Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the Leading from the Inside Out Programme?

Leading from the Inside Out is my flagship engagement for the senior leadership team running a multi-academy trust. It’s a ten-month piece of work, held with skill across that period, designed for trusts whose leadership layer needs the slower, more relational work of connection — between the CEO and the heads, in senior teams, across central teams and the schools they serve.

It is not a course. It is not bursts of CPD. It’s the relational infrastructure work that holds a trust together when framework-led approaches haven’t worked.

The shape is bespoke. We start with where you are, what you’re actually seeing in your senior team, and the kind of culture you want to be running by the end of it.

2. Who do you work with?

Three groups:

• MAT CEOs and the senior leadership teams running multi-academy trusts.
• Individual headteachers and senior leaders, through reflective coaching.
• Charities, foundations and funders working on SEND inclusion and relational culture.

Most of my work sits with trusts that are growing, restructuring, or recognising that their senior team needs something different from another framework.

3. Have you worked with a trust like ours?

Probably, yes, though I’d want a conversation to be sure.

I’ve worked with a number of MATs of different shapes and sizes. The trusts I’ve worked with include those with PRUs, special schools, primary and secondary settings – often in combination. The work spans single-phase trusts, all-through trusts, and trusts built around SEND specialism.

Honestly: I haven’t worked with a trust larger than around twenty schools. If you’re a 30+ school MAT I’m not the right person for the relational culture work across your full estate, though I can be useful at hub or regional level. For trusts up to that size, this is the work I do.

4. What makes your approach different?

My work lives in the space between CPD and wellbeing, the relational infrastructure that holds a trust together. It’s not a programme you bolt on.

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 the sector keeps documenting as a crisis. Senior leadership retention has slipped. If another framework was the answer, it would have worked by now.

What works is structured, relationally intelligent practice that builds relational infrastructure, capacity and connection, for the people who lead a trust, held with skill across months. That’s the work I do.

5. How do you protect confidentiality?

The boundaries are explicit, and we set them at the start of the engagement.

What stays in the room with senior leaders stays there. What I share back to the CEO is agreed up front, in writing, and I share themes and patterns rather than individual content. If a CEO is also receiving 1:1 coaching from me, that work has its own confidentiality boundary. The only exception is the standard safeguarding one.

In practice, the work needs trust to function. I’d rather lose a piece of work than compromise on this.

6. Can you work across multiple schools in our trust at the same time?

Yes. Multi-school coherence is the defining MAT challenge, and the work is designed for it.

A typical engagement might involve 1:1 work with the CEO, group work with the senior executive team, and parallel coaching or facilitated work with the heads across the schools. The point isn’t to run the same intervention everywhere. It’s to build relational infrastructure that holds across the trust, so what one school is experiencing connects to what the others are.

The cadence and shape are agreed at the start. I’d rather do focused work well than spread thin work everywhere.

7. How do you work alongside our existing CPD and HR functions?

This work doesn’t replace your CPD or HR. It sits in the space between them.

CPD typically delivers content and skill. HR holds policy, performance and wellbeing systems. Neither, on its own, builds the relational infrastructure that lets a senior team actually function under pressure. That’s the work I do.

In practice, I’ll often meet with your director of people, your CPD lead or your trust improvement lead at the start, so we’re clear on how the work overlaps, where it complements and where it deliberately doesn’t. The goal is coherence, not territory.

8. What experience do you bring?

Twenty-four years in SEND and education, with three things shaping the work:

• Being the parent of a young person with SEND. That’s where this started.
• Co-founding Gesher School, the specialist SEND school I helped build from scratch – Outstanding × 3.
• Co-chair of the SEND council for the FED, and a trustee for Bloomsbury Football which works with over 6,000 children and young people a week.

I am an accredited coach (AOEC, ILM) and action learning facilitator and I work with leadership, inclusion and culture across schools, trusts and the foundations that fund them. The MBE was for services to children with SEND.

9. What does ‘relational culture’ actually mean in a school?

It’s how people experience the school or the trust as a community. Whether staff feel trusted to be themselves. Whether pupils feel known, not just managed. Whether families feel part of it.

Belonging matters. Inclusion matters. Mattering matters. Those 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.

10. How does this work impact outcomes?

Slowly, and then in ways that hold.

When relational infrastructure strengthens: staff retention improves, behaviour becomes easier to understand and respond to, inclusion becomes embedded rather than bolted-on, decisions become more consistent across the trust, and the senior team stops haemorrhaging energy on the same circular problems.

This isn’t a quick fix and I won’t pretend otherwise. It’s the slower work that makes the rest sustainable.

11. Is this relevant if our trust is performing well?

Often, this is when it matters most.

Strong outcomes don’t always mean staff feel connected, culture feels sustainable, or inclusion is experienced by everyone. A school can perform well for years and then lose its central team in a single term. The work that prevents that drift is the work that doesn’t show up in your data dashboard until it’s already gone.

For trusts that are performing well, this is preventative. For trusts that are struggling, it’s foundational.

12. How do we get started?

A thirty-minute strategic conversation. No pitch. Half an hour to think out loud about what you’re seeing in your senior team, and whether this is the right work for your trust right now.

If it isn’t, I’ll say so. If it is, we’ll talk about scope.