Leora Cruddas CBE, Chief Executive, Confederation of School Trusts
Our CEO summit is intended to be a human-scale event – small enough to enable real conversations on the big problems that we face as public leaders in the society in which we lead.
Last year, we considered the problem of retention. We know that the conditions of our school leaders, teachers and support staff are not sustainable. The wonderful Sinead McBrearty, chief executive of Education Support, did the opening provocation looking at data from the Teacher Wellbeing Index. This was followed by a careful exploration of the evidence for good working conditions that contribute to retention. Our thinking at CST is always anchored in evidence – in this case, the rapid evidence review conducted by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). EEF reviewed the evidence base on school leadership, culture, climate, and structure for staff retention. We talked about the importance of culture, climate and conditions – making our schools brilliant places to work.
This year, we want to focus on the problem of the loss of public trust and confidence in our public institutions, which is also affecting our schools and in particular, school trusts.
We want to consider four powerful questions:
- Who is education for?
- How do we create public value?
- How do we build relational trust?
- How do we create public narratives?
Who is education for? In system design terms, our most vulnerable learners are often at the margins. We need to bring them into the centre of system design. And we need to make this a first consideration, not an afterthought.
Public value shifts our organisations away from the view of public services that has been dominant since the mid-80s (choice, competition, markets). Public value has emerged as a response to the limitations of new public management, to incorporate notions of more democratic and inclusive dialogue and deliberation.
Relational trust is about how we build and value our connections with one another. Viviane Robinson’s work has helped us understand that the ability to build relational trust is a core leadership virtue. Relational trust is grounded in social respect – and respectful exchanges are marked by genuinely listening to people say and by taking these views into account in subsequent actions.
Public narrative is a leadership practice of translating values into action. It is a way of engaging the head and the heart of others to join you in action on behalf of a shared purpose. Public narratives are narratives that many people share and that reflect deeply held cultural perspectives and shared histories.
Remaking relationships
In introducing this summit, I’d like to share with you some reflections on based on the brilliant insights of Hilary Cottam. Her work is fundamentally about ‘remaking relationships.’ She writes about six principles:
- A vision of the good life (which is also the defining principle of our paper, A Good Life: Towards Greater Dignity for Learning Disabled People);
- The need to develop capability, as opposed to manage need;
- Relationships above all, over transactional cultures;
- Connecting multiple forms of resource, rather than auditing money;
- Creating possibility rather than containing risk; and
- Taking care of everyone, as opposed to targeting individuals.
The shift towards relational engagement I believe the basis of a new social contract not just with our colleagues in the organisations we lead, but also with pupils and parents.
More recently, I read with fascination, a paper on Relational State Capacity: Conceiving of Relationships as a Core Component of Society’s Ability to Achieve Collective Ends. This paper argues that traditional definitions of ‘state capacity’ have overemphasize technical and institutional elements, overlooking relational dynamics. Perhaps this is true too of the way that we have thought about institutional capacity in our school system? The authors make the case for recognising the quality of relationships in every interaction, human capacity, and the creation of a common collective good.
We need not only to tell a better story about the work that we do, but also build the relational cultures in our schools that help us recognise and build our collective human capacity.
We hope you can join us in this important conversation. We are at a frontier of public leadership where we must think differently if we are to solve the problems and challenges in the society in which we lead.
