With an incredible foreword written by best-selling author Matthew Syed, six academy trustees from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds share their personal and professional experiences and highlight why a diverse and inclusive board is so important. This timely collection is part of a broader programme on diversity and aims to encourage everybody in the sector to reflect.
Published in association with the New Schools Network.

‘Rising Strong’ is a series of essays from CST members. This attempts to celebrate the leadership response to COVID-19 and CST’s warmest thanks to the colleagues who approached us about creating a record of our responses: Dawn Haywood, John Camp, Rebekah Iiyambo, Stephen Chamberlain and Sharon Gray. This artefact is a contribution to recording and remembering what we have done.

We believe school trusts are well set up to play a civic role – particularly the larger trusts who may be quite large employers in an area and will have the capability and capacity to act with other civic partners. But even smaller trusts can all play a role – as many already do – as good civic partners to their local authority to advance education as a public good in their community.

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?