Over the past 12 months, CST has been developing a new narrative promoting school trusts as education charities with a single legal and moral purpose – to advance education for public benefit. As part of our work on a new narrative, we have also been developing three ‘nested’ leadership narratives considering trust leadership, civic leadership, and system leadership.

This document should be read alongside the Department for Education’s guidance for maintained schools applying to join a school. It provides an overview of good practice on public engagement and consultation at each step of the process.

This document is the final report of Ethical Leadership Commission, to which CST contributed alongside other leading education organisations and thinkers. The Commission was set up in 2017 to help school and college leaders consider the ethical foundation of their work, and to offer guidance for our colleagues at a time of great change and unprecedented pressure in education.

This guidance offers a process or framework for auditing organisational culture. It is designed to meet the requirement in the Competency Framework for Governance in relation to the responsibility of the trust board to determine, embed and monitor the culture, values and ethos of an organisation. It will help trust boards to answer the question: how do you know?