Jen Elliott, Chief Executive Officer, EPM
The 2024 election brought uncertainty to a sector already facing a barrage of challenges. A new government inevitability brings about change and a period of flux - this could have resulted in trust leaders starting the autumn term without the confidence to act. However, at EPM we see this moment as a powerful opportunity for trust-led, purposeful transformation. Trusts are now a mature part of our education environment; having a clear and robust people strategy is crucial to helping de-risk external changes. We’re working closely with many trusts who are driving forward approaches to sustain their organisation and improve outcomes for their pupils through their employees.
Trusts have the power to be transformative for their communities, but the well-articulated strategies of even the most sophisticated trust will struggle to be realised in the absence of a truly embedded ‘people-first culture’. With academies now comprising more than half of schools, trusts have the power to provide a new dimension of creativity in their approach to people - taking cues from other sectors where bold, forward-thinking strategies are commonplace. Our extensive work with trust leaders and research from the Education Endowment Foundation confirms effective people leadership is central to retention, job satisfaction, and work-life balance.
Many elements of the relationships between people and employer shifted significantly post-pandemic. It is, in many respects, now an employees’ market. With the Employment Bill set to grant full employment rights from day one and enhance flexible working rights, employer acceptance is becoming the norm. Although not specific to education, these reforms are set to reshape the landscape for employers like schools that have sometimes – because of their nature - struggled to offer the flexibility other sectors can. Trusts must be proactive in their approach, ensuring the reforms are reviewed early at trust board level as part of an all-encompassing people strategy - see our blog: Labour's Employment Rights Bill: Key changes you need to know
As trusts review growth plans, they should seek to build people strategies with an emphasis on development and career progression fostering high levels of employee engagement. School improvement focused CPD opportunities are plentiful but investing in a trust-wide approach to embedding values, culture and employee engagement is also essential. From an operational perspective, areas such as managing challenging employees, underperformance, and absence require specialist training. Excellent practitioners don’t automatically make good managers – they need support to make that transition.
We see a lack of training in the core areas of people management, which is crucial for building pathways into leadership roles. According to the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) report, CPD comes at a cost, and not just the initial monetary outlay. Ensuring that leaders are given dedicated time to engage in professional development whilst managing the pressures of workload is a challenge. This is reflected in our work with trusts; over half of the 2,500 cases we advised on last year focused on absence management. Trust leaders cited a lack of confidence to address these issues, often due to complexities of employment law and employee relations challenges. To address this, we’ve developed a toolkit to enhance management capabilities, tailored to specific roles and objectives, explore the details here.
While each trust will take a nuanced approach to its strategy, to build future resilience, expertise and capacity from within trusts should:
- Build a well-defined and embedded people strategy to improve your trust’s ability to attract, retain, and develop top talent. Given that, on average, 85% of trust income is spent on staff, investing in your people is one of the smartest moves you can make – we’ve highlighted six steps to creating and embedding a people strategy.
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Build engagement: Keeping stakeholders informed and engaged helps manage disruption, eases resistance to change and strengthens connections, ownership and commitment.
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Build a pipeline of future leaders: A strong CPD offer will have a far-reaching and invaluable impact, developing future talent to ensure succession planning, particularly for key central trust roles.
As the wheels of government get back into action after the election, trusts that have invested in a strong people-centric approach are poised for success whatever the environment that emerges around them. To engage with other trust leaders on these issues, sign up for our trust Leadership roundtables – free for CST members.
EPM is a CST recognised supplier and sponsor of networking breaks at our 2024 Annual Conference
The CST Blog welcomes perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
