Dear colleague
There's no shortage of goodwill when it comes to staff wellbeing in education. Walk into almost any school or trust and you'll find leaders who care deeply about their people, who think hard about workload, who worry about retention, who want to build something better. The intentions are rarely the problem.
But good intentions and effective people strategy aren't the same thing. Research on organisational culture, in education and beyond, consistently points to the same uncomfortable truth: the gap between what leaders believe their culture communicates and what staff actually experience is often significant. That gap is where recruitment struggles and early-career exits tend to live.
The 2025 Teacher Wellbeing Index found that 49% of education professionals said their organisation's culture negatively affected their mental health. Not their workload in isolation. Not pay. Culture. And yet culture remains, as the report puts it, "a critical but under-addressed factor" - something we talk about but rarely operationalise with the same rigour we bring to curriculum or data.
So here's the harder question: how do you know that what you intend is actually landing? How do you know your people strategy, however carefully constructed, is doing what you think it's doing? Because a strategy that looks coherent on paper can still carry untested assumptions, unexamined risks, and blind spots that only become visible when someone else holds it up to the light.
That's what I think is genuinely rare about the conversation Amy Whittall will open with in her workshop on July 8 at ASCL’s People and Culture conference. Rather than presenting a model to replicate, she's asking the questions that sit underneath any people strategy worth having: what is a people strategy, and what is it emphatically not? What are the known and unknown assumptions baked into yours? And what's your risk appetite when those assumptions are tested? This isn't a session that will hand you answers, it's one that will help you interrogate your own thinking alongside peers who are grappling with exactly the same questions.
The same rigour runs through Beryce Nixon's work on talent pathways at Exceed Learning Partnership. When I was working with schools on how they develop staff at each career stage, I kept encountering the same gaps, the same moments where good intentions ran out of road. What Beryce has built is something different: an approach genuinely grounded in a wide evidence base, tested and refined rather than assumed. The chance to hear directly about that work, and to think alongside Beryce about what it means for your own context, is one I'd have found genuinely valuable whatever stage my trust or school was at.
If your school, college or trust is already working hard in this space, this day is a chance to pressure-test your thinking, to find out not just whether you have a people strategy, but whether it will hold. If you're still trying to work out where to start, it's a place to find your footing.
Best
wishes
