And so, good morning colleagues,
It is a joy to be here with you today.
Last year, I concluded my conference speech with an extract from Freedom’s Plow, by the American poet, social activist, writer, 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.
Colleagues, it is in our hands to build a better world for all who live in it.
‘Not my dream alone, but our dream.’
Given global economic insecurity and political instability, climate disasters, social unrest, and conflicts and wars that are likely to determine our future, it has perhaps never been more important or necessary that we build a better world through the power of education.
So, I’d like to offer some reflections on the theme of building through four lenses:
· Building trust
· Building community and society
· Building public institutions
· And finally, building back.
We know that trust and confidence in public institutions is a concern right now. We see this in our schools through the problems with pupil attendance, behaviour, and the exponential rise in parental complaints.
We started to see these trends emerge before the pandemic. But the pandemic has perhaps exacerbated them.
Trust is integral to the functioning of any society.
As the United Nations says: "Trust in each other, in our public institutions and in our leaders are all essential ingredients for social and economic progress, allowing people to cooperate with, and express solidarity for one another.”
So, it is essential that as public leaders, we work with our parents and communities to repair the social contract and to rebuild trust in our schools.
Colleagues, I want to suggest to you that belonging is a foundation for rebuilding the social contract.
At our conference in 2022, we invited Owen Eastwood, author of Belonging, The Ancient Code of Togetherness to give a keynote. The book is a beautiful exploration of our primal need to belong.
To be clear, this is not the next faddish thing in a sector that can be captured by fads. It speaks deeply to what it is to be human.
"To feel a sense of belonging is to feel accepted, to feel seen and to feel included by a group of people, believing that we fit in, trusting we will be protected by them. To not feel belonging is to experience the precarious and insecure sense of an outsider.”
There are some worrying trends in terms of our children and young people feeling like they belong to our schools. The PISA 2022 report for England found that pupils in England reported a significantly lower average level of satisfaction with their lives, and fewer reported they feel they belong at school than their peers across the OECD.
This data is supported by other reports, like the Children’s Society 2023 Good Childhood Report which shows trends in children's wellbeing. Almost a third of children in this survey reported that they are unhappy with at least one specific area of their lives.
We know that from our national school trust survey with Edurio, that providing inclusive education – including for those with special educational needs – and tackling attendance problems are the top priorities for CST members for the new school year.
So, this is the beginning of the story we will create together about building more inclusive schools. Schools where all our children feel that they belong.
Not because Ofsted tells us to do this or is currently investigating how to measure inclusion.
Because it is core to our mission and moral purpose.
Now I want to move on to our second expression of building: building community and society.
CST has long made the case for trusts as civic institutions and anchor institutions in their communities – and for trust leaders to work with other civic leaders for the wider common good.
Professor Alex Hill the author of the beautiful book Centennials- the 12 habits of great, enduring organisations, and whom we heard from yesterday, says:
"Centennials look at the whole of society, and every possibility, and ask themselves: ‘How can we shape how society thinks, and behaves, not only today, but for the next twenty to thirty years?’”
And this colleagues, is an exam question for us all to consider - ‘what is our role in shaping society and building community
Some would say we do not have this role. Our role is advancing education. And of course this is our core business. We must never lose sight that our core purpose is to advance education.
First and foremost we must run good schools.
But as Professor Deng, member of the curriculum and assessment review panel and Professor of Curriculum and Pedagogy at UCL writes: education is centrally concerned with the formation of individuals through the cultivation of human powers predicated on the contribution of knowledge —and that is vital to preparing students for the current and future world.
I am so pleased that Professor Becky Francis can join us at conference to talk about the curriculum and assessment review.
If we accept that education is both the transmission of knowledge and the cultivation of human powers – then I think we must also accept that we have a role in shaping society.
One of the things that confused me as a young teacher when I came to England is that I could not reconcile that in South Africa, the country of my birth, adults and children fought and died for the right to an education. Yet some children in England who have education as their right are alienated from it and unengaged by it.
Hector Pieterson was shot and killed at the age of 12 during the Soweto uprising in South Africa in 1976, when the police opened fire on black students.
And in a different part of the world, Malala Yousafzai was shot by a Taliban gunman while on a bus in the Swat District of Pakistan in 2012 because she wrote and spoke about the right of girls to an education.
