The school landscape has changed dramatically in the past 25 years. More than half of schools are now academies, with teachers and support staff employed directly by school trusts.

Furthermore, it is important to recognise the role trusts as employers play as the school system seeks to grapple with the numerous challenges facing the public sector, such as recruiting and retaining teachers.

Since its inception, the Confederation of School Trusts (CST) has recognised this crucial part of trusts’ functions, advocating for trusts as employers in discussions with the government and policymakers, and providing support and guidance for trusts themselves.

Schools as better employers

This is why this afternoon and tomorrow we’re holding a summit for CEOs where we hope to galvanise and support trusts as employers to think deeply about the importance of culture, climate and conditions - making our schools brilliant places to work.

The summit was planned before last week’s election was called, but fortune has placed it at an interesting crossroads.

Ensuring the supply of teachers and leaders (and CST would argue, support staff) in our schools is a key responsibility of a strategic state. But retention is a shared responsibility with employers.

Teacher retention

We do have the evidence for good working conditions that contribute to retention. Our thinking at CST is anchored in the rapid evidence review conducted by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF).

The EEF reviewed the evidence base on school leadership, culture, climate, and structure for staff retention. There are three interrelated leadership approaches and associated practices highlighted in the report:

• Prioritising professional development
• Building relational trust
• Improving working conditions

We should also not underestimate the influence of headteachers on their schools, as recent research from the Education Policy Institute (EPI) has shown. While trusts set the culture of the group of schools, the headteacher controls to a large extent the climate within each school.

Effective schools for staff

The EPI report links an effective headteacher with outcomes for pupils, not just for staff. Therefore valuing and developing our headteachers, and paying attention to their workload and wellbeing, is absolutely essential to our shared endeavour, and the success of our education system.

While this is a continuation of our existing work to support employers, we believe now is the time to further strengthen our position as an employers’ organisation. Today we are focusing on the recruitment and retention crisis but we will do more over time to support trusts as employers.

Strengthening our role as an employer organisation is a natural evolution of our work as a sector body, bringing together those 2,500 trusts to have proper national representation.

Building better schools

Over the next twelve months, we will work with our members to determine how they want to be represented. It is important that we respect the sovereignty of trusts as legal entities and work with our members to seek a mandate for this work.

Our new people and culture professional community, launching in September, will be central to this work. A core function of all our professional communities is knowledge building. This community will be a key part of the way we build professional knowledge about people, culture and employment practice in school trusts.

We’ve noted that other public sector organisations can call on this support, and voice, from their own sector bodies (such as the NHS Confederation and the Universities and Colleges Employers Association) and we believe there is more CST can do to help trusts in a similar way.

Expanding the CST mission

These organisations support their members to be employers of choice through collaboration, advocacy, expert advice and their voice. They support workforce leaders and represent employers. We see this type of work as integral to CST’s mission, so will work with members over the next twelve months to strengthen this.

Trust leaders understand the importance of their staff. They recognise that our schools cannot be places of human flourishing for our children, unless this is also true for our staff. As Lynn Swaner and Andy Wolfe write in their book Flourishing Together: “Where there are few flourishing adults, there will be few flourishing children.”

So, we need to care deeply about our workforce and give renewed consideration to what “good work” means and how we might strengthen our understanding of what it means to be a good employer.

This is both a practical consideration, but also a moral duty. Education is the building of who we can be as a society, and those involved in educating our children shape the next generation - they shape minds, nurture potential, and help children to lead good lives. This work is fundamentally meaningful.

This is an exciting moment for CST and the sector as we take the next step towards building strong and sustainable organisations that enable all our people, adults and children alike, to flourish.

Leora Cruddas is CEO of the Confederation of School Trusts