Join us for an opportunity for reflection, growth, and networking

Conference Schedule:

8.15am: Arrive/coffee
8.45am: Welcome
9.00am to 10.30am: Viv Grant – Keynote
10.30am to 10.50am: Coffee
11.00am to 12.30pm: Viv Grant – Workshop
12.30pm to 1.15pm: Lunch/networking
1.15pm to 1.20pm: Introduction
1.20pm to 3.20pm: Jolyon Morris
3.30pm: Reflection and Close

Viv Grant – Cultivating Brave Leadership: What This Means for School Leaders Today

Viv’s Keynote will draw on the lessons she has learnt as an Executive Coach for Headteachers. Viv will share insights into the personal qualities that school leaders need to cultivate in pursuit of leadership styles that can be characterised as brave, authentic and courageous. Her talk will illustrate how a deeper connection with self and one’s sense of vocational purpose can build resilience and help leaders stay connected to what matters most in good school leadership.

Keynote

The keynote will cover ways in which school leaders can:

• Increase their levels of emotional resilience
• Maintain a deep connection with their core values and ability to make decisions that are more aligned to who they are and who they want to be
• Heighten their levels of self-awareness, self-management and their ability to cope more effectively with the stresses of the role
• Maximise feelings of professional satisfaction and fulfilment
• Find ways for re-discovering their joy and passion for the profession

Workshop: Cultivating Brave Leadership, It’s an Inside Job!

This workshop will aim to help school leaders to:

• Discern what drives them, how this affects levels of resilience and how to deal with heightened levels of stress
• Identify the core characteristics of typical driver behaviours and how to utilise strengths within each to increase levels of personal effectiveness.
• Determine personal action points to facilitate greater authenticity and courage in the leadership role.

Viv Grant’s book, “Staying A Head” is considered a seminal work in this area. Recognised as an expert in the field, she has contributed to various books and periodicals on the subject. As an expert commentator, her contributions have also been featured in The Guardian, London Live, Sky News, Radio Four, Woman’s Hour and the World at One.

Jolyon Morris – Building Organisational Resilience: The Key to Success

Our personal resilience as leaders is linked with the resilience of our organisations.

Schools are complex organisations with many dimensions and moving parts that can go wrong or behave in unexpected ways. Their context is one of high levels of demand, accountability, and uncertainty. When our organisations are less reliable, our personal resilience can be put under strain and the organisation is less able to achieve the outputs that it exists to achieve. This creates risk to leadership effectiveness and can undermine our resilience.

One of the key elements of developing our own resilience is to be wise to the extrinsic and intrinsic risks and seek to manage those well. Building in organisational resilience will reduce this risk and improve effectiveness.

We will explore how we can apply the research on ‘High Reliability Organisations’ to the work of the school.

• How can we ensure that things that should happen, do happen?
• How can we focus our energies on the key things that make the difference for all the children in the school, whilst avoiding distractions?
• How can we avoid risk, errors, mistakes, poor outcomes, and failures?
• What would this mean in terms of how we work in the school?

We will look at the research on high reliability organisations [HRO’s] and apply it with the aim of exploring the current context and what could be done differently.

Jolyon Morris is an organisational consultant and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He has provided consultation to organisations, leaders and managers for 20 + years and prior to that held senior leadership roles in manufacturing and commercial businesses.

Each member school has TWO free places!
This conference is for VNET members only.