In multi-academy trusts (MATs), leadership encompasses much more than running a single school. As MATs continue to grow, Julian Drinkall – who is CEO of the 43-school – gives his thoughts on the fundamentals of leadership, emphasising the need for balance.
He says: “I think leadership is in part about experience and in part about judgement. One of the big pieces of judgement is knowing when to be committed, utterly intransient, inflexible, and insist on maintaining a legacy but also knowing when it makes sense to be adaptable and flexible.
You have to embrace some disruption, but you can’t go overboard.
“How much disruption is right? You need to balance keeping the best of what you’ve already established versus the best of the future. That’s a judgement call. You have to embrace some disruption, but you can’t go overboard.
“Different people respond to change in different ways, over different periods of time. You have to decide when it’s right to turn up the heat, or to slow things down. So, the pace of change and the quantum of change and the type of change is really important. You have to work through the trade-off between commitment and flexibility, and also analyse the trade-off between technical and theoretical skills versus relational skills.
“People talk about ‘culture eating strategy for lunch’; I personally think that you can have great technical strategies which you’ve thought through, quantified and analysed. But that’s utterly useless if you can’t bring people along with you, if you can’t communicate what you’re implementing and why.
Multi-academy trusts are providers of education. But they’re also businesses.
“That whole notion of technical skills versus adaptive skills, commitment versus flexibility, is utterly crucial. Knowing when to rely on theory, technology, science and data is very important, but if you can’t communicate, it’s useless.
“Another trade-off is top-down versus bottom-up. You’ve got to listen to people, you’ve got to understand what the zeitgeist is around you; you’ve got to discern what the objections and resistance you encounter are all about. Some of it will be irrational and illogical; some of it will be well thoughtout and resourced.
“Good leadership constitutes when to choose between old versus new, stick or twist, innovate versus reassure. Sometimes one finds a caped crusader, but even that caped crusader needs a jolly good team around them. In a successful school, or a successful school group, whilst there may be a figurehead, that person is nurturing and giving responsibility to other critical people.”
On business and education: A cross-sector puzzle
Multi-academy trusts are providers of education. But they’re also businesses. This dual identity poses some questions about who should be running them, and what we should be looking for in our cross-sector leadership teams.
I don’t think a lot of school leaders know enough about running a big portfolio organisation.
Julian says: “MAT leadership needs to be stronger and more capable. There are some good leaders, but there are quite a lot of holes. You look around, there are a few people like myself who have come from outside the sector, and who maybe have more general management and leadership skills; and then there are a lot of people who’ve grown up from within the sector, through the headteacher role, the executive headteacher role.
“Both models can work; but both are imperfect. I just don’t think a lot of school leaders know enough about running a big portfolio organisation. They’re used to running a single entity then maybe two, three, four, five schools. But go beyond that, and it becomes a different task.
“Then again, people who have come from outside education need to understand the language and the priorities of the sector. Everyone always says that their sector is different, but in education that’s probably true.
“People come from other sectors, and there’s an assumption about economies of scale, that there are obvious and easy efficiencies. Actually, a genuine, deep understanding of individual schools is really important. To make the judgement that schools are the same, or are on the same pathway, is flawed.
People come from other sectors, and there’s an assumption that there are obvious and easy efficiencies.
“I think we’re failing to get the best of both worlds. What’s the sweet spot? I’m not sure we’re training educationalists who’ve had great leadership experience to become leaders of big MATs; but equally we’re not attracting enough leaders from outside of education to help mature the sector.”
On the role of the CEO: Working with headteachers
As a previous CEO of AET, one of the largest MATs in the country, and now leading headteachers in 42 schools as CEO of GLF, Julian can offer a considered distillation of what the CEO role entails, and how to maximise efficiency in the CEO/headteacher relationship.
“Personally, I never have an ego contest with headteachers. When I bring headteachers together to look at school improvement, I always insist that we do so through a holistic, 360 degree point of view. If you split the world up into education versus finance versus marketing and development we’d be in trouble.
None of us have the monopoly on wisdom, none of us will get everything right.
“The headteacher will always be the more knowledgeable person in terms of pedagogy and curriculum, but I like to think that I can suggest ways of improving marketing, or communications. I think all of us know our core strengths and weaknesses, and that’s the key thing with leadership in general. Where you identify weak spots, you need to compensate, to build a team to cover the issues, or to bring in talent to make improvements.
