I help leadership teams create the
conditions where people can flourish

Leading from the Inside Out

A ten-month engagement for the senior leadership team running a multi-academy trust.

Why this work

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.

If another framework was the answer, it would have worked by now.

Leading from the Inside Out is the work that lives in the space between CPD and wellbeing, the relational infrastructure that holds a trust together. It’s not a course. It’s not bursts of training. It’s the slower, more relational work of connection, between the CEO and the heads, in senior teams, across central teams and the schools they serve.

The programme is built around three conditions

Healthy school cultures grow from three connected conditions. Each phase of the engagement deepens one, and reinforces the others.

The shape of the engagement

Each engagement 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. A typical engagement combines four kinds of work, woven together across the ten months:

• 1:1 work with the CEO – sustained reflective coaching across the period.
• Group work with the senior executive team – facilitated sessions that build the team’s capacity to hold itself.
• Coaching across the schools – parallel reflective work with heads, deputies, or senior pairs, depending on what the trust needs.
• Action learning between sessions – structured peer conversations that turn what’s discussed into what’s practised.

The cadence and emphasis are agreed up front. I’d rather do focused work well across a coherent senior layer than spread thin work everywhere.

Who this is for

Leading from the Inside Out is for MAT CEOs and the senior leadership teams running multi-academy trusts who recognise that their leadership layer needs something different from another course or framework.

I’ve worked with a number of MATs of different shapes and sizes – including trusts with PRUs, special schools, primary and secondary settings, single-phase trusts, all-through trusts, and trusts built around SEND specialism. The work fits trusts up to around 20 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.

What changes

This work strengthens slowly, and then in ways that hold. Most trusts describe four things shifting over the ten months:

• Less reactive, more intentional leadership across the trust. The senior team stops being shaped by whatever shouts loudest.
• Stronger alignment between the central team and the heads they serve, and between the senior pairs at the centre of each school.
• A clearer view of how culture is being held — and how decisions are being made – across the trust.
• A senior team that stops haemorrhaging energy on the same circular problems.

Beneath all of that is something more fundamental: human connection. When the people leading a trust feel connected to each other, the rest follows.

On testimonials and confidentiality

Most of the work I do with MAT senior leadership teams is, by its nature, confidential. The detailed case studies and named references that would normally appear on a page like this aren’t public, they’re shared in conversation, with permission, after a strategic conversation has confirmed mutual fit. If you’d like to hear how the work has landed in trusts of similar shape and size to yours, that’s something we can talk through.

Frequently asked questions

How long is the engagement, and is the length flexible? The standard shape is ten months, which is the period most trusts find lets the relational work actually settle. Shorter pieces are possible, but the full programme is designed to span an academic year so the work moves through the rhythm of school life.

Can we start with a single school first, before scaling across the trust? Yes, and many trusts do. A pilot engagement with one school and the executive team is often the way in – it lets the senior team feel the work before committing across more schools. The first three months can be designed as a defined pilot phase with a built-in review point.

What does pricing look like? Pricing is shaped by scope – how many schools and senior leaders are involved, how the four kinds of work are weighted, and the cadence we agree. We talk this through during the strategic conversation; I won’t quote a number until we both know what we’re actually scoping.

How does this 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 skills. HR holds policy, performance and wellbeing systems. Neither, on its own, builds the relational infrastructure that lets a senior team function under pressure. We meet your director of people, CPD lead or trust improvement lead at the start, so the overlap is clear.

How do you protect confidentiality across a trust? Boundaries are explicit and set at the start. What stays in the room with senior leaders stays there. What’s shared back to the CEO is agreed up front, in writing, and shared as themes and patterns rather than individual content. The only exception is the standard safeguarding one.