In Afghanistan, right now, girls are systematically denied access to education.
And yet in England, schooling does not speak to some communities.
How can we make sense of this?
How can we engage or re-engage the communities we serve in a conversation about the importance and power of education?
If the contract of trust is broken with some people and some communities, how do we rebuild it?
There are of course lots of answers to these questions. And this is a contested space. We should be debating this, not just in the echo chamber of ‘edu-social media’ or conference halls like this, or sector roundtables, but in real and respectful conversations with the communities we serve.
And in my visits to your trusts across the country, which I’m always privileged to do, I see so many of you engaged in this work. The real work with parents and local communities that connects your schools so deeply in communities in deep and purposeful work.
Many CST members are already engaged in this work. Dr Seb Chapleau, assistant director at Citizens UK, has been such a constructive partner in the work of trusts to remake relationships and build community. Seb says:
Civil society is the backbone of a strong community, where relationality is key, and social capital is built. Anchor institutions are essential to maintaining this notion of social capital. These institutions serve a purpose that transcends their immediate outcomes: a nursery isn't just about childcare, a school isn’t simply there to teach academic skills, and a local football club isn’t merely there to entertain for 90 minutes. As anchor institutions, these places intrinsically serve a greater purpose by creating links between people and sustaining the social capital that gives life meaning.
I think we have to ask some big questions about the role of schooling in society – questions beautifully framed by Professor Deng:
· "What does it mean to be an autonomous and responsible individual who is actively participating in and interacting with the current and future world characterised by transnational economies, an ever-increasing rate of information exchange and mobility, rapid developments of new technologies, uncertainty, climate change, human-induced environmental disasters, and wars, among others?
· "What intellectual, emotional, moral, social, cross-cultural, and technological powers would he or she need to develop to become a free and independent individual and to face the challenges of the world?
· "How and in what ways would academic disciplines and specialised fields contribute to the development of such powers?”
These are the conversations I hope we are having in our professional communities and at conference.
There are no easy answers. These are complex questions requiring our collective intellectual endeavour as public leaders.
We must protect the work that we have done in the last decade on knowledge rich curricula. And we must embrace the complexity of the world we live in.
As Daisy Christodoulou says, knowledge is the pathway to skills.
And knowledge is the route to developing our human capacity.
To solving complex problems like global conflicts and the sustainability of our beautiful planet.
To building a just and peaceful society.
I want to turn now to building school trusts as public institutions.
Some of you know that just after the party conferences last year, I was invited to meet with Vice Chancellors at Queen Mary University of London in the beautiful old library. Located in London’s east end, a mile from the City of London, this is a university that is acutely aware of its civic role in place. All the vice chancellors who spoke that evening, told profoundly moving stories of the places in which their universities are located and the civic role of universities. Sitting in that room, I had a moment of truly understanding what it means to build public institutions – and that it is possible to become too caught up in Westminster and political cycles.
Of course, we live in a democracy and it is fundamentally important that we respect the mandate that the state has in relation to state-funded education.
But it is also possible to think in longer terms than political cycles.
This is because we are building public institutions, civic in their outlook, anchored in their communities.
In a fascinating paper on the subject of building institutions, Sir Geoff Mulgan, Professor at UCL writes: "Institutions exist because distinct tasks - running libraries, hospitals, armies, supporting science or providing welfare services – require a distinct ethos, methods and capabilities rather than generic bureaucracies.”
Part of the reason I am such a strong believer in school trusts and so proud to lead the organisation that advocates for you, is this fact – trusts are specialist organisations set up for one purpose only: to run and improve our schools, or put another way, to advance education for public benefit.
It seems to me that the education of our children is so important that it is desirable to have expert organisations with expert governance responsible for our schools.
Like Alex Hill, Professor Mulgan is interested in the longevity of public institutions. He offers a view that "Some of the institutions which have survived longest combined a strong moral ethos and sense of mission along with competence and excellence… A tentative conclusion might be that some mix of moral purpose and mission, perceived competence and strong relationships is key to survival.”
This is exactly what I think trusts are (or should be).
I believe the point about longevity is particularly important. Education policy is typically fiercely contested and timelines are often foreshortened to each political cycle, each term of parliament.
We must respect the democratic role of the state, but we also need to think in terms that are longer than the short-termism of political cycles.
This is how we build public institutions.
