the Billy Factor and it was about making things personal to simplify what it was I was there to do.

And we turned that school around to receive a “good” rating in four terms, which was incredible.

I think the flip side is that although I’m in a trust where the majority of our schools were rated “inadequate” before they joined us, and then after joining us are now rated “good” or better, we haven’t got everything right quickly enough in a couple of schools.

To have a school go in the wrong direction on my watch is something that sits extremely badly with me, and one of the perils of working at scale is you can’t necessarily lead in the way that you would lead if you were in that school building and making decisions quickly

It’s meant we’ve had the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time and not acted quickly enough. I look in the mirror and take responsibility for that because it’s our job to turn schools.

5. Who would be your colleagues in your perfect school staffroom?

I work with a wonderful group of people at REAch2, so I would need a big staffroom.

But from the wider sector outside education, I would choose Simon Sinek. I love what he has written about leadership and purpose, and I find the way he writes makes things incredibly tangible.

Then Maggie Farrar, who was the interim chief executive at the National College and is now doing some wonderful work on the inner life of school leaders working with Oxford University around mindfulness.

Her compassion, wisdom - her whole approach - would be such an asset to any staffroom because she’s very exacting in her expectations but she does it with a heart and warmth.

And finally, a more personal choice is Marie-Claire Bretherton - she was in her first couple of years teaching when I got my second headship at Mount Street Academy and, over the course of a decade, when I was leading that school, she went on with me to become assistant head, deputy head, head of school and then, when I left, she became the headteacher and then she became executive head.

The school was “double outstanding” with us as a team and we became Lincolnshire’s first teaching school - we’d even got an infant and nursery school, so that was very unusual. And we really did think we could change the world together and actually, in our little corner of it, we did.

6. What would you say are the best and worst aspects of our school system?

The best thing is that expectations are incredibly high and that means, as a profession, that we have to be self-improving. That’s a good thing for children and it means we had a never-give-up mentality during Covid, which was just awe inspiring.

The worst thing is, in spite of everything we know about what makes a great school, there is still too much variability in the system - there are schools I would absolutely want my children to go to and schools I absolutely would not, and those gaps remain.

7. Who in education has influenced you the most?

Professor John West-Burnham [at the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Suffolk].

I worked very closely with him in Lincolnshire in the early days of headship. He had a huge influence on me around his research and writing on social justice in education, particularly the research on the impact of family on a child under the age of 12, as well as the impact of school. It completely changed the way I saw my role as a leader, and the role of a school, because his research found that family is seven times more influential on a child’s outcome under the age of 12 than school.

So, suddenly I saw that if we are going to concentrate on 9am till 3:30pm, that can get us so far but, unless we widen the lens to a bigger approach around breakfast, childcare, bedtime, sleep, and helping parents with food needs and parenting support and so on…it will only go so far.

So, we went on some quite innovative routes at that point, that I believe made a huge difference and closed the gap for disadvantaged children in Mount Street, and actually inverted it.

8. What would you do if you were education secretary for the day?

I would make funding available so every school has a nursery that was financially viable and I would offer 30 hours of free provision to all children - not just parents who work.

We know the evidence about the first three to four years of a child’s life - we know the inequities at that point can hamper children’s life chances, we know how the brain is shaped during those early years. At the moment, it’s a great set-up to have 30 hours but there are children who can’t access it.

The other thing I would do is fund a full-time school counsellor in every school. We have mental health training leads and mental health first aiders in school now, but we have such acute needs, it can’t just be falling to people who are in other roles in school.

At the acute end, this needs fully qualified specialists and I think if there was that facility in every school, it would unleash real greatness in people because, sometimes, these struggles are temporary and, with the right help, they can be overcome.

9. Who has made the biggest difference to education in the past 12 months?

I think it’s Leora Cruddas at the CST (Confederation of Schools Trust), who has been such a support to the sector, particularly through the pandemic, and now, as we’ve come out of that and are asking, “what is the role of the CEO now?”

She is proving to be a great source of support to new CEOs like me in this second generation, but also really encouraging about the ability to be able to learn from other people in order to be a better leader.

I suspect we’re all trying to solve the same sorts of problems, and what Leora has created in the CST is increasingly a safe place to collaborate and share and work together.

10. What are the most important lessons you’ve learned from doing this job?

Well, I’ve been CEO for less than a month but it holds true from my time as deputy CEO, too, and that is that it’s all about culture. It’s our culture that will carry us through change and that ultimately determines if people want to stick around and do great things together.

So, creating that bedrock of what we stand for, what we value, how we do things around here, feels to me to be the most important part of the job.  

Cathie Paine was talking to Dan Worth