“I think a CEO of a MAT is a very, very difficult role. None of us have the monopoly on wisdom, none of us will get everything right, all of the time. The critical thing is getting the right people to help out. I enjoy that. Headteachers will say thank you, for the support I’ve given.
“For example, their communications strategy with regards to the community is enormously improved, because I’ve introduced them to someone who writes fabulous copy; or I’ve introduced them to someone who really understands their parents in a more analytical and thoughtful way.”
On governance: The need for experience
Julian goes on to describe how to maximise the impact of school governance. At AET, he was committed to raising the quality of governing bodies, in line with raising overall standards within the trust. He explains: “When I took over at AET, 90 per cent of the schools were in deficit and the vast majority of them had some very poor educational results.
I raised the quality of the chairs, and therefore of the governing bodies.
So, in a short period of time, I removed all chairs of the boards of governors – although I made it clear that all were welcome to remain on the governing board. And then I brought in really experienced educationalists to be the chairs, such as CEOs of other multi-academy trusts, and HMIs from Ofsted.
“So, I raised the quality of the chairs, and therefore of the governing bodies. I did this because I wanted the headteachers to feel that they had the right amount of support and challenge around them. I insisted that every headteacher at AET sat on one other governing board. This was very good for their professional development; they would learn the context of another school. It would also be good for the school, to have a current practitioner on the board of trustees.”
On the future: Plans and opportunities at GLF
aged 2 to 19 in an array of settings, with around 2,500 employees. The trust’s schools are located in Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, Surrey, West Sussex and the London Boroughs of Wandsworth and Croydon. Since joining the trust as CEO in December 2023, Julian has been developing his near-term and 5-year planning.
He says: “In the near term, I want to really focus on the schools, to help them to be even more successful than they are today. The first goal I’ve set myself is that, 18-24 months from today, all those schools will look back and say, we’re in a better, healthier position than we were in before. So, my first focus is the individual schools.
“Then, assuming that confidence, trust, engagement, as well as overt external success has occurred in our schools, I’ll be looking to build the trust, and the trust brand, and the trust processes. I’m always going through the process of decentralisation and autonomy, trying to make sure that we’re looking towards each individual school.
“My five-year plan for is that GLF will be one of the greatest school groups in the world.
“And then my sense is that, as a trust, we can say, here’s the group, here’s what works. But it’s very nuanced, it’s a case of identifying what succeeds in particular circumstances. I think a lot of trusts quite often try to stamp, prematurely, their policies and standards on schools. I think it’s important to have a long-term view.
“My five-year plan for GLF is that it will be one of the greatest school groups, not just in the UK but in the world. I want our children to have extraordinary experiences. I don’t think the UK has a monopoly on wisdom of what constitutes a great education. I want the trust to be distinctive and bold, I want it to be holistic.
But the small steps, the pathways to get there, are really important. And that starts with proving that you can make life better for the schools you’ve already got in the group, in a very practical, tangible way. And then I think that you earn respect and trust, you build confidence and you build momentum, and then you can universalise some of the systems.”
As Julian’s work at GLF gets underway, there will be lots to learn from the strategies he implements and the successes he will surely demonstrate. We look forward to following his story in the months to come.
Julian Drinkall – CV
Educated at Eton College, Oxford University and Harvard Business School, Julian’s early career focused on business development, corporate finance and business strategy. In 2007 he became CEO of Macmillan Educational Services, which inspired his interest in education.
He says: “What really mattered to me was the enormous impact that one can have through education. Education is a vast endeavour. It’s often seen to be the third largest human activity, after health care and military service. There’s a huge amount of money spent on it, and 80 per cent of that goes on salaries, on people. A relatively small portion of finance supports content and technology. I figured I could have a bigger impact on children’s lives by running schools. And, in fact, by running big school groups.”
In 2014, Julian took on the CEO role at Alpha Plus Group which, with 18 schools and colleges, was the largest independent school group in London. From 2016-2021 he was CEO at Academies Enterprise Trust and since December 2023 he has been CEO of GLF Schools, a multi-academy trust supporting 42 schools in South East England.
This article first appeared in the latest edition of Academy Trust Leadership Today, out now online here.
