Executive coaching 

Our executive coaching service helps CEOs and trust leaders find space to prioritise, re-energise and reflect — on what they've learnt, how they see the future for their organisation, and the opportunities and risks ahead. 

The Space + Time coaching programme sits within a broader range of development programmes designed specifically for education clients. It's ideal for: 

• CEOs and trust leaders who want clarity on their priorities and to work to their full potential. 
• CEO/trust leader designates as part of their development journey. 

Successful coaching relies on a strong relationship of trust between you and your coach. We offer an initial free-of-charge chemistry session to make sure both parties are confident the relationship will work.  

Clients can then opt for a term's course of four sessions (usually three weeks apart) or a full programme of 12 sessions over an academic year. Sessions typically last 60–90 minutes, delivered through a mix of face-to-face and online meetings. 

The coaching team brings leadership, education, crisis and project management expertise. It includes Iain Blatherwick, our former managing partner; Emma Hughes, a qualified HR director and accredited coach with senior roles in two large national school trusts; and Nick MacKenzie, head of education and accredited executive coach, who sits on the firm's board and has over ten years' experience advising education boards and executive teams. 

We also offer a 'Towards a coaching culture' programme for trusts - helping organisations embed coaching as a leadership approach across the trust, not only at CEO level. It's well suited to CEOs looking to strengthen their leadership pipeline and improve staff retention.

#EdInfluence podcast 

The #EdInfluence podcast is hosted by Nick MacKenzie, our head of education and accredited executive coach. It features down-to-earth conversations with leaders from education and beyond, exploring the human side of leadership. 

Now in its fifth series, the podcast has attracted a diverse range of influential leaders sharing their stories and insights. Series 5 includes conversations with: 

• Andrew Warren: former DfE regional director and coach, on authentic connection and leadership over a 40-year career. 
• Paul Estes: former leader at Dell, Amazon and Microsoft, on innovation, AI literacy and what makes organisations perform. 
• Charlotte Blant: founder and CEO of Tiro, on values-led leadership and why "you can't innovate with one foot on the brake". 
• Edward Vitalis: CEO of Invictus Education Trust, on why a finance background is a "superpower for education CEOs" and how governance, estates, risk and growth outweigh pedagogy in the modern leadership role. 
• Professor Lucy Easthope: a leading authority on disaster recovery, on burnout, vocational awe and building resilience in peacetime. 

The podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and Amazon Music.

School leaders survey 

Our school leaders survey is one of the sector's most significant independent research tools, giving trust leaders a clear evidence base for policy discussions and strategic planning. 

Hundreds of school and trust leaders contribute, representing more than 1,000 schools responsible for hundreds of thousands of pupils.  

It covers financial resilience, government policy satisfaction, SEND, staffing, Ofsted, parental complaints and more. Key findings include: 

• 85% of school leaders feel negative or very negative about their financial situation compared to 12 months ago, with only 4% feeling positive. 
• 64% said they were "not very confident" or "not confident at all" about their organisation's financial security over the next three years. 
• Nine in ten (89%) were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with school and academy funding; 90% were dissatisfied with SEND funding. 

The survey provides a sector-wide snapshot that trust CEOs can draw on when engaging with boards, local authorities, government and the media.

Governance reviews 

External governance reviews provide critical insights for academy trust boards and are an important part of maintaining effective governance. We carry out governance reviews across the trust sector and draw on the patterns we observe to help boards strengthen their practice. 

Best practice is to carry out an external governance review every three years. Over 60% of attendees at EdCon2026 had undergone a review within the last three years, leaving around 30% either overdue or never having had one. 

The most common themes our reviews identify are: 

• The CEO as trustee: an arrangement that can work well but requires active, periodic sense-checking and management of conflicts of interest, rather than passive acceptance of an inherited arrangement. 
• Committee chair tenure: continuity has value, but entrenchment over time brings real risk; refreshing leadership at a certain point matters. 
• Board papers and strategic focus: papers produced by the executive can focus too heavily on operational matters rather than strategy; guidance for report authors is often needed. 
• Trustee induction: new trustees often arrive enthusiastic but underprepared; good practice includes a trustee handbook, an induction checklist and signposted resources. 
• The governance professional: often carrying a considerable workload with insufficient capacity to work proactively; ensuring adequate bandwidth matters. 

The overarching message: strong governance and robust pay setting are the same story. Both require independent judgement, constructive challenge, careful documentation and a culture of accountability with openness to scrutiny throughout.

Executive pay reviews 

We advise on executive pay setting for school trusts, supporting trust leaders and trustees with processes that meet the obligations and expectations within the Academies Trust Handbook. 

Each project is different. We take time to understand the trust's context, level of challenge, organisational structure and distribution of leadership — looking at geography, strategic plan, past and future growth, and performance indicators. 

Working with many different trusts has enabled us to develop our advice and methodology, building on deep understanding of school trusts and, crucially, the regulator's expectations — delivering a best practice approach to executive pay setting. 

The three-stage methodology covers: 

1. Understanding the organisation: context, structure, strategic plan and leadership distribution. 
2. Data gathering: using the Brightmine salary benchmarking tool to deliver salary data across education, charities, public sector and private sector, refined by organisation size and geographic location. 
3. Analysis and recommendations: including reward design, review of executive job descriptions, provision of an executive contract, and creation of an executive pay policy with a robust, compliant framework for trustees to follow annually. 

We've worked in partnership with CST and Brightmine since 2021 to build a salary survey for the school trusts sector - a trust-specific benchmarking tool providing data on salary expectations for executive roles, filterable by organisation size and geographic location.