Review by Dan Morrow

CEO, Cornwall Education Learning Trust

2 Feb 2025, 5:00

Book

New Domains of Educational Leadership by Leora Cruddas

By Leora Cruddas

Publisher

John Catt

ISBN 10

1036010473

Published

7 Feb 2025

Let’s get straight to it: New Domains of Educational Leadership is set to become a seminal piece in reshaping our shared philosophy of education after the pandemic. Five stars. Pre-order it now.

Okay, now let me explain why.

First, there’s the author herself. If the Confederation of School Trusts has grown significantly in recent years, it is as a direct result of Leora Cruddas’s leadership. She has rightly earned huge respect for her courage and singular intent to ensure we made not just good decisions but the right decisions in this difficult period.

That ethical leadership permeates the pages of this book, which deftly posits our own leadership role as a public service guided by the Nolan principles and a mission-led worldview of education as the optimal vehicle for human flourishing.

Second, there’s the book’s clear structure, founded on three domains of leadership which she has consolidated from all that work. At the organisational, civic and system levels, it explores key threads of purpose and impact.

As you’d expect, all of the chapters are extremely well referenced and use a variety of case studies to support and challenge its theory of change. The result is a compelling, reasoned and sensible set of paradigms to test in practice.

And then there are the guest authors, whose expertise and insights add the depth and colour of lived experience to Cruddas’s outline of a system.

Part one focuses on trust leadership itself. It builds on existing notions of servant-leadership and adds a laser-sharp focus on implementation and intent.

Here, Steve Rollett contributes an adaptable model of trust-led school improvement that I have no doubt will be adopted at scale.

Then, Ben Newmark and Tom Rees contribute what is perhaps the most resonant chapter of the whole book. It advances five principles of inclusion, somehow managing the fine balance between radical and sensible, and its model is one that I feel must surely become the sector’s norm.

Cruddas is revealed here as a leading thinker of our generation

Further chapters on governance operations and workforce are useful, if not ground-breaking. But these are vital and often overlooked aspects of trust leadership, so it’s great to see them thoroughly addressed.

Part two looks at civic leadership and provides an intelligent and thoughtful anchoring for a renewed understanding of collective purpose. Here is where Cruddas best articulates her vision – and our purpose – of nurturing schools as centres of learning and community.

After a moving example of the importance of protecting and promoting public values, it includes a chapter on community anchoring by the inimitable Ed Vainker and James Townsend, who draw on their experience at the Reach Foundation to  provide practical and inspiring examples of civic trusts in action.

But if this section best voices Cruddas’s vision, it is also where its chief weakness is exposed. For me, Cruddas doesn’t yet go far enough in looking at how civic work nestles into a multi-agency approach that goes beyond how we have previously operated.

Having said that, this remains novel and contested as structures and cultures evolve under the push and pull of new government priorities.

The book’s third and final part focuses on system leadership, and here Cruddas is unsurprisingly unabashed in advocating for academy trusts as the best vehicle for sustained school improvement.

Of course, she is respectful of the alternatives and accepting that they may be necessary to complement the work of trusts. But for her they can never bring the system-wide flourishing we need on their own.

Nor is Cruddas blind to the lessons from the early days of academisation, but what emerges here is an astute focus on building the architecture of an ethical system. Central to that is nurturing the next generation of talent, and perhaps a very different type of trust leader.

Detractors will easily dismiss this book as a puff piece for academy trusts. This would be wrong for two reasons. First, because the leadership work Cruddas proposes is not anchored to trusts. And second, because tediously-held ideology is precisely the opposite of what Cruddas argues and stands for.

She is revealed here as a leading thinker of our generation. And she demands to be contended with.

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