Finance professional community

From the day to day to the strategic, supporting trusts to maintain robust financial health.

Balancing budgets has never been more difficult – or more important. While resources are constrained, the demand placed on trusts and the work they do for their communities continues to grow.

Our work to build excellence across strong financial management is a challenge, and one we will have to take on collectively. It is incumbent upon us to work together and find innovative ways of building capacity, driving improvement, and delivering support for the families we serve.

Our community brings together the finance experts leading our trusts to share knowledge, develop practice, and offer supportive challenge as we work together to ensure excellence across the sector in the most challenging of fiscal environments, and explore long-term policy reform that will ensure state education is adequately funded by the state.

We aim to provide support and development opportunities, through a blend of expert input on key practice challenges, facilitated discussion, and networking.

The community offers a safe and supportive environment in which to develop your understanding of some of the key challenges related to financial management in trusts, through:

Termly online community meetings featuring expert voices
Topical webinars on emerging issues
Our community site, which connects you with trust leaders across the country through a dedicated website and mobile apps
Community resources and blogs from our members and partners
Priority access to our annual in-person CST Finance and Operations Conference

Our professional communities are an integral part of CST membership, and taking part is open to all staff and governance volunteers of member trusts.

How to join

If you already have a MyCST login

If you are already registered for MyCST, CST's personal registration for employees and governance volunteers at member trusts, you can add professional communities to your account using our community registration form.

If you are not yet registered for MyCST

MyCST is CST's personal regisration for employees and governance volunteers at member trusts. Registration unlocks your access to member benefits, include exclusive resource on this website, our briefing emails, and our professional communities.

If your trust is a CST member you can sign up using our MyCST registration form.