Growing Together: Our First Decade (2012–2022)

In this second article in the series Jame Brown,  Managing Director of Inspiring Leaders, continues his description of their evolution.  James writes, when Inspiring Leaders was formed in 2012, it emerged in direct response to a growing belief in a new kind of system leadership, one that David Hargreaves called “a self-improving, school-led system.” As the national structures shifted, with local authorities receding and teaching schools taking centre stage, we chose a path that aligned with that vision: collaboration over competition.

This blog continues the story we began in article 1 “Choosing collaboration over competition.” It charts how, over a decade, a small group of teaching school alliances situated in the English East Midlands grew into a powerful, values-led Multi Academy Trust (MAT) partnership, bound by trust, mutual respect, and a collective ambition to shape the region’s educational landscape.

Becoming a School-Led System in Practice

Who said his work was seminal? In his seminal work for the National College (2010–2012), Hargreaves described the conditions required for schools to become more than self-managing, to become self-improving. He argued that “families of schools,” working interdependently and pooling professional capital, would be essential to that transformation.

In 2012, just a few months after our incorporation, our partnership took its first major step towards that future. We became one of three groups in our region, and of only about 20 nationally to be designated as an National Professional Qualification provider, not just to deliver government-mandated programmes, but to co-design and shape them, using the expertise of high-performing school leaders across our region.

It was our view that this was not a branding exercise. It was the realisation of Hargreaves’ idea that “improvement should be done with schools, not to them.” Our objective was for our leaders to design and deliver qualifications grounded in lived experience, adapted to our regional contexts, and focused on genuine leadership development rooted in student achievement and social mobility.

“We chose to call our partnership Inspiring Leaders and intentionally added the strapline ‘tomorrow’s leaders inspired by today’s’ because it reflects our core belief. Our goal was to have our most accomplished leaders guide school leadership development, ensuring it is based on real-life leadership experiences, key models, and theories that inform our work.” – Andy Burns, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Redhill Academy Trust

FACT: Since 2012, over 4000 leaders in the region accessed our NPQ provision creating a legacy of high quality leadership in the region.

Building the Professional Learning Continuum

With the NPQs established, attention turned to the front end of the professional pipeline. In 2014, following a joint effort from within the partnership, Inspiring Leaders secured status as a School-Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT) provider. This significant step enabled us to offer school-led teacher training from day one, rooted in the needs of our trusts and shaped by the people best placed to mentor new professionals.

“Our passion was the whole teacher professional continuum, and we shared a collective agreement, much like with our NPQ provision, that if we mobilised our most successful teachers and leaders, we could improve the training and readiness of new teachers entering the profession. This, along with our NPQ provision would then secure talent pipelines and capacity to improve schools – which was at the heart of the Teaching School and MAT vision” – Paul Stone, CEO at Discovery Trust

FACT: Since 2015 we have trained over 800 teachers in the region with over 90% getting jobs each year within 90 days of completing our course. Well over 50% become employed in our partner schools.

Together, the SCITT and NPQs formed the bookends of what would become a regional professional learning continuum. Over time, our MAT partners also co-constructed support for Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs), and middle leaders, long before frameworks like the Early Career Framework (ECF) were formalised. We perceived that the impact of this development pathway was profound: educators were being nurtured, developed and retained by a system that understood their journey from start to senior leadership.

“As a partnership who came together for Initial Teacher Training and NPQs, each with a local Teaching School remit to drive on standards in CPD and school improvement, it felt obvious that we look at programmes like NQT, NQT+1 so that we could try and best support teacher to thrive in the early stages of their careers and give them strong foundations. We took the opportunity to pull together our best teacher development leads regularly to co-design and develop these programmes, maintaining our local style, but agreeing on the fundamentals. They were exciting days, we were able to be creative, synthesise ideas and we really felt like we were building something exciting together.” – Paul Goodman, Deputy CEO, Flying High Partnership.

Trust Is the Bridge Between Structure and Impact

The real strength of these efforts was not technical, it was relational. We perceive that trust became our currency, and it allowed us to move from coordination to collaboration, and ultimately towards coherence. This is what Fullan would describe as the “collaborative culture” needed for large-scale change to be sustainable.

When colleagues came together to align NQT provision, or to co-design CPD that responded to shared regional challenges, they weren’t doing so under compulsion. They were acting on a shared moral commitment to collective improvement, a commitment we learnt through experience that cannot be manufactured, only nurtured over time.

The Leadership Conference: Culture Made Visible

One of the most visible expressions of this trust-based culture was establishing our annual Inspiring Leaders Leadership Conference. First launched in 2015 and attended by nearly 2,000 delegates over the last decade, we perceived it offered more than inspiration, it was a space for collective renewal.

