Data Leaders Professional Community

The CST Data Leaders Professional Community is a unique development network for those leading on data management, insight and compliance within School Trusts, such as Chief Information Officers, Directors of Insight, Heads of Data and MIS, Data Managers, Protection Officers, and Data Controllers.

The Professional Community provides support and development opportunities at a time of unprecedented change, through a blend of expert input on key practice challenges, facilitated discussion, and networking.

The Community provides a safe and supportive environment in which to develop your understanding of some of the key challenges related to operational practice across a group of schools, access expertise from across the sector, and build a professional network.

CST's Professional Communities focus on the concept of ‘practice challenges’ and engage through:

Half-termly virtual community meetings.
A one-day Professional Community conference.
Networking with colleagues across our sector.
Access to CST briefings and guidance.

As a member of the community, you will also gain exclusive access to our virtual platform. CST Hive is a peer learning platform that connects you with a community of information, resources and support, that you can access anytime and anywhere. On the platform you'll find an ever-growing collection of resources, containing information about key knowledge areas needed in our profession, as well as a space to connect, learn and interact with your peers from across the country.

Membership of the community is included for employees of member trusts as a benefit of CST membership. Join using the button below with your MyCST membership details.

Join our Data Leaders Professional Community

Session overview

Session one:
Wednesday 20th September 2023, 10:00 - 11:00 (Virtual)

In this session we are excited to launch our new professional community platform and outline the exciting year ahead for this community.

Session two: What do the latest attainment and progress data tell us about post-pandemic secondary education - and has Progress 8 become less credible?
Speakers: Timo Hannay, Founder, SchoolDash
Wednesday 22nd November 2023, 10:00 - 11:00 (Virtual)

In this session, we are delighted to have Timo Hannay, Founder of SchoolDash, joining us to take a deep dive into the following 3 areas:

- The latest trends in attainment, progress and subject choice in KS4
- Participation and the issues surrounding Progress 8
- The latest trends in KS4 and KS5 destinations

Session three:
Speakers: Matt Woodruff, Open Education AI, Lauren Thorpe, Chief Transformation Officer at United Learning, and Derek Hills, Director of IT, Systems and Data at Ark Schools.
Wednesday 24th January 2024, 10:00 - 11:00 (Virtual)

In this session you will learn how a group of multi academy trusts have collaborated on shared infrastructure practices and common education use cases in order to achieve results that would be difficult, or impossible, to achieve individually. As predictive and prescriptive analytics demand more from our data, how can we be sure our Trusts approach is ethical and the outputs are trustworthy? How can we determine what actions should result from the insight? We will showcase practical examples through the lens of attendance and safeguarding risk and share the groups learning in how AI is augmenting human decision making – not replacing it.