Honest work.
Healthy cultures.
Leadership that holds itself.
The work in the space between CPD and wellbeing.
Relational culture work for MAT CEOs
and the senior teams running
multi-academy trusts.
At its heart, this work is about people, and about the relationships that shape how a trust actually functions.
Most leadership development for MATs is sold as frameworks, models and short bursts of CPD. In a decade of that approach, headteacher wellbeing has reached a point that the sector keeps documenting as a crisis. Senior leadership retention has slipped. The same patterns surface in staff voice surveys across the country – being unheard, being managed-to rather than worked-with, being part of a trust that hasn’t yet quite become a trust.
If another framework was the answer, it would have worked by now.
The work that changes a culture is not another model. It is the slower, more relational work of connecting the people who lead a trust, between heads and deputies, in senior teams, across central teams and the schools they serve. The relationships at the heart of a trust.
You can’t reach those relationships through a course.
What does work is structured, relationally intelligent practice that builds relational infrastructure, capacity and connection, for the people who lead a trust, held with skill across months. The work that reaches what no course can.
Belonging matters. Inclusion matters. Mattering matters. These words are important, they name something real. But beneath all of them is something more fundamental: human connection. When people feel connected to each other, the rest follows.
Culture changes when relationships do.
That is as true for the adults leading a school as it is for the
children and young people inside it.
Ali Durban
Director
When leaders feel secure in themselves they can hold others. From that, and only that, comes psychological safety, self-awareness, and the capacity to lead a team that does the same for each other.
When this happens, trust deepens, connections and culture form and community alignment begins to grow.
For MAT CEOs reviewing what their leadership layer actually needs.
Book a strategic conversation →A confidential, thirty-minute strategic conversation. No pitch – half an hour to think out loud about what you are seeing in your senior team, and whether this is the right work for your trust right now.