Here, system leaders reconnected with their moral purpose. Delegates did not just listen; they contributed, facilitated, and brought back learning to their own schools and trusts. It became a cornerstone of our professional identity, a moment in the calendar when the school-led system came together as a community, not a marketplace.

“I can remember so many inspiring inputs and lightbulb moments which have helped shape my practice which wouldn’t have happened if our MAT was working in isolation. We decided to use our economies of scale to create our own conference, guided by our needs which is collectively designed and attended by all our school leaders. Each year I attend and feel so proud that we established this annual gathering and it’s now so brilliant to see other MATs joining us too, to learn, share and be inspired together”. – Liz Anderson, Chair of Inspiring Leaders (former CEO at Djanogly Learning Trust)

The Quiet Work That Built a Movement

While national policy often focused on high-profile initiatives, much of our impact came from the quiet alignment that developed between trusts. Our MAT leaders worked collaboratively, not competitively, on:

• School improvement strategy development as maturing Trusts deciding how best to navigate a new system together.
• Peer review and coaching structures helping leaders to grow and develop by informally challenging and supporting each other.
• Shared CPD programmes tailored to specific regional challenges, such as our NQT and teacher developments programmes and conferences.
• Leadership development pipelines aligned with trust growth, feeding from our NPQ provision.
• Collective intelligence sharing about developments in the system, enabling leaders to navigate change successfully.
• International Study Tours where our collective leaders came together to observe high performing systems across the world and bring back learning to the region.

This echoed Hargreaves’ view that the “deep partnerships” which enable schools to challenge and support one another are central to a sustainable school-led system. As Greany later argued (2018), mature collaboration isn’t soft, it’s disciplined, focused, and built on mutual accountability. That’s exactly what developed during this period.

From Collaboration to Formalisation

By 2021, the wider system began to shift again. ITT reform, a new ECF, and the restructuring of NPQ licensing meant that informal collaboration alone would no longer be enough. The leaders of the Inpsire recognised that the next phase of our journey would require a wider, more formalised partnership structure, clearer strategy, and greater influence and a pivot in the role of Inspiring Leaders to best serve the schools and MATs which we serve.

But that transition was not reactive, it was made possible because of the approach we had adopted to collaborative learning and refined in the decade that preceded it. As a result, we had the shared memory, trust, and moral alignment needed to respond not just as individual MATs, but as a regional partnership.

Lessons From Our First Decade

Our experience illustrated to us that this was a decade of disciplined and willing collaboration, not quick wins. It showed that school-led improvement is possible when relationships are trusted, leadership is distributed, and professional capital is mobilised with purpose.

In building a model of teacher and leader development that spanned ITT to executive leadership, we did more than fill a policy gap. We proved that a partnership model that is collaborative, co-owned, co-designed and co-delivered—can create enduring, system-wide change.

What Went Well (WWW)

• Created a full teacher development pipeline, from SCITT to NPQs.
• Embedded trust-based partnerships that matured over time.
• Developed leadership capacity across the region through aligned programmes and structures.
• Intelligence sharing and peer support and challenge was invaluable.
• Proof of concept, that MATs can work well together to best the serve the needs of the whole school community.
• All of our work helped improve schools and enable more young people to thrive.

Even Better If (EBI)

• Earlier recognition from policy makers about the potential of regional partnerships for the long-term benefit of all
• Impact data systems could have been developed sooner to evidence long-term outcomes.
• We had committed to central capacity building sooner for the Inspiring Leaders team.
• More MATs would have sensed the value in becoming closer to Inspiring Leaders earlier in our journey.

Coming Next:

In our third article, we explore how Inspiring Leaders underwent a strategic revolution, repositioning itself as a MAT-led partnership model, with a renewed civic purpose and a system-wide ambition.

We are  grateful to James Brown for authoring this article for us. This article, a long with a series of others published in this journal during this school year and the next, provides a picture of the development of a specfic type of collaborative learning communities.  These communities have grown out of the Department of Education designated teaching school.  The process of designation started in 2008 with the designation of National Teaching Schools in London.  By 2011 this had grown to 64 across the country. Then with a change of government they became one of the central approaches to school improvement in England which has continued to today.

These collaborative learning communities all focus upon providing high quality, life time learning opportunities for teachers, support staff and school leader.  These articles provide a picture of three other the  communities that have emerged from this initiative, highlighting their similarities and differences.

Take care and stay safe

George

http://georgeberwick.com