Category: CEO’s Blog

CEO’s Blog: March 2026 – “I fear he has suffered a great success.”

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In December 1985 bass player, singer, lyricist and founder member of Pink Floyd Roger Waters left the band.  Believing the band to be “creatively dead”, Waters then embarked on a bitter feud with his former band mates when they decided to continue without him.  Finally settling out of court, but admitting to having “lost”, one of the most acrimonious rifts in music history was solidified.

Embarking on a solo career, Roger Waters found himself in Cincinnati on a tour to promote his album.  In close proximity in both space and time – within the same city, and within the same week – Pink Floyd were also performing.  Waters played to an audience of only 2, 000 fans, whilst his former band performed at the Colts Stadium before a crowd of 70, 000.  In an interview many years later, he recounted this experience and how it made him feel.

ID 129268022 © Michael Bush | Dreamstime.com

Whilst with Pink Floyd, Waters had penned numerous classic rock songs and the band had sold millions of albums.  Even now, “Dark Side of The Moon”, “Wish You Were Here”, “Animals” and “The Wall” remain classics that many self-respecting music enthusiasts will own copies of.  These four albums alone sold over 110 million copies worldwide, and this is before streaming and downloading figures are included.  In short, Pink Floyd were massive – by any standards. 

178386664 | Pink Floyd © 9parusnikov | Dreamstime.com

Playing in a small theatre to 2, 000 was an experience that changed Roger Waters.  For a decade or more, almost everything he had touched turned to gold.  Having parodied the trappings of success in the song “Money” in which he wrote “new car, caviar, daydream – think I’ll buy me a football team”, he was in a position to know what absolute wealth looked and felt like.  In his interview, he stated that the taste of failure, whilst somewhat bitter, was important.  He quoted Jung, who wrote of a colleague that “I am greatly worried for him, as he has suffered a great success”. 

We often emphasise the importance of resilience and tenacity.  Indeed, they are incorporated into our Trust values for colleagues and pupils alike.  The ability to overcome difficulty is what, in so many instances, leads to growth and learning.  Intelligence itself is sometimes defined as “knowing what to do when we don’t know what to do”, and placing ourselves and others into situations where we are uncomfortable can be a valuable part of our development.  When I was a younger teacher, we were urged to make our classrooms places of “high challenge, low stress” – and that is something I continue to believe is a healthy learning environment.  Without challenge, there is no change. 

The very best teachers have always balanced the support and scaffolding required to enable all pupils to access and engage with learning with exposure to problems, challenges and conundrums that will test both the skills and the fortitude of the learner.  More and more examinations are centred on problem-solving, or are synoptic in their requirements – preventing rote learning and the revision of standard, “model” answers.  This really tests understanding.  Crucially, it replicates the real world that we have a responsibility to prepare our children and young people for.  Being “comfortable when uncomfortable” is a phrase used in sports coaching, but is equally applicable to all learning.  In an age where information Is more and more readily accessible and available, those who can use and manipulate what they know to resolve what they don’t will truly inherit the earth!

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Mike.

CEO’s Blog: January 2026 – “Learning at the heart of all we do.”

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For this month’s post, I want to highlight how inspired I have been by the exemplification of one of our Trust values, “Learning at the heart of all we do.”  Whilst it may seem obvious for an educational provider to hold such a value dear, it is very easy for such organisations to become distracted or deflected from our core purpose.  For me, this value is about both the delivery of learning by the organisation and its stakeholders, but also the acquisition of learning into the organisation and its stakeholders. 

This academic year saw the launch of John Taylor MAT’s “Cheers for Peers” programme: an initiative whereby colleagues can nominate those staff in their school who they feel deserving of recognition for the exemplification of a specific Trust value.  Reading the nominations for last half term’s chosen value (Learning at the heart of all we do) I have been deeply humbled by the testimonies of those across our schools when they describe the generosity and commitment of those they work alongside. 

Our in-house staff magazine (“JTMATters”), now a well-established publication, always highlights and celebrates the events, innovations and accomplishments of individuals and groups within and across our schools.  Each edition seems to have even more content that both informs and inspires.  Our recent families’ edition is designed to communicate more effectively what being part of the Trust means to our schools and the staff who teach, lead and support their children’s learning and development.

Most recently, this month in fact, we saw the launch of “John Taylor Training” (www.johntaylortraining.co.uk), an umbrella entity that seeks to bring coherence and synergies between our various strands of staff development.  These include The John Taylor SCITT (providers of teacher experience programmes and initial teacher training), John Taylor Teaching School Hub (provider of Appropriate Body services for Early Career Teachers, support for ECTs and their mentors, and the delivery of a wide-ranging suite of National Professional Qualifications [NPQs], the Staffordshire Research School (at the heart of disseminating the best research, and supporting its adoption into school strategy) and our own in-house staff development programmes.  With a strapline of “from our staffrooms to yours”, we aim to provide more support for more colleagues in more schools – always with “learning at the heart of all we do”.

