School Improvement Is Incomplete: The Senior Role Every Trust Will Need by 2030
Provision and inclusion are no longer about place, they are about connection and belonging
Strategic Education Consultancy · Thought Piece
School improvement is incomplete.
There is a senior role that every trust, federation and school will need in place by 2030.
For the last decade, school improvement has had a clear centre of gravity. On its own terms it has worked: a knowledge-rich curriculum taught well, with assessment kept close behind to tell us whether it had landed. I spent a good deal of that decade making that case. I would make it again tomorrow.
What I have come to think, slowly and not entirely willingly, is that this version of the job was only ever half of it. It was never designed to carry the half this piece is concerned with.
The current definition of school improvement can stay exactly where it is. What it does not have is a structural counterpart, one that does not yet exist in most trusts and schools. There are three places where that gap is now visible in the data. The senior role we will need by 2030 is the consequence of looking honestly at all three.
The role is currently fictitious, but I would argue it is becoming increasingly needed as the complexities of the education and wider systems mean many children and young people are not succeeding when they leave school, both academically and personally.
Three places where the current approach hits a ceiling
1. The disadvantage attainment ceiling
A school can do everything the curriculum-first model asks of it. It can put a strong knowledge curriculum in place, build retrieval practice into its lessons and keep the work in books, the behaviour and the pupil voice all in good order. And then, if it happens to serve a community of real socioeconomic disadvantage, it can watch attainment settle against a ceiling that none of those things will lift.
I work on the principle that what we do for our most disadvantaged children sets the floor for all of them. Get that floor right and the rest follows. The difficulty is that the current school improvement model has come to treat disadvantage as a curriculum and quality of teaching problem, when the data tells us it is also a wellbeing and conditions-for-learning problem.
A working figure from a recent staff wellbeing analysis:
70% of staff reported feeling supported in their roles. Only 35% reported a supportive culture and ethos.
That gap points to something structural rather than personal. People can feel genuinely well supported by their own line manager and still be working inside a culture that, taken as a whole, does not hold them.
On the staff side, that gap is the equivalent of the attainment ceiling pupils run into. It will not yield to a better curriculum or to sharper line management, because it sits a level below both, in how the whole system is built. And that level, at the moment, belongs to no one.
2. Persistent absence and what we now know about it
In the autumn and spring terms of 2024-25, the DfE reported persistent absence at 17.6% of all pupils. That is down on the post-pandemic peak but it remains around two-thirds higher than the pre-pandemic figure of 10.5% in 2018-19. The composition matters more than the headline.
Persistent absence by pupil group, 2024-25:
43% of secondary pupils eligible for free school meals.
33% of pupils with an Education, Health and Care Plan.
12.6% of pupils with probable mental health difficulties miss at least 15 days of school, against 4% of those without.
DfE, NHS Digital.
Read those figures for what they are. They describe wellbeing and the systems meant to hold children who are struggling, far more than they describe behaviour or motivation. A third of children with an EHCP are missing at least a tenth of their schooling. Children with mental health difficulties are away from school at roughly three times the rate of their peers. There is very little room for doubt in that. Persistent absence in 2026 is a sign of a gap in the system far more than a failure of will on the part of children or families.
The Inclusive Attendance work I deliver inside trusts and schools uses a multi-tiered system of support for exactly this reason, with universal, targeted and specialist provision layered on top of one another. The audit asks where a school actually sits across those tiers and what has gone missing in the gaps between them. In every audit I have done, the most useful conversations have been about which adults hold which layer of that system. They have been, even more, about the layers that no one is holding at all. They are rarely conversations about attendance messaging; far more often they are about whether the structure that makes good attendance possible has ever been built underneath it.
3. Provision in all its forms
The 2026 SEND white paper changed the language of inclusion from a placement-based definition to a conditions-based one. What matters under it is whether the right conditions are present for a child, wherever that child is taught, rather than the placement itself. Ofsted’s standalone inclusion judgement asks broadly the same question of a school’s whole offer.
This is the definition of inclusion I work to. It is worth stating plainly, because the policy language can blur it. Inclusion, properly understood, is the presence of belonging, achievement and thriving for a child, in whatever setting that child learns. On that understanding a resource base, an alternative placement or an online setting can be a genuinely inclusive one, at times more inclusive than a mainstream classroom in which a child sits unreached at the back all day. The same understanding catches the reverse case: a child who is technically in mainstream, yet belongs to no one and is achieving nothing, has been excluded in every sense that matters except the legal one. The real question about any form of provision, then, is whether belonging, achievement and thriving are genuinely present in it, or whether the setting has quietly become a place to hold a child no one knew what else to do with.
