Good morning colleagues,
Thank you for being here today. You are so important to us, and it is wonderful that we are here together, particularly because CST is 5 years old this month. What a journey it has been. Together we are a richly diverse community, at the vanguard of system change. As you know, the conference theme this year is ‘belonging’ and we hope that there'll be a great deal joy and wisdom in the reconnection and new connections that will take place over the two days.
At our annual conference last year, our keynote from Owen Eastwood shared a compelling view on what it means to belong – the past, present and future of our actions: "Belonging is a wildly undervalued condition required for human performance. When our need to belong in a team is met, our energy and focus pour into the team's shared mission.”
Owen reminded us that humans are story dwellers and that belonging is created by memory and stories. And as my lovely Australian colleague Elena Douglas, founder of the Knowledge Society says, memory and stories provide the building blocks for belonging.
I’d like to create a bridge from last year’s conference to this. I don’t want our conferences to be seen as a moment in time but rather a story narrated over years about who we need to be and what we need to do so solve the challenges that face us. Our conference will have three key strands through which we will share ideas, learn, and debate what belonging looks like in our sector.
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People - the intrinsic sense of belonging that is built through our relationships – with one another, with our staff, with our students and families, and with our wider communities.
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Purpose - Our deep and interconnected purpose to advance education for public benefit.
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Place - Our natural connection to place is fundamental to our identity and our sense of belonging.
People
Tomorrow, we will hear from Doug Lemov who has recently written on the themes of meaning, purpose and belonging in a book with his colleagues called, Reconnect. The book examines three unprecedented problems that our young people face:
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A crisis of mental health amid rising screen time;
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A lack of trust in public institutions; and
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The challenge of balancing the benefits of individualism with the benefits of collective endeavour.
Doug and his colleagues start with an analysis of the historic decline in the psychological well-being of our young people. When the pandemic hit, everything that might have offered an alternative to screen time disappeared. At the same time, wider society increasingly perceived public institutions as incompetent or suspect.
Doug and his colleagues reflect that as schools struggle to operate in a climate of mistrust, other civic institutions that offered sport and music and drama – programmes that connect young people to their community – are also struggling.
Finally, they point to a tension between individualism and belonging. They argue that a social contract in which people – young people in our case – routinely defer and relinquish short term desires to the greater common good of a shared endeavour is a necessary condition for schools to function.
They are optimistic. And so am I.
I have repeatedly said that our schools are part of the social recovery.
It is possible to counter the impacts of the pandemic.
We will re-establish the social contract.
It is possible to rebuild trust in what feels like a rising tide of mistrust by helping our young people and parents feel a sense of belonging.
There is something hugely powerful in saying to a child who doesn’t know what it means to belong anywhere or is unsure that they belong at all – I’m glad you’re here. You belong here.
You can and do create school cultures that foster belonging and create a sense of community.
Doug offers a beautiful expression of belonging: "Belonging is a flame that needs to be constantly fed by connection.” Our connection to one another. Our connection to story and memory. Our connection to something beyond ourselves – to a greater common good.
This is why he talks about the importance of virtues in the creation of school cultures.
Now, I’d like to pay tribute to the University of Birmingham School whose talented young pannists performed for us this morning. This is a school where virtues are built into the fabric of school life.
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Intellectual virtues: those required for the pursuit of knowledge, truth and understanding.
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Moral virtues: Those which enable us to respond well to situations in any area of experience.
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Civic virtues: Those necessary for engaged and responsible citizenship.
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Performance virtues: Behavioural skills and psychological capacities that enable us to put the other virtues into practice.
When I visited the school, the principal, Colin, told me the story of pupil with autism who was struggling to come into school. The pupil would stand outside the school entrance clearly distressed, but he needed to learn that he could come into school. One morning as Colin watched carefully over this pupil, two other boys who shall we say were more streetwise approached, clearly late for school. Colin saw them approach the young boy with autism and made ready to intervene. But what happened next exemplified the explicit virtues of the school community. They stopped and talked kindly to their school mate, and then gently encouraged him into the school.
