The chairs of trust boards play a key role in delivering strong governance to develop and maintain high-quality school trusts. We appreciate how rewarding the role of chair can be, whilst also recognising that it can at times, feel challenging and isolating too.
Our mentoring service for chairs offers personalised, strategic support for those who are new in post, developing their skills, or leading the trust board through a challenging period. The opportunity to have a trusted mentor for personal, professional, and strategic decision-making over a sustained period, can be transformative.
What does mentoring offer?
We will work with chairs to develop their personal leadership skills to deliver their trust vision, strategy and outcomes. Mentoring conversations will be goal-oriented and informed by established models and frameworks.
Whilst all mentoring partnerships start with a process of discovery about the chair and their trust governance, each mentoring relationship will be individual for each chair and led by them.
Mentors will focus on understanding individual chair’s opportunities, risks, ambitions, experience, and context at the start of the relationship so that highly focused conversations can explore relevant areas. The partnership then develops across a series of regular face-to-face or online meetings. Mentors and mentees typically keep in touch between meetings, with ad hoc conversations taking place on request. This helps establish trust and gives the time and space to explore potentially difficult issues and personal goals.
Trust and confidentiality
The relationship between mentor and mentee is clearly defined, professional and strategic. It’s underpinned by a mentoring agreement that sets out the expectations of each party and is characterised by open and honest exchange. The partnership, and any work created within it, is also highly confidential. Your mentor will not provide any feedback to your trust board.
Duration
Mentoring partnerships are generally established for a year to give you time to formulate strategies and put them into action. We recognise that this may be the right duration for some and not long enough for others, particularly those managing mergers and growth. In the third term of each partnership, progress towards goals will be reviewed and consideration will be given to whether there is value in extending the partnership. We are careful to avoid building in dependency but equally want to ensure that the progress made over the course of the partnership becomes embedded and sustainable for the long term.
Mentoring partnerships begin with a conversation with CST to discuss the service and how it might meet your needs and expectations. If you’d like to explore this further, we arrange a conversation with a mentor whose values and experience are potentially a good fit with yours. Some mentees like to work with someone who has local knowledge, others deliberately opt for someone completely independent of their locale. The choice is yours. This is an open, no-obligation conversation to explore suitability. If desired, several conversations can take place, each with a different mentor, before you make your decision.
Our mentors have been carefully chosen for this role. They have:
- Direct experience of trust governance and board leadership
- Powerful insights on strategic planning, robust accountability and governance systems which enable stakeholder voice to be heard
- A passionate commitment to helping others through active listening, insightful questioning, honest feedback and gentle guidance
Our offer is flexible and bespoke. We have developed two styles of mentoring service and are happy to explore other options on request:
This service is particularly suitable for individual professional development and building confidence.
- One to one mentoring to support a chair through a particular issue
This service is particularly suitable to support chairs in managing difficult issues such as the receipt of a financial notice to improve, trust growth or challenging board behaviours. The duration of this service is user-led, according to need.
Getting started
