Trust is not often talked about within educational leadership but it should be considered a factor vital to our success. We are now, more than ever, living in a low-trust culture.

Low trust in politicians undermined the election, low trust within all sectors of business pervades. Education is no different. Successive years of cuts have forced leadership teams to make redundancies, reduce budgets and attempt the impossible - more for less. Staff trust has been eroded.

In our own college, we have just completed a merger. Sadly, mergers inevitably bring essential staff restructuring and rapid change, fostering fear and insecurity.

In such situations, no matter how hard we try, it is difficult to create a culture of trust, and morale is often undermined.

So what are the essential elements to increase trust? At a college level, I believe it must begin with the individual. We all need to have a “look in the mirror moment” and raise the question “are you trustworthy?” Do you say what you mean, do what you say, tell it straight without fear or favour, driven by personal values?

Tough questions

Next, it is worth considering carefully how systems, policies and procedures can support a high-trust culture. Are they there to serve and improve or simply to check and report? We at East Coast College are challenging ourselves to ask these tough questions. We recently decided to move away from graded lesson observations for this very reason. Teaching and learning is complex, and to continue grading simply undermines trust and increases stress.

Another area I’d love to tackle is emails, one of the main drains on time for our working generation, and one where levels of trust seem low. The “copy in for information” culture prevalent across many colleges really means “I don’t trust you to do this without me telling your line manager”. As renowned US educator Stephen Covey once said, when the “trust account” is high, communication becomes “easy, instant and effective”.

A higher-trust culture allows the creation of efficient and effective “micro-teams” for teaching or support functions. These are built on trusting the person next to you, and result in the ability to move fast, with low cost and with the clarity of a shared mission.

Special forces teams are built on these principles, operating within a clear framework and values, but often, where there are no policies or bureaucratic institutional frameworks to support immediate decision-making, or if the landscape is changing too fast, policies and systems will fail to keep up. Does this sound familiar?

My recent and continuing leadership challenges relating to the merger - a situation where trust and belief can decline - have forced me to revisit Covey’s 2006 work, Speed of Trust. In it, he argues that the creation of trust is a long-term project; there are no shortcuts. I have seen what happens when staff discover they have been lied to and misled, when financial difficulties have been hidden and quality issues left unexplained.

When such behaviour is exposed, it simply creates chaos, erodes trust, slows communications, increases suspicion and makes fixing the original problems even more expensive and difficult.

Credibility and capability

There are arguably two essential elements required for trust to thrive or even be possible: capability and credibility.

Credibility comes from “walking the walk” and being honest, from acting with integrity, from having honest virtues and intentions, and from taking responsibility for results. Capability is about being competent enough to deliver results and promote constant improvement.

Another requirement necessary to develop a high-trust culture is for the public and the government to trust in the further education sector itself.

It’s time to admit, as a sector, that we simply aren’t trusted enough. We are an afterthought of the government and a cost rarely considered worth paying. The underfunding and positioning of the sector is evidence of this lack of trust.

It is essential that the sector develops a reputation for being credible and capable of delivering results. If we can develop trust, in a similar way to the higher-education sector, public support will follow. This will require significant work but the planned T-level reforms - which will introduce technical qualifications as an alternative to A levels for 16- to 19-year-olds - may provide an ideal opportunity.

Author Jesse Stoner once said: “People follow leaders by choice. Without trust, at best you get compliance.”

Never has it been more important, as the sector is squeezed for leaders, to act with integrity and for colleges to be underpinned by values that generate trust. Trust is created by actions, not just words.

Stuart Rimmer is principal and chief executive of East Coast College