The leader of a major multi-academy trust has warned other trusts against pursuing growth without a clear motivating strategy.
Speaking at the Confederation of School Trusts conference in Birmingham, Rowena Hackwood, CEO of Astrea Academy Trust, said she was worried by trusts trying to grow purely for the sake of growth.
She said: “I always really worry when I hear trusts saying our strategy is to grow. If you believe you have a brilliant mission that you can broaden out and deliver to a broader group of communities, fabulous.”
‘Growth is not a strategic priority’
She also acknowledged that for some trusts, growth can be driven by a “financial imperative”, and added: “Maybe you do need to grow to deliver financial stability in order to enable all of the schools and children within your trust to thrive.”
But she warned that “growth in itself is not a strategic priority”.
The Astrea CEO, who cited her time working for outsourcing firm Capita as an example of a company that pursued growth “only to grow”, added that “from my point of view, I would always say, start by being clear about the problem that you’re trying to solve”.
Ms Hackwood also encouraged trusts to embrace innovation and for the education sector more broadly to be more open to taking risks.
She said that turning some situations around will require “getting more comfortable, as a sector, with failing faster [and] moving on. I think it is something that we’re going to have to start to think more about”.
Ms Hackwood added: “The whole point with innovation is it’s untested, so sometimes it’s not going to work.
“I think as a sector we’re not super comfortable with failure because we feel it so keenly in our hearts that we’re failing children. But the effect of that is that it can be quite hard sometimes to get going with something at pace.”
According to Ms Hackwood, her team at Astrea, which has 26 schools in Yorkshire and the East of England, has been “instructed” to think more positively about risk, “rather than making sure something is beautifully crafted and completely oven-ready”.
School turnaround
However, she noted that in the past, the trust had sometimes not always brought everyone along with it.
Ms Hackwood said: “We did things that - with the benefit of hindsight, with more capacity and with a more solid base - we might have spent more time on the change management process around the changes that we made.
“We might have spent more time on the why, crafting our communications, doing our change management piece, working with focus groups and drawing out ideas and really spending the time…[but] we just had to get started with something.”
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