Interview with Laura Taylor from The 3-18 Education Trust
Recently, we have been exceptionally proud to be working with a UK educational trust (The 3-18 Education Trust) as part of their Aspire Leadership Programme, supporting teachers and support staff across the Trust to develop their leadership skills.
We caught up with Laura Taylor, HR Director who is leading this exceptional initiative, to discuss why it’s so important for us to be talking about topics like Growth Mindset within the education sector.
Why do you feel it is important for teachers and their support staff within the UK to go through some form of leadership training?
The desire of our leadership programme is to bring both our teaching staff and support staff together as one staff body. You can sometimes find in schools that there may be a level of separation between these two staff bodies and so it is imperative that our employees come together, to grow together, to ensure we are continuously driving educational improvement for the benefit of all our students.
Through this investment we are highlighting our commitment to develop leaders and enhance leadership capability throughout our Trust to sustain our future growth and to ensure that driving school improvement, for the benefit of our young people, is at the heart of what we do.
What values has the Aspire programme been based around?
Underpinned by our Trust values (Accomplished-Resilient-Compassionate), this is an exciting, high-level programme for our aspiring leaders. It aims to bring individuals together, from across the Trust, who may never have met each other before to collaborate and work together. Specialists in leadership and associated subjects are facilitating the programme, where growth mindset, action learning and mentoring will also be a strong component of it to drive our Trust values.
We are aiming to build the skills and characteristics that can be transferred back into their teams and departments to drive improvement and to enhance the future careers of our employees.
What are your next plans for the Aspire programme?
We are being creative and flexible about our career pathways and would like to see transition of careers across our education phases, so opportunities will never be limited to the current school in which our employees work. Where previously internal career development will have been limited to the school our employees work in, the opportunities are now wider – we’re currently at eight schools and soon to grow further.
As our Trust grows, we can then harness this growth to open up more leadership opportunities for all. It’s about creating a strong and diverse workforce. It may be that, in time, we look to offer this exciting programme out to other Trust’s who may be interested in exploring this new venture with us!