Jan 12, 2025 | Business, Leadership, Partnerships, Professional development, Science, Updates
10 year anniversary blog – what I’ve loved and learned about being a freelance consultant, and some tips for anyone considering a similar move. “What are you prepared to give up in order to have what you truly want?” This question changed my life. It was on a wall calendar in 2013 and prompted my move away from classroom-based teaching towards consultancy, with considerable soul-searching along the way. In short, it launched Astin Consulting which last term, unbelievably, celebrated its 10th birthday. So what did I give up? A...
Aug 31, 2024 | Leadership, Partnerships, Professional development
School partnerships mean different things to different people, including: joint events or shared facilities relationships with parents or feeder schools charitable support for a partner school overseas cross-sector co-created projects business partnerships research collaborations with universities and everything in between! Understandably, these different flavours of partnership (brilliantly described in Graeme Lawrie’s book “50 useful things to know about school partnerships”) beg the question: “who leads partnerships?” One...
Dec 13, 2023 | Leadership, Partnerships, Primary, Professional development, Secondary
Fresh from the buzz of Partnerships Week 2023 and as the year draws to a close, it feels like a good time to reflect on school partnerships: what’s changed, what’s working well and where 2024 might take us. This year has witnessed unprecedented challenges in education: student attendance, teacher recruitment, school building decay, questions over Ofsted, severe budgetary pressures and family poverty, continued COVID fallout for young people and more. Dame Alison Peacock, CEO of Chartered College of Teaching, referred in her discussion with me...
Nov 7, 2023 | Communication, Leadership, Partnerships, Primary, Professional development, Secondary, Updates
This article was written for the Independent Schools Council website and also appeared on the Schools Together website in November 2023. It’s easy to see how some view partnerships with state schools as nice to have but non-essential. Historically, many such collaborations developed from individual passions and goodwill. But some schools are taking a more strategic approach. They have aligned partnerships with their school aims and ethos and have embedded partnerships in their school development plans, aware of how much impact they bring....
