The chair and chief executive of Bradford Diocesan Academies Trust learnt about the importance of the CEO chair relationship when they worked on academisation for the Department for Education. Seven years into their partnership, the former DfE advisers tell Jess Staufenberg about lessons learned along the way.
Carol Dewhurst, chief executive, and Tessa Mason, chair, of the Bradford Diocesan Academies Trust (BDAT), are a fascinating powerhouse pair to lead an academy trust. Dewhurst is a chartered marketeer, a non-teacher specialising in marketing strategies, who spent years on the Department for Education’s academies programme. It was there that she met Mason, a former primary school headteacher working as a DfE consultant on the same programme, in 2012 – the feverish early days of academisation.
So, when Dewhurst left the civil service to become BDAT’s chief executive in 2014, she rang Mason straight away after her original
chair, the archdeacon of Bradford, stepped down.
“I’d always been very excited by the way Carol worked. Our paths had crossed at DfE, and she had enthusiasm and a can-do attitude,” beams Mason.
Dewhurst, who prior to the DfE had worked on the Children’s Workforce Development Council, the quango that delivered the ‘Every child matters’ programme, was conscious of not having an education background herself.
She also found herself surrounded locally by big trusts with a national profile, including the likes of Dixons Academies Trust. BDAT was small, with just three schools that had struggled. Dewhurst wanted to reposition the trust as a home for excellent schools and felt there was no better way to persuade them than have a former experienced headteacher and a high-powered civil servant at the top.
“Tessa was well respected and steeped in a schools background,” she explains. “And I gave it credibility in that I’d given up this career as a civil servant to join this embryonic MAT. There was that degree of credibility that we’d chosen to take our next career steps here.”
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