The appointment of an Operations Director comes at a pivotal moment in the growth and evolution of the Cranmer Education Trust (CET). Over the past 2 years we have doubled in size, welcoming 3 new primary schools and 2 new secondary schools. Our family of schools has almost 8,000 pupils from Rising-3s to 18, and over 900 staff, including our Initial Teacher Training arm, Manchester Nexus and our Teacher Training and Development Hub – The East Manchester Teaching School Hub.

The CET’s mission is to provide the best education, care and nurture for young people in our schools that are committed to:

We work in boroughs where there are high levels of disadvantage, and we believe, and have shown, that our provision really does make a difference to young people’s lives and opportunities.

The key to holistic educational excellence, which enables children to thrive, is our people. They are the heart and mainspring of everything. If you value and get things right for staff, they will value and get things right for children. Our People Strategy is central, focused on creating a positive workplace culture where people have professional agency and access to high-quality professional development, where staff wellbeing is enhanced, workload is reduced and people understand that they are part of something bigger that gives them a real sense of purpose, self-belief and belonging. We aim to build capacity across the trust at every level, to create a reservoir of potential that is our pool of talent for sustainable leadership and excellence in our schools.

People who lead schools face high levels of expectation and pressure. Our role as a trust is to strategically and operationally enable - to help them and their teams flourish as leaders, who create great schools for our children. We need to provide the structures, systems and tools based on our collective knowledge and experience that will ensure maximum effectiveness and efficiency. Some things are prescriptive – the technical and regulatory environment makes this essential. We are a single employer with a statutory duty to ensure that terms, conditions and opportunities are fair and equitable across all our schools. We are accountable for a lot of public money, even though there is never enough to do what school leaders would like. When the centre establishes consistent systems that help create efficiencies and manage workloads, there is a liberation in knowing the parameters of where I am accountable, and where I can rely on others.

That said, context matters. We do not come with a “school in a box”. Our schools are different, and we cherish and promote their unique identities in their communities. They are at different points in their development and face different pressures and challenges. One size does not fit all in a trust, any more than it does in a classroom. Our philosophy is agency within frameworks, based on shared values and principles. The central executive team develops the business frameworks and policies and works closely with leaders in schools to ensure consistency in application where there is a legal requirement for compliance, and coherence where the framework is applied in different ways by schools, because of where they are and what they need. It’s an approach that needs our executive directors to communicate, to be visible, to listen, to explain, to challenge and always be ready to adapt, and always work with the flow of the schools so that the trust is not adding to workload or complexity.

All our executive directors report to the Deputy CEO: Business Strategy, to ensure that we are working coherently and modelling the collaboration that we expect of all our schools. All our executive directors meet regularly with the CEO to keep them up to date and strategically aware; those conversations will directly influence how the trust works with schools to promote educational improvement and ensure that we are not holding anyone back, and we are not leaving anyone behind.

Our current priority is to ensure that schools that have recently joined the CET feel fully connected and valued and know that we are always working with them. One of the best things that has been said about CET came from one of our headteachers who took over a school that was really struggling, where change was needed across the board. Reflecting publicly on the journey, the headteacher said that working with CET was always shoulder-to-shoulder. Even when there was disagreement, there was always communication, listening, emphasising values and principles and, above all, empowering the school to do its work, which it does brilliantly.

As we grow, we do not want to lose the immediacy of engagement, or our “family” feel, and we need our Operations Director to champion it. “The trust” is all of us together, working for all the children and the staff.

We plan to expand further, particularly (but not exclusively) in primary, to build the range and depth of capacity that we have in secondary, attracting ambitious school leaders, including governance, who are committed to collaboration and raising aspirations for all. In the context of the increasing complexity of needs that all schools face, involving Special Educational Needs, safeguarding challenges, the mental health of children and families, we are looking to develop SEN bases and specialist expertise in our schools from which we will all learn. Recruitment for teacher training has been a national challenge, but we are seeing our numbers increase, partly because we have a strong and diverse partnership of schools where we can train people. We intend to increase further by exploring all possible training flexibilities to attract people who will become great teachers for our children.

This is a very diverse role. It will involve and impact on many different colleagues and aspects of the trust. As CET grows, the pivotal role of the Operations Director will be at the forefront of change, strategically and thematically promoting vision and values, ensuring initiatives, frameworks and ways of working land well. They will make sure communications are enacted well through people, through cross-phase working, matrix management and messaging in a way that holds true to our values. They will have highly developed communication skills and be able to win hearts and minds, ensuring that everyone knows not just what we do and how we do it, but why we do it, in the Cranmer way.

You will be at the heart of a growing, evolving and constantly adapting organisation with a clear civic and social purpose, within a strong, close team, working in an environment where you are surrounded by the vibrance and vivacity of young people. The post will evolve as the CET grows.

We want someone who is wholeheartedly committed to educational opportunity and excellence, social justice, and the leadership of learning, someone who will enthusiastically and purposefully lead that journey with us. They will have the intellectual stimulation of working with colleagues across teaching and business leadership and will be at the centre of transformation. At no point will they ever question whether their role makes a difference: they will see that, every day.

Yours sincerely,