Guidance for blog contributors

Thank you for your interest in writing for Trust, CST’s blog. Our blog provides a platform for members, partners, and invited contributors to share their thoughts on a topic relevant to school trusts.

It exists to welcome different perspectives that will spark discussion and help colleagues at trusts across the country to reflect on practice in their trusts.

The blog is a space for knowledge building and thought exchange. It is not a platform to sell products or services.

Below you’ll find some tips to support you in ensuring your post is relevant to our members, encouraging them to share and benefit from your words.

Your blog post

• Blog posts should be 500-750 words. If your post is over the word limit, we may edit it down.
• CST is focused on our members. Our most successful blogs feature real voices from schools and trusts, with their thoughts, opinions, and experiences. We want to hear from and learn from colleagues across the sector.
• CST membership covers everyone with a school trust: chief executives and other executive leaders, principals and school leadership teams, teachers, professional services staff, trustees and local governance volunteers. Think about this broad audience when writing.
• Blogs work best when written in the first person, featuring personal experiences and honest reflections.
• Blogs must not be written solely to promote a specific service, event, or provider. Blogs that consist solely of marketing case studies or promotional material will be rejected. Paid-for services may be referenced incidentally, but readers must be able to apply the ideas from the blog without using any specific product or service.
• Our blogs are not academic papers. It can be useful to include links to sources and any quoted material, but we do not need extensive footnotes.
• We strongly recommend that you read some of our previous blogs before you begin writing your piece. These will provide a sense of CST’s priorities, views, and tone. You may also wish to look at the guidance section of our website to review our recent publications.
• We may edit blogs in order to match our house style (for example, we usually refer to ‘school trusts’ rather than ‘MATs’). Where this happens, every effort will be made to ensure original meaning is not lost.
• Blog posts will be placed in a category, and assigned tags to help readers find related content, filter by interest, and view similar topics together. We will assign the blog to the most appropriate category and tags.

Reaching the right audience

• Our main Trust blog is aimed at the whole range of roles in school trusts. As such, it generally deals with quite broad topics rather than technical detail.
• CST members also have access to our professional communities. These offer a tighter focus on particular roles and areas within trusts. In some cases, we may publish a blog on a professional community site instead of the main blog where we believe this offers a better fit between the content and the audience.
• Blogs will be promoted across relevant CST channels, this may include social media, our member briefing emails, and our professional communities.

Things to remember

• By submitting a blog, you agree that CST has the non-exclusive right to publish your work online and elsewhere, and that the work is your own.
• You must provide the name, role, and organisation of the blog author so we can attribute the blog.
• Our blogs are illustrated with an image. We can provide an image but if you have a relevant image, please supply it, along with confirmation that you own the rights to use it and grant CST permission to do so.
• We cannot guarantee to publish on a specific day. Wherever possible we will indicate a likely publication date but we reserve the right to amend the publication schedule.
• We reserve the right to refuse publication, and to edit or remove material after publication.