Trust Leaders' Network
A catalyst for the development of your trust and leaders.
Gain powerful insights for your trust leadership team from a carefully-crafted programme of trust visits and webinars, each focusing on a different aspect of trust development or practice.
What is the Trust Leaders' Network ?
This expertly facilitated space allows you to share best practice with peers across the country and connect with leading thinkers and business experts.
How does it work?
Trust leaders benefit from this practitioner-led safe space to connect and network, while gaining deep insight into effective approaches to trust development. With a focus on honest, purposeful exchanges, it creates the perfect environment to share challenges, insights, and solutions that truly resonate with your trust.
The Trust Leaders’ Network connects trusts and leaders at all stages of maturity, ensuring you can learn from those at a similar stage or steps ahead.
Visit up to four trusts across the year, each carefully selected to present a different aspect of effective practice or trust development.
Each visit is expertly facilitated by recently-retired CEOs of successful trusts, and designed for optimal learning and collaboration among peers who share our ethos of hard-edged collaboration to support mutual improvement.
Your trust leaders will also benefit from a series of webinars as well as our annual Trust Leaders' Conference to network, explore best practice, and connect with leading thinkers and business experts.
We know effective trust leadership is a team effort, so you are welcome to bring different members of your trust team to trust visits and webinars to ensure the right insights and strategies reach those who can put them into action.
CEOs and DCEOs in the network can also strengthen their leadership and personal impact on a personally and professionally nourishing two-day residential.
The TLN’s spiral curriculum explores recurring and evolving themes from different perspectives, while allowing space to tackle urgent and novel challenges. Themes include:
- Growth
- Developing and sustaining a one-trust culture
- Building and scaling an effective model for central operations and school improvement
- Balancing alignment, autonomy and innovation
- Effective governance
- Growing your people
- Maximising the trust dividend
The Trust Leaders’ Network enables you to:
Insights
Gather actionable insights by attending a programme of purposefully-planned, expertly-facilitated visits to trusts across the country
Train
Train up to two leaders in our pioneering Trust Peer Review methodology and join our pool of reviewers to go out and conduct Trust Peer Reviews
Connect
Connect with outside experts and business leaders through our webinar programme
Gain inspiration
Gain inspiration and influence policy and practice at our annual Trust Leaders’ Conference
Enhance
Nourish yourself and enhance your leadership impact at our revitalising Trust Leaders’ Residential
Contribute
Contribute to sector improvement as part of Challenge Partners’ national Network of Excellence, made up of over 540 schools and 137 trusts
100%
of respondents taking part in a trust visit learned something that they’d be taking back to their own trust
100%
of respondents taking part in a webinar learned something they’d be taking back to their own trust
"Some of the best education system leadership minds all in the same room at the same time talking to each other. Affirming, inspiring, challenging."
David Coaché, Executive Headteacher of Bengeworth Multi Academy Trust, Trust Leaders' Conference 2024
"Great people. Great leadership. Great coherence. All on display really well, with humility and openness. Really good to see a large, mature trust in action and how it is still evolving, thinking and developing. Slightly reassuring to see them mulling over the same issues we have, just at a bigger scale!"
Gavin Henderson, CEO of Windsor Learning Partnership, Trust Visit at Lighthouse Schools Partnership
“The Trust Leaders’ Residential provides a reflective space for exploration, support, challenge and innovative thinking. No other course, conference or training provides trust leaders with an opportunity to gain such an insightful and privileged opportunity to deeply analyse the key aspects of how we think, behave and act in order to accelerate our personal and professional development for sustainable improvement and necessary to tackle the many challenges the we face across the sector.”
Sharon Burt, CEO of Solent Academies Trust, Trust Leaders' Residential 2024
2025/26 subscriptions open now
Secure your place for a year of collaboration and impact. Sign up by 16 May to take advantage of early bird prices. Have a look at our new brochure and get in touch with us at partnershipsteam@challengepartners.org to discuss your options