This definition was developed with James McDonald of McDonald Education, whose work on belonging and inclusion has shaped my thinking on it.
Behind both of those changes sits a quiet reality. The range of provision inside many schools and trusts is now far broader than the curriculum-first model assumes. It takes in internal alternative provision and inclusion bases, online and hybrid pathways, resource bases, pastoral work running alongside the timetable and the time-limited specialist placements that quietly become long-term ones because, for a while at least, they appear to work.
My own work with Nisai Learning sits squarely in this territory, providing online and hybrid education for pupils for whom mainstream is not, for the time being, the right environment. The point I want to make is that all of this is provision in the full sense of the word. It needs to be governed as provision: with the same quality assurance, safeguarding, supervision and outcomes data we would expect of any other part of the school.
There is a harder thing to say about all this. The new guidance is what finally makes it sayable. Every one of these categories is a genuine form of support. Each of them is also, quietly, a decision about whether a particular child is the school’s responsibility or somebody else’s. Internal exclusion, looked at honestly, is still a form of exclusion. And when a child’s need reaches back into poverty, or trauma, or a family carrying more than it can manage, a familiar sentence tends to arrive in the room: this is a parenting issue. Sometimes that is true. More often than we like to admit, it is simply the moment at which the most complex child stops being anyone’s to hold. We have become fluent in the language of moving children sideways. We are a good deal less fluent in the harder question of when sideways is genuinely the right direction and when it is only the one available to us.
What the current model does not have is a senior leader whose job is to hold this whole range of provision together as one coherent piece of work, governed according to what children actually need rather than according to the order in which each part of it happened to grow up.
What the three have in common
The current model knows what it is doing up to a point. It knows how to design a curriculum, how to monitor attendance, how to assess special educational need. Where it consistently runs out of answers is the same in all three cases: the point at which the question stops being what we teach, monitor or assess. It becomes a question of what conditions have to be in place before a child, or a teacher, can engage with any of it.
That last question is the one a school’s resilience system exists to answer. In most senior leadership structures, it currently belongs to no one.
Plenty of people are already working on pieces of it. Safeguarding sits with the designated safeguarding lead. Special educational needs sit with the SENDCo. Behaviour and engagement fall to the pastoral or behaviour lead. Staff wellbeing goes to whoever holds the HR brief. More often than not, a deputy is carrying all of it at once, on top of the curriculum and quality of education work that is supposed to be the actual job.
When something this important is held in pieces by five or six people who each have a full job of their own, it tends not to be held at all.
There is a deeper reason the gap goes unowned. It has little to do with a shortage of people to hand it to. The system itself makes owning it irrational. Progress 8, inspection as it is actually experienced, the budget: very nearly every measure a leader is judged against rewards them for letting their most complex children go, because those are the children who pull down every figure on the page. In pure accountability terms, the most socially complex child is precisely the one a school is encouraged to move on. The absence of this role is therefore better understood as a rational response to the incentives we have built around schools than as an oversight the sector has simply failed to correct. No one holds the gap because, as things stand, holding it well is quietly punished.
The argument I worked on with Mark Greenberg and others in the Handbook of Prosocial Education in 2012 was that prosocial conditions are a measurable discipline with a research base behind them. The argument here, fourteen years on, is the same one applied to school improvement: the conditions for learning are a measurable discipline, one that now needs someone senior to be genuinely responsible for it.
The fictitious role all of this points to
I would call the role Chief Resilience Officer. CRO.
Cities have Chief Resilience Officers, as do many large companies. Schools, so far, do not. The post exists in those places because at some point someone at executive level realised that the resilience of the whole system needed to be somebody’s responsibility, not just the resilience of its separate parts. Schools and trusts have reached the same point now.
The role on paper
I have kept the list below short on purpose. The role is defined less by how much it does than by what it is finally made accountable for: the things that at present belong to no one, the work of joining them together and the job of protecting all of it when it comes under pressure.
Fictitious Role
CHIEF RESILIENCE OFFICER · CRO
Reports to: Chief Executive (in a trust) or Headteacher (in a single school). · Sits on: the executive team or senior leadership team.
1. The standing to protect the conditions for learning.
This is the item that makes it a role rather than a remit. Big decisions, whether a restructure, a change to the timetable, a budget cut or an admissions call, carry a cost to the conditions for learning in just the way they carry a financial cost. The CRO is the person that cost has to be tested against before a decision is taken, rather than the person who discovers it afterwards. This carries more weight than the goodwill of an advocate who can be heard politely and then overruled: it is a required assessment, of the kind a chief financial officer gives on cost, so that someone in the room can say, with the evidence in front of them, that a decision will lift results over two years while quietly damaging the conditions for learning for the next ten.
