Sir David Carter was in charge of the country’s academies and trusts in his role as national schools commissioner, from 2016 to 2018. He was previously the first regional schools commissioner for the South West, CEO of the Cabot Learning Federation and a headteacher and teacher. He writes:

I have worked with hundreds of leaders and genuine ego is pretty rare. For most, the language of ego is a shell, it’s a protective reaction to the insecurity they feel.

That leap from headship to trust leadership is a big one. As a headteacher, you know the role inside out, you have always been around that role at first hand. Stepping up to lead a trust, which is still a relatively new role - there’s no blueprint or honed, iterative experience to follow. So you find people fall back on trying to run a trust how they ran a school. I tried to do that at the start when I stepped up. And you just burn out doing that. It’s not possible.

Repetition is such a fundamental part of leadership. As a trust leader I took every opportunity I had to land my key messages. That’s how you build culture, that’s how you make it stick.

No one expected me to achieve the type of roles I did. My O levels were very average. But my A levels surprised everyone - including me - and I ended up at Royal Holloway in London studying music. It flipped a switch in me - I realised this other world existed. And there was a horrible realisation that it might have been luck that got me there. There is a steel in my leadership because we simply cannot leave opportunities for kids like me, from working-class backgrounds, to luck.

It’s too easy to forget that people are parents, siblings, brothers and sisters as well as teachers. People have lives and stresses, and things happen. And that collides with what happens in a school, and you need to be so aware of that and recognise it, because it is naive to think those things can be simply left at the gate.

The way I managed four to five schools - being on site every day if I wanted one-to-one meetings frequently - I couldn’t do that as the trust grew. I had to tweak the model. But the fundamental concept of being seen and being present had to remain.

If I am going to give someone feedback that is going to be a little difficult, they can’t go away wondering what I meant. You have to work hard at being as clear as it is possible. I would always role-play difficult conversations with my chair of trustees, not just because I was worried about getting it right but because I was worried about getting too emotional.

That moment at the start of the day in a school - bringing people together at that moment is so valuable. Having 10 minutes to come together as a team, to demonstrate you are in it together, to make sure everyone understands why they are there and that they are supported; I hope leaders still create those moments.

I worked for a head who was extremely autocratic - not my style at all - and I loved it there. He appointed a whole bunch of us in our mid-twenties to leadership roles. We didn’t know what we were doing really, but we were a team and we worked so hard and played hard too. But I outgrew that. It was a later head who made me realise I could do the job: he was visible, collegiate, he would come and watch your lessons not with a clipboard but sat on the floor with the kids. He showed me I could do headship my way.

When you are running multiple schools, your instinct when you are in any one of those schools is to intervene if you see something you feel is not right. I learned the hard way that doing that completely undermines the leadership team in place in that school. I never did it again.

When a school got to “good”, I made it a requirement for the headteacher to set a trust objective and to dedicate 15 days or so per year to meeting that objective. What that gave me was 150 days of extra help in the trust from the 10 or so heads working with me at that time. It gave them a buy-in at a trust level, and it brought them closer to me in terms of transparency of my role and what working at scale looked like.

Miscommunication only happens when both parties are at fault. You can’t just say, “They didn’t listen”. Did you check they were listening and that you were understood? It is too easy to blame others in those situations when your own actions are an equal part of the problem.

I am obsessive. Whatever I do has to mean something. So whether it is learning the piano as a child, playing golf now, or what I did in my education career, it has to be serious. I am all in, because for me to be interested it has to matter and because it matters I am obsessive about getting it right.

When I went into schools, I’d always highlight something that I had really been impressed with from another school. I’d put a photo up of that thing on the big screen. And it was always something that the school I was talking to was struggling with. It was showing the team that there was another way possible without directly telling them what to do. And then I would tell them that in the next school I went to, X or Y element of their school would be the thing I’d be showing on the big screen.

The flow of information between the front line and politicians is a tricky process to manage. I tried to be connected enough to both. I would ensure I was in the Department for Education Monday-Wednesday when the ministers were in, and then I would ensure I was seeing trusts in every region, on a rota, on Thursdays and Fridays. I’d have meetings with 20 trusts at a time. I would give messages and receive them. It was tough - on Friday nights I was on my knees - but it was what needed to be done if the national schools commissioner role was to be a visible one focused on improving standards.

What you have to ask when teacher performance is an issue is: would they be struggling in every school or is the current one just a bad fit? I learned that in 75 per cent of the cases, when you moved someone to another school in the trust, they thrived. It was a clean slate, a better fit. But the other 25 per cent, I just couldn’t make it work for them.

To develop great leaders, you need to creep the scale. If they are a great headteacher, then don’t take them out of that school, just begin to expand their sphere of influence. And that is not simply going somewhere else to do the same thing, it is actually how you influence practice without doing it yourself. How do you help others understand the change process? And you just creep that scale up gradually each time they achieve success.

There are about 25 people who are headteachers today who were in my leadership teams. When people ask what gives me the most satisfaction in my career, it is that. Leadership is about developing great people to go and do great things.

My dad was so important. We talked constantly. I would say to him that I was going to mess things up, or might fail, and he’d calmly tell me the reality, and reassure me. His thing was always, “Why can’t you do this? Of course you can.” He was a grafter. It was “work hard and if you do that you will get through”. He gifted me that.