Best Practice

In teachers we (absolutely must) trust...

School improvement Whole-school issues Senior leadership
Do we have a crisis of trust in teaching? As a senior leader, do you trust your teachers? As a teacher, do you feel trusted? Principal Ben Solly looks at why we must place trust at the heart of our schools – and how we can do it...


“The best way to run a business is to trust your colleagues with the freedom to do their job in the way they know best.” Sir John Timpson.

In 2018, Ipsos MORI revealed that teachers are the third most trusted profession in Britain, with only doctors and nurses ranking higher. An impressively high proportion (89 per cent) of the respondents in the poll purported that teachers, as a profession, are a trustworthy bunch.

This contrasts with a 2018 Ofsted survey, which found that 62 per cent of teachers believed that they were not trusted by society. Similarly, in the 2019 annual NASUWT survey, 56 per cent of teachers said they did not feel empowered at school, with 59 per cent not believing their opinions to be valued by school leaders.

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