Russell Hobby has previously been dubbed a “teaching Benjamin Button”, with each career move taking him closer to the classroom.
He’s gone from being an arm’s-length education consultant, to running the National Association of Headteachers, to working with new recruits at Teach First.
He’s taken another step closer to those classrooms in his latest role, where he is now in charge of 45 schools across the south and east of England as CEO of the Kemnal Academies Trust (TKAT).
Despite the chain’s size – only eight other MATs are larger – the 53-year-old calls it “one of the best-kept secrets in education”.
‘Where’s the action?’
Hobby’s move into the trust sector was a surprise. Since 2017, he had been CEO of Teach First, the education charity tasked with recruiting top graduates for England’s poorest schools.
When asked why he decided to go, he responds: “Eight years.”
He had “done a lot there …but it gets to a point where it’s someone else’s turn”.
“When I’m making career choices, what I’m looking at is where’s the action, where can we make a difference? I can do more in a trust than I could in almost any other role in the system,” he explains.
“It seems to me that after years of devolution and with all the resource constraints that central government has, the levers of change are much closer to schools now.”
The ‘big pressures’
After taking the reins at TKAT, Hobby set himself the target of visiting all the trust’s schools by Christmas. Two months in and he’s through 20.
“You know my background. I’m not going to walk into a classroom and give a teacher feedback on what they’re doing,” he says.
“My job is to build a strategy for the next five to seven years. These visits are telling me what are the big pressures on the system.”
Cash is “tight”. SEND diagnosis is up and provision “is increasingly stretched”, with the trust “entering into some very adversarial relationships as a result”.
Pupil numbers are also “rising and falling in different areas” and then “you’ve got more of a sense now that school is more of an optional activity post-Covid. The attendance crisis is very real”.
However, the trust is “in a relatively robust position organisationally”, with “healthy” finances. He credits this, in part, to its size.
“That’s where scale comes into play – we can support individual schools with particular challenges. It feels like a very firm foundation.”
‘Stealing’ from other trusts
While Hobby’s been visiting the TKAT academies, his senior team “has been out there meeting as many other trusts as we can”. They’ve been told to “steal everything that we can” from the likes of United Learning, Ark and Oasis.
“To be honest, I don’t have to steal it because they’re queuing up to say, ‘This is what we do, how can we help?’ People talk of a competitive system, but it doesn’t feel very competitive to me.”
Two of his directors recently visited The Regis School in Bognor Regis to look at its “aspirations curriculum”. There, every child “gets their career aspirations assessed at the start [in year 7] and that helps to shape their provision”, according to Hobby.
“You’ve got to think about careers, the earlier the better. I would start in primary to be honest. If you fancy a career in medicine, if you’re not doing the right GCSEs then that’s ruled out already.”
The autonomy tightrope
Hobby says TKAT “is already excellent in some areas”, too, highlighting its special, early years and primary provision.
For these, it is “in a position where people should be coming to have a look at what we’re doing and people should be trying to steal from us”.
But he’s identified secondary outcomes as an area for improvement. He’s yet to meet “a single headteacher who doesn’t agree”.
To aid this, the trust “needs to put some focus on” introducing “shared” curriculum materials for key stage 3. He also wants to convert teacher recruitment into “a shared enterprise across [the] trust”.
But Hobby will walk a “tightrope” to preserve heads’ “autonomy”.
“Every great head I’ve met is a little bit unusual in some way,” he says. “We cannot wring the spirit out of the system.
“You don’t really want it eroded through the finance system, human resource decisions, the IT and technology – that’s where a large trust can free heads up to be the leaders of learning.”
Four RISE schools
Four of Kemnal’s secondaries have been added to the Department for Education RISE school improvement programme, after being identified as ‘stuck’.
Stuck schools are those rated ‘requires improvement’ following an earlier inspection that resulted in a grade below ‘good’. Previously, they could have been in line for academy orders or trust rebrokerages.
But the government has seconded 65 experienced turnaround leaders as advisers who are appointed to specific RISE schools in their region to identify priorities and propose an outside organisation to deliver support.
Hobby believes it’s a “good way forward”, given the advisers have “a track record of school improvement, given there’s a judgement being made and it’s adapted to the school’s need and when you think what the alternatives will be for a school that’s struggling”.
He adds: “Sustaining school improvement is a never-ending job and schools go through cycles as well. Knee-jerk reactions to early signs of challenge are not the right thing to do, which is not about having low ambitions.”
Two of the TKAT schools were adjudged not to require the additional input from a supporting organisation, while the others have been paired with neighbouring trusts.
Hobby insists that “when people tell us something needs to improve, it’s not a reflection on our values, our leadership, our own mission – it’s just a piece of data that we can use”.
And “if it comes with some extra resources attached to it, even better”.
“I’m never going to turn away help… so bring it on. The pupils, staff and parents know exactly what is going on in these schools.
“Whether the government has spotted it or not, they know the truth, so there’s no point in hiding from any of this.”
White working-class communities
Hobby says the debate over the results for white working-class children “is very real” in many of his schools.
Star Academies CEO Sir Hamid Patel, who is co-chairing the inquiry into white working-class outcomes, said last month the youngsters “seem the most resistant to the transformative work” of schools.
Hobby thinks the differences aren’t “about race or class”. Instead, it’s an issue of “place and communities we have not served as a society very well for a long period of time”.
“I think families are making quite rational choices around what jobs are [available locally], what job am I going to get after school, is it worth me giving up my summer evenings for revision, what will that qualification get me.
“It’s not a lack of ambition at all. They’re saying, ‘There’s nothing for me if I do that’.”
With schools “the last institution standing” in many areas, they must try to solve the problem, Hobby says.
“We shouldn’t have to do it, but we have to. It’s very hard for young people when networks don’t exist to know all of the jobs that are available.
“Some of that social network is lacking, and I think we can do that sort of thing.”
Moving out of the shadows
Hobby believes the trust could help shape debates around this and other hot-button issues, like inclusion.
He points to the trust’s use of its two special schools, whose leaders regularly visit the chain’s mainstream settings and advise on the building of “specialist resource provision”.
They will also “have a role to play” in the development of the trust’s shared key stage three curriculum, as well as its “teaching and learning frameworks”.
“TKAT is one of the best-kept secrets in education. People put their head down and just get on with it,” Hobby continues. “I want to honour that sense of it being a trust that gets on with things, but I see it as part of my job to get it the recognition it deserves.”
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