Operations professional community

The CST Operations professional community is a new and unique development network for those specialising in operations in school trusts.

Our professional communities provide support and development opportunities, through a blend of expert input on key practice challenges, facilitated discussion, and networking.

The community offers a safe and supportive environment in which to develop your understanding of some of the key challenges related to operations, to access expertise from across the sector and beyond, and to build a professional network.

By joining, you will open up opportunities to engage through:

Half-termly virtual community meetings
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. This 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 Operations professional community

Session overview

Session One
Speakers: Stephen Morales, Chief Executive of the Institute of School Business Leadership (ISBL)
Tuesday 19 November 2024, 15:30 - 16:30 (Virtual)

We will be joined by Stephen Morales who will take us through ISBL’s research on operational excellence. Operational Excellence (OpEx) is defined as "the cultural transformation and technical enablement of an organisation that allows it to perform optimally and achieve its strategic objectives".

In this session, we will learn more about its applicability to education and the ingredients necessary for operational effectiveness (tried and tested over many years and in many sectors), and see that, no matter the size of the organisation, we can all enjoy significant capacity gains if we embrace OpEx techniques.

You can expect to learn some new techniques and ways to improve your operational excellence within your MAT, whether you are in a single school trust or a large MAT of many schools. The topic of this session is a direct response to the survey of our Operations Community earlier this academic year, were you asked for more sessions on operational excellence/efficiency.