Overview
Appointed as CEO of a 15-site Multi-Academy Trust serving 6,100 students and 1,100 staff, I found schools that had never truly worked together. The Trust was experienced as something that happened to schools, not with them. An external staff-experience survey gave us a clear baseline: only 26% of colleagues felt they understood the Trust’s vision and values.
We wanted to use the survey as an opportunity to build belonging and trust. Part-time colleagues (such as catering teams) were paid for the time to complete it, reflecting the value attributed to every voice. The 78% return-rate was a strong early marker of psychological safety building.
‘From day one, the message was: you belong here, and your voice counts.’
The ‘together we are…’ shift
Listening out loud
I met every Principal individually to understand their academy context and get to know them as leaders - mapping hopes, fears and ambitions. We shared the survey results openly in trust-wide communication, emphasising appreciation for people trusting the change in direction and being prepared to share their experiences of how things previously were.
Co-creating the values
We ran four design-thinking workshops with mixed groups - teachers, senior leaders, estates, TAs, trustees, members, governors - many collaborating for the first time. Out of this came three new concise values, owned by everyone: courageous, innovative, excellent - prefaced by ‘together we are’ to emphasise shared belonging and support.
Naming the family
The same stakeholder workshops surfaced a new identity: an organisational name that matched the culture we were building. Anonymous post-workshop feedback gathered digitally through an accessible, live-time visual platform gave insight into the importance of a potential new name: how it embodied the change in culture, and deeply reflected being valued and being together. Stakeholder feedback resonated with the Board of Members, who unanimously approved the new co-owned Trust name.
‘Before, it was the trust. Now, it started being our trust.’
All together conference
We held the first ever whole-trust conference, bringing nearly 1,000 attendees together, where we officially transferred to the new name. Here, principals shared on stage what the values looked like to them in practice.
Impact + next steps
A new leadership structure and operating model facilitated sharing of expertise, enabled collaborative improvement strategy, and creation of leadership development networks.
‘Pupils feel part of a special community. They say you can be yourself…the Trust has established a positive culture.’
Ofsted HMI
We ran several creative engagement projects based on the values, including utilising space in a shopping mall to host pop-up exhibitions with interactive aspects that the public engaged in. Due to popularity with the public, the team were asked to extend the exhibition for another week.
We worked with stakeholder groups across the Trust to distil each value into four observable attributes, which would then be embedded into appraisals, recruitment, and recognition.
The first remit of the newly established Trust Student Board was to discuss and plan how to utilise the values to bring students together and embed a whole-team culture. We set a term-by-term focus with cross-academy projects, broadcasts from different sites, and student and staff annual awards that featured in the second annual conference.