2. The wellbeing data, for pupils and for staff.
This means wellbeing data proper, rather than safeguarding referrals or behaviour incidents: the kind of information that tells you whether the conditions for learning are genuinely present. The CRO runs it with the seriousness a director of education brings to progress data, looking at it closely each term and against a sensible benchmark.
3. Provision, joined up as one system.
Family services, pastoral care, inclusion, mental health, alternative provision and the partnerships with health and the voluntary sector are all governed as a single connected system, rather than as five separate teams in five separate corridors who happen to meet from time to time.
4. Support for the people doing the work.
This reaches everyone in the building whose work involves complex relationships with children and families, which, looked at honestly, is most of them.
That first item is the one missing almost everywhere. A great many people will advocate for wellbeing; very few have the standing to defend the conditions for learning at the moment those conditions come into conflict with short-term pressure on results. Advocacy can always be thanked and then set quietly aside. An assessment that has to be on the table before a decision is taken is far harder to skip. That, in the end, is the whole difference between a role and a title.
The person we need
The Chief Resilience Officer is something other than a senior pastoral lead given a grander title, or a designated mental health lead promoted a rung. Those are good people doing important work, but this is a different role that asks for a different kind of person.
The role asks one person to do two things at once. They have to be able to hold the human side of it, the relational side, the moment when you sit across a table from a Year 4 teacher who is at the end of her tether and are genuinely able to listen and connect. And they have to be able to hold the system side just as securely: the data, the structures, the supervision, the governance, the commissioning and the question of scale.
Most leaders are stronger at one than the other. The CRO has to be credible in both, because the job is the join between the two. It fails the moment either side is weak.
They have probably led at executive or senior level in education, though I would not rule out the right person from health, social care or children’s services.
They understand wellbeing as a measurable, evidenced discipline rather than a mood or an aspiration. Their evidence-informed practice shows in what they actually do, far more than in the language they use for it. They know the research on adversity, attachment and self-regulation. They can turn it into the design of provision, of supervision and of the school day itself. They are trauma-informed in the working sense of the term, the sense in which it shapes practice, rather than the sense in which it has become a badge to collect. They can tell the difference between a feeling that something is working and the evidence that it is. They are willing to publish the data either way, even when it says plainly that something has not worked. They take supervision themselves, as they expect of the people they look after.
What it costs to leave this to a person
Where this work is done well, as in some trusts it genuinely is, it tends to rest on a particular person who decided it mattered and then carried it themselves, usually without the title, the structure or the protected time that should have come with it. The Flourish model at Leigh Trust is the closest thing I know to the role in practice. Pupil and staff wellbeing data are governed there alongside progress data rather than after it. Provision is held together as a single connected offer that runs from a birth-to-five community programme, through family support in school and out into adult education for the wider community. It works. The warning is in why it works. Where this succeeds, it usually succeeds because of an individual rather than a structure, which means it is only ever one resignation away from disappearing. Something this central to a school is too important to depend on whoever currently happens to care about it. That, in the end, is what a role is for, where a single committed person is not enough.
Three questions for this term
Most schools and trusts cannot create this role tomorrow. This piece is not asking them to. It is asking for something smaller to begin with: to see the gap clearly, because a good many senior teams are standing in it without ever having named it. The three questions below will not let you do the role yourself. They are not meant to. They are simply a way of locating the space the role would eventually fill.
First, on disadvantage. Where is your current school improvement plan reaching its ceiling? Is the next step in front of you a curriculum step or a conditions step?
Second, on attendance. Who in your senior leadership team is accountable, by name, for the multi-tiered system underneath attendance, rather than the messaging on top of it?
Third, on provision. Is the full provision landscape in your school or trust governed as a single coherent piece of work, or is it a collection of pragmatic responses held together by the people closest to each one?
If you cannot answer one of them cleanly, I would read that less as a failure of leadership than as the shape of the gap itself, almost certainly the gap you are standing in now. The real question is no longer whether it exists, but who, in time, is going to be made responsible for it.
About the author
Anna Bateman is the founder and CEO of Halcyon Education, an education consultancy working with multi-academy trusts, local authorities, online schools and education providers. She has been a Department for Education Adviser and a contributor to the Handbook of Prosocial Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), co-authored with Dr Mark Greenberg and others. Halcyon Education supports senior leaders to design and deliver staff and pupil wellbeing, inclusion and pastoral strategy across whole organisations.
