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Thriving Trust Communities

Thriving Trust Communities: Best Practice Guide

How do leading trusts create a supportive environment where staff feel valued and confident in their roles? 

We interviewed 7 of the top 10 trusts that received the Trust Value Award 2024 to discover what drives their success. This guide is also informed by our recent national report on Trends in Trust Value: 2019 – 2024, which provides valuable insights from over 203,000 staff responses on how teachers, school leaders, and education staff across England perceive the value of being part of a school trust.

This guide will help you:

  • Identify key practices that contribute to a thriving trust community
  • Develop strategies to enhance staff sense of belonging, morale and retention
  • Create initiatives that align your trust’s mission with community needs

 

You’ll also discover:

  • Trust growth strategies: How to ensure culture-fit and supporting culture spreads across your trust community.
  • The role of common trust vision and values: The challenges and solutions around proactively building a thriving trust community and how to balance autonomy with centralised approaches.
  • Driving community impact: Understand how a positive organisational culture can extend benefits beyond your trust, positively influencing the wider educational community.

This guide is essential for trust leaders committed to cultivating a thriving educational environment where both staff and students can flourish.

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Introduction

This guide combines Edurio’s data on staff perception of trust value and interviews with trusts with the most positive trust perception scores in our data. Acting as a comprehensive collection of approaches, practices and advice, this guide is built on interviews with nine leaders from seven trusts. Their insights illustrate how leadership fosters a strong organisational culture with aligned values and a collaborative spirit to create a thriving trust community for staff, pupils and parents.

This guide reviews key topics and summarises the approaches taken by the trusts interviewed. The broad themes covered are:

Growth story: This section outlines the strategic approaches trusts use to expand and stabilise their schools, focusing on aligning new schools with trust values and fostering sustainable growth.

Culture and values: This section explores how trusts embed core values into their daily practices, balance autonomy with alignment and prioritise staff wellbeing to create a cohesive and supportive organisational culture.

Fostering community and knowledge sharing: This section examines the methods trusts use to build strong communities, encourage collaboration among staff, engage with parents and the wider community, and promote knowledge sharing across schools.

We finish the guide with a conclusion from Sir David Carter, former National Schools Commissioner and instrumental force in developing the school trust sector.

Methodology

The Edurio data on trust perception is based on a dataset created from the Edurio Staff Experience and Wellbeing Survey, comprised of over 70,000 staff responses collected during the academic year 2023/24.

The Edurio Staff Experience and Wellbeing Survey comprehensively examines key elements of staff experience, enabling school and trust leaders to understand staff needs and priorities. The survey covers 14 modules, from Communication and Leadership dynamics to Trust perception and Wellbeing. In collaboration with trust leaders and researchers at UCL Institute of Education, we developed this survey to help trusts guide their staff retention strategy. The survey covers multiple factors, that the current academic research, interviews with teachers and SLTs, and the Ofsted School Inspection Handbook 2019 highlight as key to high workplace satisfaction and staff wellbeing. In this guide, our focus on thriving trust communities stems from consistent findings in our data, highlighting questions from this module as having relatively poor results and a strong connection with how likely staff are to consider resigning.

The rest of the guide draws on interviews conducted with nine members of leadership teams from seven trusts they are part of. Amongst the interviewed leaders, you will find insights from some of the most respected leaders in the sector:

Who will find this guide useful?

This comprehensive guide is a recommended read for trust and school leaders looking to understand the key practices that contribute to a thriving trust community. It gathers practical advice for trusts seeking to develop strategies to enhance staff sense of belonging, morale and retention.