Sir Jon Coles is CEO of United Learning, the largest multi-academy trust in England. He was formerly a senior civil servant in the Department for Education, leading initiatives such as the London Challenge and the efforts to reduce class sizes. He writes:

The only thing I judge myself on when I look at myself in the mirror at the end of the day is whether I was flat out trying to do the right thing. And that means not saying “no” to the thing that is needed or that is hard. It means not being dishonest. It means treating people properly.

My mum has been the biggest influence in my life. Her family were tenant farmers, not well off, but she got into grammar school. She did her A levels. She got a place at UCL to read modern foreign languages. But her family could not afford for her to go, they needed her to work. That impacted her whole life. She made education the most important thing in our house. It meant I became very educationally successful. But the unintended consequence, I think, from my mum’s point of view, is it meant I wasn’t interested in being a lawyer, or a doctor or anything else. For me, like my mum, education was the most important thing. And so I was never going to work in anything but education.

I was going to be a teacher, but I had a place to do a postgrad in philosophy and I was going to do that and then the PGCE. I ended up doing it the other way around and I started thinking I should do something to improve the system, so I just took the first job that looked like a chance to do that, at the National Audit Office. I’ve ended up always working in education, but never actually as a teacher. That’s still my ambition - to go back and teach maths in a system where all teachers can succeed with all children.

I have never had a problem challenging up. I joined the Department for Education as part of the civil service in 1997. If I didn’t think something was right, I said so regardless of who was in front of me. I never wasted any time thinking about what they thought of me or what their reaction would be. I expect the same from our team at United Learning. That’s what a healthy organisation should be like.

I am incredibly driven by goals. When I was in charge of reducing infant class sizes for the Blair government, I would obsess over the numbers. We had incremental targets: reduce the number of kids in classes over 30 by 100,000, by 250,000, eventually to 0 - I liked to see that impact. I liked the feeling of winning and making a difference. When I went on to run the London Challenge, it was the same feeling: break the problem down and then get it done.

I took on the job of reducing class sizes in the same year my mum died and the same year I had my first child. All my hair fell out. I was young and naive and I put a lot of pressure on myself.

I applied for the role at United Learning as I had a sense that the place where someone could have the biggest impact on school improvement over the next five years was going to be in a trust. That was in 2012. I made the right choice.

We’ve got more than 100 schools, so the people working in those schools below the leadership level may only see me in person once every year. I am very conscious that I want that experience to be a positive one. I want them to know I care about them and their school, about what they do, and that I value it.

I don’t like the phrase impostor syndrome because I think that everybody, whatever they say publicly, has periods of thinking: am I good enough? Is this going to work? Turning that into a syndrome, or making that a thing that’s uniquely about you, is not helpful.

My dad grew up in a flat above a shop. He left school at 17. He ended up working his way up through the Admiralty. He was happy for me to do what I wanted to do. And I think I am extremely independent-minded because he and my mum allowed me to be.

You shouldn’t be the one who talks the most in a meeting. Your job is to listen. Your job is to ask: what is the bigger question here? How do these things connect together or to something else? Are we focusing on the right place? And when you can answer those questions, that’s your time to speak.

Purpose is important but it should not be about telling people what matters to you or what should matter to them. It’s much more about their intrinsic motivation to do great things for children, to create conditions in which children thrive and flourish.

We all have those moments when you think you are stuck or when a situation seems irretrievable. Now, I never think: why me? I think: this is why I am here. These are the moments you really show your worth.

There are three circles of skill that you need to have as a leader: strategy, people and operations. At a senior level of leadership, you need to be “good enough” at all three things. But you will certainly be better at one than the others. The thing I’m best at is strategy. My biggest weakness of those three is operations. And as a leader, you have to kind of fiddle around with your senior team to get the balance right with your own skillset.

I ascribe to the never too high, never too low model. It’s not helpful to anybody if you get over-excited, either positively or negatively.

I can solve problems but, generally, it isn’t my job to solve the problem. It’s my job to make sure someone with the right expertise has the opportunity and support to solve the problem. Too many CEOs get sucked into being operationally responsible for too much. And if you’re the best person at solving a problem, that’s still not a good enough reason for taking it on yourself. You’ve got to think: “OK, am I going to add value by doing it? How am I going to stop doing it once I’ve started doing it? Are there some things in my actual job that only I can do at this moment that would not get done as a result?” You have to be disciplined.

You’ve got to be curious - curious enough to want to know how things work, to be excited by ideas, to spend time thinking about people. Endless curiosity is really at the heart of good leadership.

I’m pretty clear about what I expect: if you’re not in the organisation to improve the lives of young people, you don’t belong in the organisation.

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