EVENTS
National #TrustLeaders Symposium 2025
One year in: navigating the change as trusts and as a sector
The education landscape is shifting. The academy trust landscape is shifting. Our leadership and our organisations must adapt and evolve in response. Trust leaders’ role in change is at a premium.
How do trust leaders make sense of the change one year in? How do we read the landscape and learn from others in a way that allows us to prioritise strategically and invest precious resources with care and impact – to the benefit of all our pupils and communities? What remains uncertain? And what will that mean for our leadership?
The 2025 symposium brought together trust leaders to clarify and reflect together on these big, strategic questions – carefully led and guided by Michael Pain, Chair, and Alice Gregson, CEO of Forum Strategy; with expert facilitation from Jane Creasy and inputs from Ed Dorrell, Partner at Public First and former education journalist, and Sir Steve Lancashire.
A year of change and reform in government is bringing huge developments around the school improvement landscape; trust regulation; accountability; curriculum and workforce reforms. Alongside this, trusts and trust leaders are navigating some huge societal challenges and opportunities – the evolution of technology and its impact on social development and learning; demographic shifts; the impact of poverty; and the growing need for greater community cohesion. Our symposium provided an important space to take a step back and reflect on key changes together, as a network.
Additional Resources
Time for trust leaders to be both bold and vulnerable
Michael Pain, Founder, Forum Strategy
Sir Steve’s Blog – June 2025
Sir Steve Lancashire, Chair of Forum Strategy’s National #TrustLeaders CEO network
A summary report of the National #TrustLeaders Symposium 2025
Read the summary report by Sarah Ginns, Policy and Research Manager, Forum Strategy
Our Partners
Our partners, shared their thoughts on what has been the biggest shift in the last 12 months for the trust sector and how they are supporting trust leaders to adapt and thrive in a changing landscape.
Our small number of paid partnerships are based on our partners’ expertise, credibility and ethos.
You can learn more about our partners by visiting our Partners page
Additional Member Only Resources
About the contributors:
Michael Pain
Michael Pain
Michael Pain is the founder of Forum Strategy and an entrepreneur, overseeing the development of successful businesses and a national network of well over one hundred Chief Executives. He is a long-standing strategic adviser to CEOs and Chairs, a ‘sought after’ coach to executives, and author of the acclaimed book: ‘Being The CEO‘. In 2021, Michael’s Being The CEO framework was endorsed and published as the template job description for academy trust CEOs by the National Governance Association. Michael was Called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 2007. He is also a co-owner of Satis Education, a sector-leading executive recruitment organisation, and currently chairs the organisation’s Advisory Group.
Alice Gregson
Alice Gregson
Alice Gregson is the CEO of Forum Strategy. She is a regular contributor to sector-wide thinking, has led a range of CEO system leadership programmes. and authored a number of pioneering thinkpieces including on issues such 'system leadership in the academy trust sector' and 'thriving trusts'. Alice began her career leading workforce planning projects in Adult Social Care, before joining the National College for School Leadership - working on the national headteacher succession planning programme. Her cross-sector work included developing 50 Civil Service leaders in the Fast Stream Programme and police leadership development, attraction and recruitment at the College of Policing. As a certified project and programme manager, Alice has run large scale operations across multiple sectors and delivered multi-million pound programmes of work of varying focus and scope including large technology transformation and culture change initiatives.