Trusts are a protective structure that support our school leaders

Schools and their leaders are under multiple pressures at the moment, but the exacting demands of the pandemic demonstrated the power that school trusts can have as protective structures. This power can also help us navigate the difficult times ahead.

While local authorities and other civic institutions have well-rehearsed disaster plans that they stepped up to brilliantly manage the challenges we faced together, for many school trusts this was new ground for relatively new organisations.

The emerging evidence is that we saw school trusts come into their own as protective structures, with lessons for how we deal with longer term challenges.

Buffering

The University of Nottingham has explored the case of the trust as a robust structure, identifying the ability for trusts to act as a vital ‘buffer’ for headteachers, shielding school leaders from the full weight of external pressures.

The research is small scale but important.[1]Authors, Day, Taneva and Smith (2021) conclude that:

"Much has been written about ‘robustness and rigour’… School Trusts had not only maintained their basic functions but also extended them over the period of unprecedented disruptions and discontinuities to school-based teaching and learning, and continuing threats to health and safety. CEOs and their teams, by being overwhelmingly responsive rather than reactive, had ’buffered’ the Headteachers of their academies by centralising responsibilities for the development and implementation of policies relating to, for example, health and safety, HR and finance, and building and personally supporting relationships and networks of intensive interactivity.

"This had brought a degree of stability to the leadership of individual academies, which were then able to focus on the welfare of pupils and their families more easily, and the wellbeing and capacities of teachers to provide and enhance their teaching” (page 40).

External pressures

External pressures have changed but not receded as we have emerged from the pandemic. If anything, they are now more acute as schools struggle to reassert pre-pandemic norms at a point in time when the social contract between families and schools needs to be re-established.

There are a host of factors creating fragility in our school system – and this is also true of society more widely. National data shows a significant rise in suspensions, with persistent disruptive behaviour being the most common reason for suspensions and permanent exclusions. Pupil attendance in some schools has fallen to critically low rates. The overall persistent absence rate this academic year to date is 22.6 percent.

All of this suggests that we are not dealing with business as normal at all. The impacts of the pandemic alongside the current economic situation have put unbearable pressures on some families and our schooling system is responding to increased disruptive behaviour, significant pupil mental health problems, and persistent absence.

Our schools are part of the social recovery. We will re-establish norms of schooling schools, but this is going to take time. We are not complacent about this, and we share a moral imperative to find solutions together.

But the point of this is that leading schools is hard at the moment. I should say immediately that teaching and leading continues to be one of the most rewarding jobs in society and just because it is hard right now, does not mean that it cannot not also joyful. The core work of teaching and encouraging human flourishing goes on, and our delight in that never wanes.

One of the great features of a school trust is that it hardwires deep and purposeful collaboration into all of what we do, and helps us all focus our efforts – whether in the classroom, the back office, or the boardroom – on how we can best contribute to education. The structure of the trust itself enables us to better support and protect our colleagues.

Protective factors are both individual and environmentalattributes that are associated with positive adjustment (Lopez, Pedrotti, and Snyder, 2019)[2]. I want to explore just three here.

Purpose

A sense of purpose plays an important role in relation to environmental protective factors. Purpose is the capacity to link people through a shared belief about the identify, meaning and mission of an organisation – it aides meaning-making which is a core human activity. A sense of purpose – of meaning – in our work is a strong protective factor.

Togetherness

The trust also creates professional communities across the schools in the group – this is particularly important for school leaders whose job can otherwise feel lonely. The strong message, ‘you are not alone’ is a message I often hear CEOs say when they talk about those who lead schools in their trust. CST also plays a role here, with our professional communities bringing colleagues across trusts together too.

Support

We have heard a lot in recent weeks about the pressures of school inspection and external accountability. This can obviously lead to acute forms of anxiety in our school leaders. As trust leaders, we will never be able to mitigate all the stress of external accountability, but we can notice when our leaders are feeling the burden and put protections around them in the form of mentoring or coaching, supporting with a particularly difficult parental complaint, improvement support, and exercising a duty of care in relation to workload.

The trust is the employer. It controls the conditions and culture in which all staff work. We can and should leverage our capacity (scale and expertise) in response to the pressures on our school leaders. We must send a strong message to our leaders that they are not alone – in fact, the opposite is true. They are part of a strong and resilient professional community working together in a single legal entity that is by its nature protective.

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• Trust leadership
• CST

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• Leadership

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