School trust leaders are increasingly being asked to think beyond their own organisations — to build alliances, share capacity and lead across place. But what does that actually demand of the person at the top?
Nick MacKenzie, our Head of Education and host of #EdInfluence, reflects on the recent Confederation of School Trusts' (CST) partnership pidend paper, which makes the structural case for trusts as civic leaders.
The paper also raises a harder question: that realising the pidend depends as much on a shift in leadership identity as on operational models, a move away from what Senge calls "the myth of the heroic inpidual leader".
The paper is candid that this second part is offered tentatively – the mindsets are sketched, the fuller theory of action left for part two. That open question is the one I want to sit with: not what partnership requires us to build, but who it requires us to become.
I don't have a tidy answer. But I've spent the last few months recording the latest #EdInfluence series, and the question kept surfacing, so I went back to the episodes to see what the leaders I'd spoken to might offer.
Many of this series' guests lead universities, FE colleges and school trusts, which at first felt like a detour. It wasn't. The identity they kept describing is exactly the one a trust CEO is being asked to grow into.
Curiosity in place of competition
The first thing the shift asks for is curiosity in place of competition. Edward Vitalis, CEO of Invictus Education Trust, gave me the clearest picture.
When something is going wrong, he picks up the phone to other leaders – not to project that he has it under control, but to be transparent and ask for help. "Our natural reaction is to keep things to ourselves", he told me, "because showing our vulnerabilities may make us look bad."
His wager is the opposite: openness is contagious, and we find better answers together than alone. His ambition isn't bounded by his own trust – he wants outcomes to improve across every school in Dudley, in his trust or not. That is the partnership pidend: an investment in place that pays out in collective capacity.
Leading beyond what you know
The second thing it asks for is the willingness to lead beyond what you personally understand. Professor Andy Long, Vice Chancellor of Northumbria University, opened with a story about being asked to lead a national research consortium.
He assumed he'd been chosen for his expertise. "I don't think it was that", he said. "It was because I was the person they all trusted the most." To lead it, he had to accept he could never master all the work himself – he had to find people in other institutions and trust them with it.
The heroic leader leads the thing they fully understand. The collaborative one leads something larger than their own knowledge.
Agency as a collective act
The third thing it asks for is a sense of agency that doesn't wait for the system to act. Professor Sir Steve West, Vice Chancellor of UWE, put it starkly when I raised Lucy Easthope's three-word test for leaders in a crisis – "help isn't coming". He didn't flinch. Government cannot fix this, so we have to find the solutions together. But his self-reliance is profoundly unheroic.
It depends on persity of thought around the table, on testing your thinking with others before you commit. Agency, in his hands, is a collective act.
It's not about you
And then there is the idea that, for me, names the whole shift. Cathie Paine, CEO of Reach3 Academy Trust, told me that when she took the job, she described her role to her heads like this:
“For me, CEO is the Chief Energy Officer. If I can energise you to just be the best versions of yourselves and keep that North Star shining bright, then you will de facto just do great things every day.”
The job, in her telling, is not to be the centre but to be the source. Reflecting afterwards, my colleague Iain Blatherwick distilled this into four words I haven't been able to shake: "it's not about you". That, in the end, is the identity the partnership pidend is really asking for.
The capital that grows when you spend it
James Plunkett, quoted in the paper, says social capital is the only form of capital that grows when you spend it and depletes when you don't. The same is true of this kind of leadership. The instinct to hold, to contain, to be the one who knows – it feels safe, but it depletes the very thing partnership runs on.
The question underneath
None of this replaces the structural work the paper sets out – the integrator role, the theory of change, the question of how relationships, data and deep listening combine into something communities in disadvantaged places actually feel.
Those are the conversations I most look forward to at the summit. But the question underneath, and the one these conversations kept returning to, still feels like the right place to start: what kind of leader am I willing to become, so that the pidend can actually be paid out?
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