Jennese Alozie is the chief executive officer of University of Chichester Academy Trust. She has formerly been an Ofsted inspector, has held senior roles at other trusts and started out as an English teacher. She writes:

My career is a love letter to my parents. Because how I relate to the world, how I speak to others, what I value - it’s all from them. Any success I have in changing the lives of children through education is because of what they gave me.

I am very certain of why I am in education, and why I want to lead in education. You can’t lead effectively if you don’t know that.

Being black and being a woman, you enter spaces where others don’t think you should be. My parents taught me to expect this to happen. They told me it wouldn’t happen everywhere, or with everyone, but it would happen and I would need the skills and courage, the sense of self and determination, to enable me to see it and to dance around it. That was my mum’s phrase, to dance around it. And it doesn’t mean to avoid it or not acknowledge it; it means negotiating around it. It means being curious: why do they think that? And it is about chipping away at those views - yes, I want to tackle racism and sexism but no, I don’t want it to hold me back by fixating on it.

You need people to be honest. If something is annoying you, tell me. If something is getting in your way, tell me. How am I going to help resolve the situation if I don’t know about it?

To enable innovation you need a really strong core. We decided what that looked like as a trust. All the heads came together and we had an imaginary slider for every area - from budget setting to staff recruitment - and at one end you have the central team who does everything and the other heads do everything. We chose as a group where the line of agency should sit, and where the core was.

Leaders can be afraid of being told “no”. Like that could be harmful to them. But if someone says “no”, you just ask why. You have a conversation about it. And though I am clear everyone has a voice in our trust, I am equally clear that there will be a time when I will have to make the call, I will have to say “I hear what you are saying, but not now, or not in that way, or this is the plan because of this reason or that”. You can have that balance if you are willing to explain your choices and be honest, and it makes you stronger as a leader.

You need to be an unblocker. Which structures are hindering your team? Seek them out. Get rid of them.

My mum always says to me, I was the child who walked through the gate on my first day of school with no tears, no emotion, just a recognition that this was the plan so I was going to do it. I didn’t wave or anything. So that clear mission, that commitment to that mission, that’s always been me.

I got to this point where I thought: do I go for that deputy head role or do I have another child? And I ended up having my second son. I took a year out. And then, when I was ready to come back, I applied for those deputy roles and was not getting any interviews. People were saying I would have to go back down the ladder again in order to be successful as I had been out too long. I was like: I have just had a baby, my brain hasn’t dropped out of my head. I found this really, really challenging. But I ignored them, I kept applying for those roles.

It is the unsaid things that end up undoing you. They kill everything. So we need to be brave. We need to just say the awkward, or difficult thing.

I believe in collective leadership. We are all in it together, we make decisions together, every child’s outcome is our responsibility together. That can be challenging for some people - to look outside the things in their direct control and to feed into other areas and have other areas feed into theirs. To be told that every person in our trust - office staff, finance staff, caretakers - is a leader of learning (children learn from every one of us in different ways) can be intimidating. But we support it; for example, our CPD is open to every member of staff regardless of role, and it just makes sense, right? Why would we not look at it this way?

I was mostly the reflective one at school. I was the one watching and working out what the world was about. And then, when I hit my first teaching job, I finally understood what I could bring to the world. What I could bring to education and how I could be part of this system. You have to be patient in waiting for that moment.

My dad died last year. When I got the job of CEO, I rang him so excited and when I told him he simply replied: “Of course.”