James Toop, Chair of Trustees, Education for the 21st Century, Samira Sadeghi, Director of Trust Governance, CST
Delivering the academy trust’s charitable objects
As with other trusts, your object is ‘advancing education for public benefit’. What role did civic leadership play in developing your strategy?
Civic leadership was very much on our minds as we developed our strategy. How could we utilise our current assets to go deeper into our communities, based on the ‘cradle to career’ model? We didn’t want one of our strategic pillars to just be ‘growth’ because growth in and of itself is not mission- and impact-driven enough. Instead, we asked ourselves, how do we grow impact rather than just growing the number of children we’re supporting? Going deeper as well as going broader. Being place-based in our thinking. What does it mean to be a child in Bromley or Kent?
As a board, we thought it was important to ask Simon Garrill, our CEO, what had motivated him to come into education in the first place and for him, it was enabling social advancement and transforming lives. But we wanted to arrive at this in a holistic way. Thinking not just about improving great exam outcomes and positive Ofsted results, but tackling some of the key issues facing our children: mental health, resilience and appropriate use of technology. Thinking about how we empower and support the community for the benefit of our pupils, in partnership with health, social and community groups.
Your strategy took a year to develop. Why that long?
We think it takes over three years to properly develop and embed any good strategy. Our Quality of Education Committee had been successful in developing an educational strategy (aligning teaching, curriculum and assessment) to be implemented in phases over three years and we wanted to use the same approach with our trust strategy. And in order to properly consult our stakeholders to co-create the strategy and make them feel like they were co-owners, it necessarily had to be a longer process.
Openness and accountability
How did you involve your stakeholders in developing your strategy?
Once our board had approved a draft strategy, Simon then took it to our Local Advisory Boards (LABs) to allow them to feed in. We surveyed parents and Simon spoke to staff about the strategy. He also organised stakeholder groups over the course of 3-6 months with key partners in the local community, including other trusts, local businesses, NGOs and local authorities. We were explicit with everyone about the fact that we were developing a new strategy and wanted their input and explaining when it would come to fruition.
What are some examples of how your strategy changed based on stakeholder input?
When discussing the addition of some nursery provision, it led to a conversation about how we could use our existing estate to further serve our communities, without adding any schools. That completely flipped our strategy from growth-focused to thinking about how we could increase the impact of our current schools. We were in the process of closing a special school provision in one of our schools – what could we do with that space?
As another example, we initially approached the digital skills part of our strategy purely from a career-readiness perspective, which can be the default in education. It was through discussion with our stakeholders that the strategy became much wider and holistic. What relationship do we want our children to have with technology? What do we think about mobile phones in schools? What’s the impact of mobile phones on children’s mental health? What digital systems should we use in schools? How would we use AI? This all came about because of our stakeholder input.
Your strategy is on your website and is very accessible. Was that intentional?
Yes, one of our trustees has a background in strategy consulting and he forced us to distil our ideas onto a single page to increase its impact and make it accessible to all of our stakeholders. We wanted parents and others to be able to look at the page and immediately understand where we were heading as a trust.
Equality, diversity and inclusion
How is your strategy consistent with your inclusive values?
We know that good qualifications and a university degree can transform your life and want to be really aspirational for all of our students. But university may not be accessible or right for everyone. We need our vocational qualifications to be as good as our academic ones. The ‘clear pathways’ strand of our strategy addresses this. We began thinking about links to our local employers in Bromley, because the reality is that a lot of children in Bromley will not leave the area. What kinds of jobs will they find in Bromley? We’ve developed a great relationship with the Bromley Football Club to support our vocational learners. We’re also working on relationships with Bank of America and Churchill Insurance, who are also based in Bromley.
CST can support you as a Chair through the Chairs Development Programme, as well as through our series of masterclasses and explained seminars designed to focus on specific areas of school trust governance. You can also become a member of our Trustee and Governance Leaders Professional Community as part of your membership. Finally, CST offers high quality External Reviews of Governance that will identify areas of strength and weakness and help you improve governance at your trust.
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