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Stephen Steinhaus has been the chief executive of Solihull Alternative Provision Multi Academy Trust, which runs three alternative provisions (AP), since 2023. He was previously an executive principal in the trust.

After moving to England from California as a Fulbright Scholar to study Shakespeare, and later having taught in schools in both the UK and Hawaii, Steinhaus ventured into AP and set up a free school in 2018.

He spoke to Tes about how commissioning work with local authorities is essential to running his trust, how he maintains a work-life balance, and the hours he runs up working in his Vauxhall Astra.

Commissioning for pupils

The majority of my time is spent focussing on commissioning places for pupils, which forms around 90 per cent of our overall commissioning as an AP.

Places are commissioned by local authorities, trusts and schools, so a lot of my contact throughout the week is towards these ongoing conversations.

The places vary from short-term intervention to longer-term places, sometimes with multiple pupils being funded for one place across an academic year.

To get a place at our academies, potential pupils have to be assessed through an admission consultation process, which ensures they have everything they need to join our school.

Commissioning for services

The other side is commissioning services, pieces of work and new provisions that we can offer when working in partnership with local authorities (LAs). I am on the phone or emailing with at least one representative of at least one LA every working day.

Commissioning a service tends to come after a school, LA or trust gets in touch, and can be short-term, longer-term or annual. Most of our queries are for one-off pieces of consultancy work on behaviour, inclusion or developing in-house provision.

Right now, for instance, we are doing some interesting work on internal truancy and restorative approaches, relational behaviour practice and adaptive techniques.

It takes up a reasonable amount of time because funding for education, and AP specifically, is tight and only getting tighter. So these commissioning conversations tend to be ongoing negotiations in many cases but form a significant part of our trust’s growth.

Budgeting and finances

I have oversight over the budgets for our academies, as well as our central team budget, along with our chief financial officer.

We have a business meeting every week about our finances, in which we discuss the different revenue streams from the services we commission and the budgets of the trusts that commission places from us.

I try to dedicate a day to budgeting across my week, although the eventual goal is that things like finance can look after themselves.

Building and preserving relationships

Another part of my time is building, maintaining - and sometimes rebuilding - relationships. This helps me ensure everyone within our trust is informed about what is going on.

This is mainly spent in my Vauxhall Astra, dropping in from site to site. It might be to lead or support specific training with staff, for an event, for quality assurance of lessons and programmes, or a general walkabout to say hello to everyone.

If it wasn’t for hands-free technology, I would find this job very, very difficult as I am travelling so regularly. In my best weeks, I’m at every single site once a week.

I tend to try and avoid formal meetings or listening in to a Microsoft Teams conversation while driving for safety, so it’s often informal conversations, check-ins and liaising with our central and executive teams.

Work-life balance

One of the single biggest shifts in terms of maintaining that work-life balance is limiting technology. Even with artificial intelligence, tech is only as good as the user is. I’ve stripped everything off my personal phone, which I put in a drawer from when I start at 8am to when I finish at 6pm.

This is the opposite of what I thought I was supposed to do as a senior leader and as a principal, which was 24/7, all access.

I also take a fluid approach to my working hours. This means I don’t have to feel guilty if I’m saying: “OK, I’m going at 4pm today because I know that in the February half term, I’m going to be spending two days working.”

That means I don’t have to worry all the time because that’s not sustainable and it’s not the model or the exemplar I want to set for anybody else in the trust.

What would I like to do more or less of?

The number one thing, if I had more time, would be seeing the pupils and staff more regularly - I get out of sorts if I haven’t been out across our sites consistently.

When I feel like this, I ring-fence more dedicated trust time for me to visit our sites and check in with more of our pupils and staff.

I would also say I’d like less of the political and business side of things, but, again, that’s what our pupils, staff and trust need from me as CEO, so I’ve learned to approach those elements of my work more positively.

Stephen Steinhaus was speaking to Cerys Turner

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