Recently, Sir Kevan Collins asked me this question on a public panel: “Do you think we are the best system at getting better?”
Fortunately, he didn’t wait for an answer. He said: “I can tell you: we are not.”
I’m intrigued by this challenge. I believe we can become the best system at getting better by consciously building a coherent system in which every school is part of a strong and sustainable trust: organisations set up purely for the purpose of running and improving schools.
In the words of Chris Zook and James Allen in their excellent book The Founder’s Mentality, this is an insurgent mission. It requires boldness, spikiness and limitless horizons.
And it requires us to explore the systems of meaning within which trusts are operating.
Academies: ‘The golden thread of collaboration’
Over the past 12 months, the Confederation of School Trusts has been developing a new narrative, clarifying that trusts are education charities with a single legal and moral purpose: to advance education for public benefit.
As part of this work, we have also been developing three nested leadership narratives for trusts.
I am delighted to be launching these at the Schools North East Conference in Newcastle today:
1. Trust leadership: How we talk about ourselves, what we do and why we do it. School trusts create the conditions for deep collaborations among teachers and leaders to improve the quality of education.
2. Civic leadership: How we work with others to advance education as a wider common good. Civic trusts create the conditions for purposeful collaboration between and among trusts and other civic organisations.
3. System leadership: This is not about the old definition of “working beyond the school gates”. Rather, it’s about how we need to act on - rather than in - the system. System-building goes beyond collaboration, and engages deliberate system design and system building.
All three of these leadership narratives have a common purpose: to advance education for public benefit in England. And all have running through them the golden thread of collaboration.
Academy trust leadership
Our first narrative is about leadership of the organisation: the school trust.
Trust leaders are not heroic visionaries, but rather people with a deep knowledge and understanding of the substance of education, including:
The primary leadership task is about creating high-quality education through developing expertise in curriculum, and teaching across the group of schools in a financially sustainable way.
But there is a wider consideration, beyond the knowledge and competence of trust leaders to lead their organisation.
We need leaders who have the theoretical knowledge to participate in society’s conversations and to lead conversations about education.
We have allowed the narrative about academies and multi-academy trusts to be dominated by others: by those who believe that this is about business interest or private interest. We have seen the corporatisation and privatisation of education by the back door.
We must work together to change society’s conversation.
Trust leaders are civic leaders
Trust leadership is necessary, but not sufficient, if we are to build a connected system in which all actors work together. Trust leaders must also understand their role as civic leaders.
School trusts are a new civic structure. As such, leaders have a duty to engage with each other and other civic actors for the wider good.
Last year, I was delighted to give evidence to the UPP Foundation Civic University Commission. It was a privilege to have the opportunity to think hard about the civic role of universities and the role they play in their localities by making a strategic contribution to the greater social good.
Civic leadership is not the sole purview of locally elected politicians. It is enacted by many different civic structures, including but not limited to local government.
Civic leadership is different from community leadership. The community leader is a designation for a person widely perceived to represent a community. Civic leadership is about the protection and promotion of public values and addressing issues of place or public concern.
In the case of civic trusts, we need to help communities to develop a better understanding of education and its role in regeneration and engage in a collaboration of partners to deliver change and transformation in a locality or region.
Civic leaders create the conditions for collective impact by addressing complex issues affecting children and young people, which require different actors to work together, and possibly even to change their behaviours.
Trust leaders are civic leaders. As well as leading a group of schools to give children a better future, trust leaders also look out beyond their organisation. They work with each other in a connected system.
And they seek to work with other civic actors to ensure the value of the child in the locality, and that the collective actions of all civic actors protect high-quality education.
System leadership
Michael Fullan, in his book Coherence, talks about “systemness”, as a key system driver. What he means by this is focusing direction and the need to integrate what the system is doing.
Right now, in England, we have a divided school system. We need to begin to integrate what the system is doing. And the system is building groups of schools.
As Peter Senge points out, the deep changes necessary to accelerate progress require leaders who catalyse collective leadership. This is the opposite of aggressive acquisition as a model of growth. It requires leaders who act collectively and strategically on - not just in - the system. The system leader is a strategic builder of local and regional systems.
In the next decade, the growth of trusts cannot be organic. It must be by design.
We need to work together within and across cities and regions to build system coherence so that no school - and no child - is left behind.
In this way, we will leverage leadership of the school system, and enable a vastly more powerful and sustainable school system to be born. We will become the best system at getting better.
Leora Cruddas is chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts. She tweets @LeoraCruddas
