The culture of any organisation is fundamental to its success - it is the social fabric that drives behaviour and actions at work. What’s more, all organisations are constantly evolving, so culture must be deliberately and actively nurtured.

This is something particularly true for multi-academy trusts that may have schools with different cultures coming together at different points.

As a growing trust, we have always wanted to make sure culture is a key part of our due diligence process with schools thinking of joining us.

This is not because a perfect cultural alignment is required, or even possible, but to ensure a mutual understanding of expectations, how we work and how we do things, to avoid any misunderstandings down the line and generate buy-in as a family of schools.

However, before a trust can assess a school’s cultural alignment, it must understand its own culture.

So, how can a trust understand what its culture actually is, how it is transmitted and how well an incoming school would fit into it?

Understanding your culture

At Pioneer Educational Trust, we began the process of unearthing our culture by focus-grouping a representative selection of staff from across the trust.

We aimed to explore the underlying perceived values and cultural beliefs by finding out two things: what staff thought makes a good leader and what staff thought about how people progress in their careers.

To do this, we asked staff to think about nine (anonymised) leaders in the trust (three they thought were exceptional, three they thought were good and three they thought were less than good) and their similarities and differences.

This drew out common themes and helped us, and them, understand what they felt about leadership within the trust and how well the trust develops its people. The results showed good leaders were collaborative, self-aware, confident, caring, understanding and good communicators.

The results also revealed that staff believe our trust is focused first on investing in people as individuals and then providing opportunities for collaboration, which drives strategic work to improve our performance.

Four key questions

This work allowed us to formulate a decision-making wheel based on four questions to ensure decisions are made in line with our desired culture and vision for our schools.

• Will this decision produce the most good?
• Will this decision lead to the right actions being taken?
• Will this decision develop pioneering leaders?
• How will this decision ensure equal access to an exceptional education for all?

These questions ensure our work both steers and is steered by our culture and creates an environment that motivates and supports staff to perform at their very best, resulting in delivering the best education for our pupils.

We also looked at how we transmitted the culture we were aiming for and how it is presented in practice, for instance by seeing what’s on the walls, in policies and what is talked about in staffrooms.

This enabled us to realise where our actions weren’t aligned with the culture we aim for - for instance, our absence management policy wasn’t as resonant with our supportive culture as it could be in terms of return-to-work processes, so we implemented new training around that.

Due diligence

By completing this audit, we obtained clarity over our culture. This then allowed us to communicate more effectively with new, potential schools by being clearer in our own culture and how any new schools might fit within that as part of a due diligence process.

We do this by speaking to governors, looking at schools’ websites and undertaking a similar audit process of talking to staff to find out what stories they’re telling and see how this aligns with our own feedback.

We also open up as many opportunities as possible for both the school and the trust to learn about each other’s cultures and how this operates on the ground.

For instance, you may have blueprints for how certain things operate within the trust, with individual schools tailoring for context - such as a behaviour policy at trust level that sets expectations but is adapted to individual school contexts.

Sharing those blueprints and being clear about what those mean - and how different schools with different contexts in your trust have adapted them - can show clearly how your culture comes to life, and how a best fit can be achieved.

Of course, culture fit between trusts and new schools is never going to be seamlessly aligned - but the important thing is that by understanding your own culture as a trust, you can understand where any similarities with the new school lie and help avoid any misunderstandings in the future.

Antonia Spinks is the CEO of the Pioneer Educational Trust