If I asked to see your trust’s asset register, what would I find? Detailed listings no doubt, diligently noting your property and leases, IT equipment, school minibuses, and the like. What I’m less sure I’d find are the people that make a place, and the relationships that connect them. They don’t fit so neatly on a spreadsheet, after all.
And yet, our relationships may be the most important strategic asset we possess. They matter as much between colleagues, as they do between staff, pupils, and their families. They are the bridges over which information flows and trust builds, where empathy blooms and reciprocity takes root. When they are weak we struggle, individually and collectively, and when they are strong they scaffold us.
“Nice to have” you might argue while reviewing persistent absence, tackling workforce retention, facing SEND pressures, or increasing complexity in family support needs, but you have bigger priorities right now. Undoubtedly, trust leaders face significant challenges and difficult choices about where to focus time and resources.
But relationships aren’t the soft side of leadership, the afterthought or the add-on to the to-do list. What can we understand about a pupil’s absence without the trust to share what’s really going on? What number of problems could be avoided with better communication? What can we tackle about workforce wellbeing (and staff retention) without cultivating a sense of belonging? Many of the current school challenges are inherently relational. Progress depends not only on what we do, but on the quality of the relationships through which we do it.
Recent personal experience brought this home. My daughter has, at times, struggled to go to school and one morning was particularly difficult. She and I both cried. When I got home, the class teaching assistant called - to share that she was happy and settled, but also to check how I was. The call only lasted a few minutes. It didn’t solve any of the underlying issues and, sadly, it didn’t magically prevent more difficult mornings.
But something fundamental shifted - it deepened trust. I felt seen. More importantly, I felt that supporting my daughter to thrive at school was a joint endeavour. A small act of kindness with a profound impact. Of course, in a school with over 500 pupils, personal phone calls can’t happen every day, and nor should they. But it is a simple example of how relationships, once built, can do the heavy lifting.
When faced with complex challenges, organisations often default to the things they can see and control - policy, a procedure, a reporting framework or a standardised approach. There is a place for all of this but when the system hits the ground it is the quality of the relationships - child to child, school to home, teacher to teacher - that will make the difference between ticking the box and transforming the outcome.
And of course meaningful relationships do more than improve individual interactions. They create the conditions for genuine partnership. When trust exists between schools, families and communities, people become more willing to share responsibility, acknowledge vulnerabilities, contribute insight and work together through uncertainty and complexity.
Relational practice is an art and a science, unique to the context in which it's needed and the judgement of the practitioner. Yet two ingredients consistently matter. First, relational practice requires capabilities which can be taught, practiced, modelled and embedded. Second, organisations must create conditions in which relational ways of working can thrive - the structures, incentives and culture we create can either enable or hinder our ability to work in this way.
If relationships truly are our most important assets, where do they feature in our strategic thinking? We audit finance. We monitor attendance. We track attainment. But how deliberately do we value and cultivate the relationships that make all of these things possible? Relational practice isn’t something to explore when everything else is sorted, nor is it one more intervention vying for scarce resources. It is, demonstrably and reliably, how we do our best work.
The questions for school leaders today are not whether relationships matter, we know that they do, but whether we are investing as deliberately, as thoughtfully and as strategically as we expect to invest in every other asset that we know to be important.
- Katherine Perrin is Head of the Relational Practice Academy at the Relationships Project, and course leader of CST's new course on Building relational practice, which begins on 4 November 2026.
We welcome perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
