Dr Kate Chhatwal OBE, Chief Executive, Challenge Partners
The first academies opened in 2002, the year I joined the Department for Education, with non-government investment and expertise seen as an additive tool for turning around underperforming schools. As the programme grew, business sponsorship gave way to successful schools supporting others, and the language of ‘chains’ (unhelpfully conjuring ‘chain stores’) gave way to the language of Trusts.
Trust is an important word and key feature of effective and ethical organisations that place the interests of children above all else. Schools, Trusts and all who work in and with them hold in trust the future flourishing of our youngsters and communities. It is only through careful stewardship and nurturing of students through their educational careers that we can grow the citizens and leaders of tomorrow. And it is only through building trust between those who work in our schools and Trusts that we can enable effective partnership between them.
Moving along the continuum from competition, through cooperation, to genuine partnership requires that two fundamentals are in place. The first is shared purpose. True, ethical ‘system leaders’ care as much about the life chances of young people they will never meet at the other end of the country as they do about those in their own institutions. They know that excellence and equity go hand-in-hand, and the improvement that matters - sustained, continuous improvement on previous best - is not a zero-sum game. A rising tide lifts all boats.
The second fundamental is deep trust; the relationships, intentionally built and deliberately sustained, which enable hard-edged, mutually-enriching collaboration without fear or favour. People buy into people and it is the bonds between them that allow the selfless sharing of scrutiny, expertise and vulnerability. For sure we need systems in place to sustain collaboration as individuals move on, but it would be foolish to suggest that personal ties don’t matter.
At Challenge Partners, we refer to these fundamentals as ‘moral capital’, the glue that binds us, and ‘social capital’, the relationships that bring us and keep us coming back together. They are two of the ‘four capitals’ on which my predecessor, Professor Sir George Berwick, founded Challenge Partners and to this day they guide how we design every event, programme and network.
The other two capitals are also important. ‘Knowledge capital’ is about systematically identifying and accrediting excellence and moving it around the system so all can benefit. ‘Organisational capital’ is the boring, but vital acknowledgement that this doesn’t happen by accident and requires structures and processes that enable challenge, collaboration and knowledge exchange to happen systematically.
Within each school trust, all four of these capitals need to be well established if the sum is genuinely to be more than its parts. But if we are really committed to system-wide improvement they need to be as embedded between school trusts as they are within them - which is why we fully support the requirement in the recent White Paper for Trusts to work constructively with each other, as well as other civic actors. It is only through this that we can achieve ‘upwards convergence’, a system in which all improve with those with the furthest to travel getting better at the fastest rate.
This brings us back to trust and moral and ethical leadership. In the scramble to bring every school into a strong family by 2030, it is only by putting aside ego and adult ambition, and putting the interests of children and young people first that we will fully realise our collective commitment to reducing educational inequality and promoting human flourishing.
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