This afternoon we will hear from the wonderful Stephen Unwin, theatre and opera director, writer and teacher, and the father of a young man, Joey, with severe learning difficulties. He advocates for the rights and dignities of people with disabilities. In a recent tweet, he said "if you want to know how to treat someone with a disability, watch their siblings.”
Would it be true in our schools and communities that we could say this too of their peers and indeed, of all of society. Today I am enormously proud that we are publishing an important paper with Ambition Institute, written by the remarkable Tom Rees and Ben Newmark: Five Principles for Inclusion.
Tomorrow we will hear from Dame Floella Benjamin – her personal journey from Trinidad to an England which she describes as cold, unwelcoming, violent and bleak. Her story and Stephen’s story of Joey remind us that we can only claim that our schools are places of human flourishing if this is true for all our children.
So we must be clear that:
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Our strength is equality.
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Our strength is diversity.
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Our strength is inclusion.
One way to do this is the intentional naming and reinforcing of virtues that make a community more likely to feel like they belong, more likely to flourish.
But our schools cannot be places of human flourishing for our children, if this is not also true for our staff. As Lynn Swaner and Andy Wolfe write: "Where there are few flourishing adults, there will be few flourishing children.” So, we need to care deeply about our workforce and give renewed consideration to what ‘good work’ means and how we might strengthen our understanding of what it means to be a good employer. And indeed, a good leader.
Viviane Robinson in her book on Virtuous Educational Leadership identifies virtues that are required to do the right work in the right way.
Whereas Doug and his colleagues speak of the importance of virtues in the creation of school cultures for pupils, Viviane helps us to understand the leadership virtues that enable schools to be positive, optimistic and psychologically safe places for staff as well as children.
Interestingly, Viviane’s work also speaks to the tension between individualism and belonging. She writes:
"Virtuous leadership is motivated by a desire to influence others for collective rather than individual success. Teachers who are motivated to help more children than those in their own classes, who want to collaborate with colleagues to solve important problems of teaching and learning” (p99).
So belonging and human flourishing for both adults and children are characterised by virtue. They are driven by a sense of the greater common good and shared endeavour.
This is in direct contrast to the pernicious narratives of autonomy that have so dominated our education system. Matthew Evans, headteacher, author and blogger, has recently written a brilliant blog on the earned autonomy trap.
Why do we think the pinnacle of a career is to be left alone?
Why do we think that adult interest rather than the interests of children should be at the forefront of our education system?
I want to conclude this section about what belonging means with a beautiful concept from the land of my birth – and we will have the honour of hearing from Chris Lubbe shortly. The concept of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu means both a quality that includes the essential human virtues of compassion and humanity; but it also means "I am because we are.”
It is "the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others.”
In this time of social, economic and political challenge, when people have lost faith in institutions:
We must exemplify the standards of public life;
We must provide the leadership that builds belonging with one another, with our staff, with our students and families, and with our wider communities.
In this way, we must be virtuous leaders.
Purpose
Now I want to turn to our second strand on the theme of belonging: purpose. What binds us together is our deep and interconnected purpose to advance education through public benefit.
CST has talked since our inception about the power of purpose - the capacity to link people through a shared belief about the identity, meaning and mission of an organisation. In the strongest trusts, there is a deep sense of collective purpose. People who feel a strong sense of purpose feel more connected and more trusting.
In our view, deep and purposeful collaboration is at the heart of the trust structure – it is the way we keep the focus on improvement at scale. And from our point of view, structures are in fact very important because they create the conditions for this intensely focused, purposeful collaboration.
Colleagues, as you've heard me say many times before, if we are going to build a school system in which schools are part of a group in a single governance and accountability structure, we need to be explicit and eloquent about our purpose.
But there is a deeper sense of purpose I want to explore here. And I am going to take us back to Doug’s work on the loss of faith in institutions.
The decline of faith in institutions directly affects schools – schools can no longer necessarily count on receiving the automatic goodwill and trust of the parents they serve. Those organisations like Public First working with focus groups of parents are seeing a change of attitudes and behaviours. We see the impact of this starkly with the current trends in attendance data. The cost-of-living crisis is driving more families into poverty, and this is an underlying driver of poor attendance in families from lower and no-income groups. But poverty is a much greater social issue than school attendance, As Mandela said, the overcoming of poverty is not a gesture of charity but an act of justice. The eradication of poverty must be a priority for the next government in the creation of a socially just society.