I am going to return to Alex Hill for a moment. In his book Centennials, Alex offers a fascinating set of insights into organisations that have lasted a hundred years or more. He argues that their strategies for maintaining excellence and success frequently fly in the face of conventional wisdom.
A key premise of the book is ‘stable core, disruptive edge.’
The trust sector grew from a disruptive mindset and a key part of your success has been the ability to innovate.
Around 62 percent of pupils in England are educated in school trusts.
And you educate an astonishing 82 percent of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds in your secondary schools.
Let’s take a moment to reflect on that: 82 percent of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds are educated in secondary schools in trusts.
Colleagues the trust sector was born from a disruptive mindset.
You have embraced the mission to run schools in those communities most disadvantaged by poverty. You have done this deliberately. And you are rightly hugely proud of this. You have taken schools that have not been good in the history of state education and made them places where communities are proud to send their children.
You have done this because trusts are mission-led organisations.
The mission to address inequalities in education standards, especially for economically disadvantaged children, is etched into the consciousness of the trust sector.
At the heart of the trust sector is a social justice mission, a civic mission, to contribute to the common good by advancing education.
So as this Government seeks to deliver its Opportunity Mission, it must understand that we share this mission.
We embrace this mission. Because we have lived this mission.
I listened to Sir Kevan Collins define the levers of state recently. He said there are three: accountability, resources and capacity.
Let us be clear that as we reform accountability, we must build a system that must be both coherent and intelligent.
Let us be clear that the state has a duty to invest in our state education system because the future of the country depends on it.
And let us be clear that there is so much capacity that we have built within the trust sector, and so much possibility as we continue to build more.
This is because groups of schools working together in deep and purposeful collaboration in a single governance structure are our ‘best bet’ for building resilience and capacity in our school system in England.
But we must retain the freedoms and flexibilities to be able to advance education. We must not be hamstrung, constrained or thwarted in this endeavour.
Trusts are also our ‘best bet’ for a system that is the best at getting better.
The ability to improve our schools is in this room and in your trusts.
And trusts are the best and most advanced expression of partnership and collaboration.
We will lean into the Opportunity Mission because we are mission-led. And because we have a foundational question in common with government – how do children and young people, and those who educate them in our schools flourish? And that is the basis of the joint paper with the Catholic Education Service and Church of England that we launched yesterday.
A resilient and effective trust sector can work with government to deliver its commitment to provide opportunity for all children. That much of this is not ‘new’ work for trusts speaks to the notion that trusts are already at the vanguard of this mission.
Through a collective effort and deeper partnership we believe Government and the school sector can go further faster, transforming the opportunities all children and communities can enjoy.
But we in the trust sector must also continue to innovate and improve. We must demonstrate the disruptive edge that has always animated our mission.
And now I will conclude with a fourth and final reflection on building. Building back.
The recent PISA (2022) England Report gave us the stark and terrible finding that one in ten UK pupils reported that they did not eat at least once a week because there is not enough money to buy food.
And we have seen from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, Destitution in the UK 2023, that there are now more than one million children in the UK living in destitution—that is, living without proper shelter or without enough food.
And in December 2023, UNICEF published a report which shows that child income poverty rates in the UK are the highest among the world's richest countries, and that we rank bottom of the table for changes in those rates in the past decade.
There are 4.3 million children, or 30 percent of all children in the UK, living in poverty.
This is in the context of living in the world’s sixth largest economy. It is unacceptable that this position is allowed to continue. So I am pleased that this government has established a child poverty taskforce.
It will take a committed government to pull the levers of state that will significantly reduce or eradicate child poverty. But it is essential that they do because as Nelson Mandela said: "Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.”
It is worth returning to Lord Kerslake’s prescient words from 2019. The situation he described then is even more complex now with greater implications for our public services and our public institutions.
The deep economic and social changes that are happening in Britain today have made the civic role of public institutions even more vital - not just to the places they are located in, but in leading a response to the renewal of our communities and of civic life.
This requires something different of trust leaders as public leaders - it requires us to think in longer term horizons and to build school trusts as public institutions.
Our work as the system’s leaders is to build our trusts as public institutions advancing education for public benefit, civic in their outlook, anchored in their communities.
This is how we will build the resilience of our school system.
It is how we will honour all the hands who build.
It is how we will build back.
Thank you.
