System leadership

System leadership across the academy trust system and beyond

In April 2023 Forum Strategy and The Brown Collective published an initial system leadership thinkpiece ‘What does system leadership look like in 2023 and beyond?’. This provided a helpful source of reflection and provocation. It was a timely reminder that system leadership has much more untapped potential to help the education system develop and improve further, including opportunities to identify and address cross-community, cross-sector challenges and the potential to collaborate with other influencers.

Since then, we have formed some small, focused and expertly facilitated CEO professional learning communities to further explore what system leadership might look like from their perspective, offering the space and time to explore this important area in detail and providing the opportunity to pull reflections and ideas into some follow-up thinkpieces.

Two thinkpieces have been produced by two separate CEO professional learning communities. The first published in September 2023, follows on directly from our first thinkpiece ‘What does system leadership look like in 2023 and beyond?’ and offered the opportunity to build on this by outlining what system leadership would look from those already serving as CEOs across the system. The second thinkpiece, published in September 2024, developed the system leadership work further by exploring a large-scale, system-wide challenge (in this case, teacher retention) and outlined ways in which effective system leadership would help to address this important issue.

All three thinkpieces are shared below as open resources. If you have any questions about this work, please contact us at admin@forumstrategy.org

The initial thinkpiece 

The thinkpiece – ‘what does system leadership look like in 2023?’ – will help us to commence this work. It s intended to explore some of the historical background to system leadership across education and start to offer questions and areas to explore as we consider what system leadership looks and feels like now, across our current landscape.  The thinkpiece will draw on cross-sector perspectives and learning, as well as the latest thinking from within education (including some of Forum Strategy’s previous work and examples from members across our networks).

You can download the the initial thinkpiece by clicking below.

The second thinkpiece

The second thinkpiece builds on the first by setting out the key thinking from Forum Strategy’s System Leadership Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), which involved ten Chief Executives of academy trusts working across two groups over the Summer of 2023. We undertook this process of exploration and reflection specifically with CEOs, not least because Forum Strategy is a support organisation for Chief Executives (and other executive leaders), but also because the CEO role is highly influential in determining how academy trusts engage and involve themselves with wider systemic matters and partnerships.  The thinkpiece shares key learning points from the PLCs and some suggested next steps if we are to see system leadership develop to become a sector wide habit.

You can download the the second thinkpiece by clicking below.

The third thinkpiece

The third thinkpiece sets out the ideas and thinking from our 2024 System Leadership PLC group. Titled ‘System leadership in focus: How the challenge of teacher retention can be better addressed through system leadership’ it explores the system-wide challenge of teacher retention through a system leadership lens, offering insights into the challenge as it stands and ideas as to how effective system leadership can help to address retention across the education system as a whole. It includes the proposal to introduce a ‘system-wide retention promise’ to demonstrate our commitment to retention across the country.

You can download the the third thinkpiece by clicking below.