Doug talks about having words that conjure things into being – the importance of a shared vocabulary for the things we want to instil. He offers insights into being more explicit about aspects of the social contract to help rebuild trust.
When a school or trust’s leadership is explicit about its purpose, then this is public and transparent. Of course it is important that this is done respectfully with parents. Because it is easier to defend decisions when you can refer back to an explicit purpose.
Let us be clear that it is hard work to renegotiate the social contract by working with parents on the shared task of educating children, and rebuilding trust in the school as a public institution. But being explicit and eloquent about purpose helps to link people – children, staff and parents – to the purpose organisation and the importance of education.
It is our solidarity and our interconnectedness – our shared sense of purpose – that will make a difference to the children and communities we serve.
It is through this that we mobilise education as a force for social justice and wider common good.
Place
The focus on rebuilding the social contract with parents brings me to the third of our strands on belonging – the importance of place.
CST has made the case that one expression of the civic nature of a trust is as an anchor institution. Anchor institutions, alongside their main purpose, play a significant role in a locality by making a strategic contribution to the greater social good.
School trusts have three particular strengths as anchor institutions:
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Uniquely long-lasting relationships with children, families and communities;
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The capacity to define a compelling vision and a theory for how we will achieve that vision; and
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A collective purpose that can be harnessed for deeper impact.
The idea of anchor institutions is not new. The concept originated in the United States in the 1960s. By the turn of the century, urban universities felt that they could no longer ignore the conditions that their communities were experiencing. As a consequence, universities started to create partnerships with other local and civic organisations to address the complex social and economic challenges faced by their local communities.
So too can school trusts.
The school trust must anchor its schools in their communities.
Whilst many trusts already do important work in ensuring all children can access full opportunities offered by schools, seeing Trusts as ‘anchor institutions’ opens up longer timeframes and broadens our thinking about how we best address our collective mission to advance education for public benefit.
So how do we move towards this new paradigm of community anchoring? I am proud that in January CST published an important paper on this very theme with the Reach Foundation. I want to explore just two ways in which we can move towards community anchoring.
The first is to develop a deep understanding of our communities and work closely with them.
We need to know our communities really well. We must understand the concerns, difficulties, joys, and hopes of our children and the adults caring for them.
We also need to listen. Through listening campaigns that deepen our connection to our communities we not only build our understanding, we also build the power of children, parents and members of the wider community to advance education and collectively strengthen our communities.
The second way in which we embrace community anchoring is through strong, civic focused and principled governance
The concepts of community anchoring and engagement are key to good governance. This is why we are so delighted today, after a period of public consultation, to launch the sector-led Academy Trust Governance Code. It is a mark of maturity as a sector that we are ambitious to define the principles of governance ourselves, and to hold ourselves to account.
Concluding remarks
Our strands of people, purpose and place on the theme of belonging are deeply interconnected. These themes are considered widely and in a myriad of different ways across our vibrant workshop and seminar programme.
I have made the case throughout this speech for responding to the challenges we face as a society and in education by being more explicit:
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About virtues in the creation of school cultures that foster belonging;
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About the purposes and meaning of schooling;
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About developing a deep understanding of our communities.
People. Purpose Place.
None of this is to distract schools from their core purpose of advancing education. It is in fact to deepen and extend this - to give it richer expression. And it is to reach for the insurgent spirit that animated the original trust movement to solve the problems we face together.
I’m going to conclude with an extract from Freedom’s Plow, by the American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and leader of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes:
Then the hand seeks other hands to help,
A community of hands to help-
Thus the dream becomes not one [person's] dream alone,
But a community dream.
Not my dream alone, but our dream.
Not my world alone,
But your world and my world,
Belonging to all the hands who build.
It is in our hands to create a better world for all who live in it, a world that belongs to all the hands who build.
Thank you for everything you do, every day. It is a privilege to represent you.