None of the above would be possible without committed colleagues to drive these initiatives forward, and none of those colleagues would have anything to deliver were it not for the colleagues across our Trust whose work is of a quality worthy of sharing, and who are willing to share their expertise and accomplishments so generously.  Long may that continue!

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Mike.

CEO’s Blog: December 2025 – “Show up on time, know the text, and have an idea!”

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Regular readers may be aware that there has been a break in my blogging for several months.  I can only blame a lethal cocktail of busy times whilst working, a period of very welcome annual leave in the summer, and an absence of inspiration for new blog content.  However, I placed upon my “to do” list for this week to “start blogging again”, so here we are. 

This month, I am sharing two seemingly unrelated experiences in the last fortnight.

The first experience is a meeting within our SCITT (initial teacher training) strategic board, in which we were advised that some of the schools, and trusts, where trainees had traditionally been placed were becoming increasingly prescriptive of the “required” learning resources for lessons and series of lessons, and the “authorised” pedagogical approaches to delivery via the teacher.  All this under a mantle of “best practice”.

This can be problematic for two reasons:

First, the trainee will need to understand how to build the learner experience in their classroom through planning, resource creation and curation, and then nuancing, adapting and yes, at times, fundamentally changing what they have prepared and delivered previously.  Without such a process, of “safe” trial and error within the confines set by a watchful mentor and in a supportive school, we run the risk of teachers who may not be proficient in all the required standards (both with a small and a capital “S”) we need from them for a lifetime of impact on children and young people. As with the use of artificial intelligence, we should allow others (including machines) to undertake tasks essential to our work only when we ourselves can perform those tasks.  When we do this, they save us time and effort we can devote to other things.  In the reverse, where the prescribed lesson plan or AI product produces something that we cannot, we become deskilled and disconnected.  We no longer “own” – in a proprietorial or accountability sense – what we are working with.

Second, there is an assumption with “best practice” that we have reached the summit of the mountain.  Those of us who have worked in the sector for a considerable period of time will recall what “best practice” looked like, and how it manifested in classrooms, twenty years ago.  Our world revolved around “differentiation” (by task and by outcome), “preferred learning styles” (remember “visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners” listed in school registers and planners?), water bottles on every table for constant sipping, and group tasks being undertaken within a thematic, blended, skills-rich curriculum.  Some may wince reading all that, whist others may giggle.  Are we so sure that our own “best practice” will be immune from such derision twenty years from now?  If not, we should hesitate before we congratulate ourselves upon, and then prescribe robustly, the “best practice” of today.  To do so is the worst form of presentism.

The second experience was how profoundly a video “short” on YouTube impacted upon me.  In this piece, easily sourced, the Hollywood actor Tom Hanks recounts a tale of his early theatre days in repertory as an unpaid, intern, understudy in Cleveland, Ohio.  In this story, the cast of “Hamlet”, on the back of a successful opening night (and consequent late party) rocked up to rehearsals the next day so hung over that they could not get it together.  In a fit of rage, the director yelled “I can’t do this for you.  You have to show up on time, know the text and have an idea!  Now, let’s take ten and then go again!”  Hanks reflected that, as a twenty year-old, he could do those things: arrive on time (or, even better, a little early), know what he was there to do, and have a sense of being able to bring something that others could not bring to the work “and move it a little bit further on down the line”. 

For our teachers, trainee and more experienced, I believe it to be essential that they “show up on time” certainly, “know the script” – in terms of the subject content, the way it will be assessed, and the children or young people who need to learn it – and “have an idea” in the way that they can create, develop, nuance and adapt their work to own it, and take pride in it.  Without the idea, there is no ownership, and without ownership there can be no pride in accomplishment. 

To conclude, there are clear benefits to aligning the “what” (i.e. content) of the curriculum – and we continue to do so across our subjects and across our schools.  We can work together in a spirit of collegiality to build and adapt resources, we can discuss transitions and progression meaningfully and assess against common standards, comparing the impact of our work within and across schools.  But when the “what” transcends too much into the “how” (delivery), we begin to risk the creativity of teaching and erode professional accountability. 

We cannot celebrate an individual’s accomplishments, or hold them to account, for decisions they have not made.  The best colleagues always demand an element of agency in their work – and we should tread very cautiously before removing it.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Mike.