Most multi-academy trusts I work with can share their values, their strategic plan, and their leadership structure. What is sometimes more difficult is understanding what it actually feels like to work there. And that is the part that determines almost everything else: whether talented people stay, whether honest conversations happen, whether the trust feels like something they are helping to shape or something they are simply part of.
That gap matters because it tells you more about the culture of a school than almost anything else. People often say that culture trumps strategy. In schools, that is not quite true. The structures, the processes, and the organisational clarity of any school or trust matter enormously, and they need to be right. But the relational infrastructure of a school, the culture that people work inside and are part of, is what creates the conditions in which all of that either holds or falls apart. And those conditions do not stop at the staffroom door.
The way adults experience the organisation is the way children experience it too.
A CEO I coach said recently that culture is not something you put in your plan for a year and tick off, and I think she captured something important. Culture is never finished. It is shaped, continuously, by the interaction between the organisational clarity of the trust and the relational capacity of the people inside it.
What school life does to relational capacity
Most senior leaders I work with care deeply about culture, and that is not where the problem lies. The problem is what the job does to the space around them. The relational space that culture depends upon becomes increasingly difficult to protect.
This is why values so often sit on a page rather than in the culture itself. It is not that people lack integrity. It is that the conditions for living those values consistently have been eroded by the sheer weight of the job. Leaders are overburdened and stretched across competing priorities. The relational space that culture depends upon becomes increasingly difficult to protect.
People can always tell you how they feel about working somewhere. They can tell you whether they feel they matter, whose voices are missing from the conversations that shape the place, and whether the organisation feels like somewhere they belong or somewhere they attend. Those responses reveal more about culture than any values statement, and they are shaped by something practical: whether people have had enough time and proximity to each other for a genuine relationship to form at all.
Proximity, time and the space between schools
Relational capacity requires proximity, the kind that comes from being close enough to people, often enough, for an honest relationship to take root. In a single school that is hard enough, but across a multi-academy trust, where a primary head in one town and a secondary head in another serve the same children but have never sat in a room together, it can feel almost impossible.
I was in a trust recently where two heads had been part of the same organisation for four years, serving the same community, and had never had a conversation about what their shared children need. The trust had structures, reporting lines, and a shared data platform. What it did not have was the time or the reason for those two professionals to know each other as people. What struck me was that neither leader lacked commitment. Both cared deeply about their communities and the children they served.
The issue was not intent; the issue was that the system had created no reason for them to be in a relationship with each other
In the trusts where connectedness does exist across schools, it has come from shared work that matters, not from reporting structures. People who have been honest with each other about what is difficult, who know each other well enough to pick up the phone without it being a formal escalation. That connection changes everything about how a trust operates, but it requires something the system is not giving leaders: time, space, and permission to be in relationship with each other rather than just in a structure together.
Local culture, trust culture, and the space between them
This becomes even more complex at a trust level, every school has its own culture, its own community, its own way of doing things, and the trust has an overarching culture shaped by its vision, its team, and its direction. The question is whether those two levels are in conversation with each other or whether one is being imposed on the other.
There is a significant difference between alignment that comes from shared purpose and co-created values, and alignment that comes from centralised expectation. The first produces coherence, the second produces uniformity. They can look similar from the outside, but they feel completely different from the inside.
The trusts that seem to navigate this most successfully have stopped asking “how do we get our schools on board?” and started asking “what are we creating together that none of us could create alone?” When a head experiences the trust as a place that amplifies what her school is doing rather than a layer of expectation above it, the energy shifts from compliance to co-creation, and the trust becomes something its schools want to belong to.
Where culture sits
Culture is not on one side of this or the other. It sits between organisational clarity and relational capacity, created by their interaction. A trust with strong clarity but weak relational capacity tends to run efficiently but feel hollow, where people follow the process, feedback flows downward but not upward, and the organisation looks well-run to anyone who is not inside it. A trust with strong relationships but weak clarity becomes vulnerable to every external pressure that hits it, whether that is Ofsted, staffing crises, budget cuts, or system change, because there is no shared structure to hold against them.
Neither version is sustainable, and the answer to one is never simply more of the other.
One trust leader told me recently that the most useful thing about the culture work they had done was not any single change, but the fact that people now had the space to discuss these things at all. Several of her heads had said to her: there are not many trusts that would give us the opportunity to have these conversations….if that is rare, it shouldn’t be.
Because culture is the precursor for inclusion. A trust where leaders do not feel they belong, where their voices are not heard, and where the culture has been handed down rather than co-created, will struggle to create belonging for its children. The conditions adults work inside are the conditions children learn inside. If we want inclusive schools, we have to start with how the adults in the building experience each other. Inclusion is often discussed as a strategy, an initiative, or an outcome. Increasingly, I think it is something much more fundamental than that; it is the natural consequence of a culture where people feel known, valued, trusted, and connected to something bigger than themselves.