In brief

On 14th July 2026, David Robinson delivered a speech at the Confederation of School Trusts’ CEO Summit. This is a transcript of David’s speech.

My sister, my brother-in-law, my wife, my son, his wife, and three of my four nieces, are all teachers or school leaders. I am neither but – almost literally – I feel at home here. Thank you for having me.

It may be a bit late in the day to ask this question, but why do we go to conferences? Why did we go to this one?

We want to learn. We want to hear from people who have experience or expertise that we don’t have. We want to share ideas with our peers.

All this, of course. But it still doesn’t quite answer the question, ‘Why do we go to conferences?’

We could have got all the above from ChatGPT or an extended Zoom without putting our trousers on, let alone incurring all the cost and disruption of two days away.

So might it be something about the nature of the experience? About the qualities of a meaningful relationship as opposed to the characteristics of a more transactional connection?

Qualities of active listening, deep understanding, trust, empathy, reciprocity, respectful disagreement, vulnerability, kindness. Qualities which are difficult to nurture well, but so precious when we do.

This is why we go to conferences, just as world leaders cross the globe for face-to-face summits, and just as teenagers congregate at war memorials, when both could speak to their peers from anywhere, at any time, with the technology in their pockets.

There is a magic to the human connection that transcends the purely transactional. 

Bob Waldinger leads the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the largest and longest of its kind. He says:

“To say that human beings require warm relationships is no touchy-feely idea. It is hard fact. We need nutrition, we need exercise, we need purpose, and we need each other. Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

I have been a community worker for more than 50 years and worked on many issues. Many things I thought I knew at 21 I find more difficult today, but of this I am more certain: strong and meaningful relationships are the foundations of everything that matters. Stable childhoods, effective schools, happy, safe and thriving communities, successful health care, just policing…  even longer lives.

They are the glitter and the glue. The cause of problems when they don’t work well. The master key  when they do, unlocking solutions, potential, trust, confidence… in the home, across and within the communities in which we live, with and between the agencies on whom we depend, in good times, and also in bad.

Professor Daniel Aldridge studies the impact of disasters. Following the Japanese tsunami in 2011 he found the strength of social capital – essentially the strength of the relationships between the people in these coastal communities – was more significant in determining the level of fatalities than the height of the seawall. The death rate was up to 10 times lower where relationships were strongest.

At first glance this seems improbable. But then if we unpick that for a moment, these are communities who notice one another, who know who is least likely to hear an alarm, who needs help to leave home, who has transport or shelter on high ground. It’s obvious really.

Just as it is obvious that it would be those same communities that recovered and rebuilt first and most effectively, because they were able to put their trust in and work with one another. Both findings emerge repeatedly from studies of disasters around the world.

There is particular topicality to this. Some 2700 people died in the June heatwave here in the UK. Hot weather kills more people across the world than any other weather event. And as Eric Klingenberg’s work on the Chicago heatwave first showed in 1995, communities with the most social capital are always the ones that fare best. 

 

Subsequent studies have made the same point. Strong relationships do not remove the physical risks of extreme heat, but they do increase the likelihood that vulnerable people are identified, checked on, receive warnings, and are appropriately supported. Fewer people die.

From thriving childhoods through to resilience in the face of disaster, nothing holds more influence or more hope, than our relationships with one another. 

So it is that I imagine an education system where relational literacy is the fourth ‘R’, thoroughly and systematically taught from nursery to university and beyond. A world where no professional training is complete without the relational component, a time when our leaders at every level put relationships first, and when our organisations, large and small, are institutionally relational.

This is the vision for a world of good relationships. 

And let’s be honest, it’s common sense. Everything works better when relationships work well.

And yet, wherever we look, the spaces, services and activities which nurture strong relationships and thriving communities are in almost universal decline and have been now for many years. 

Youth clubs, for example. Local government spending on youth services fell by more than 70% in the 2010s. More than 1000 youth centres closed.

Consider churches. Attendance in 2024 was 18% lower than in 2019, and average weekly attendance for children was 24% lower.

Look at social clubs. More than 4000 clubs and four million members in the 1970s. 1500 today. 

Even think about employers: My uncle joined Fords in Dagenham in the 1960s when it directly employed 35,000 people. His entire social life, my aunt’s and my cousins’, revolved around the people at the plant. By the time he retired there were fewer than 500. The story is the same for other communities where the docks, the steel works, the coal mines, the fishing fleets have been the backbone of town, often for generations and are now gone.

These are just a handful of the convenors and the connectors through which generations have built solidarity in good times and bad. They are eroding in plain sight. Yet seemingly unseen.

We wonder why 67% of Gen Z experience significant loneliness, why 40% of our young men are drawn to Andrew Tate, and why – according to research published just last week – almost two thirds of us believe that large scale civil unrest is likely in the next year. Whether or not you agree with that prediction there is no denying that we are, as a country, ill at ease with ourselves.

 

My point is this. As Professor Waldinger said, “We need each other.” When our relationships are inadequate, we struggle. When we struggle, we need them more. 

In increasing difficulty, we turn to services for help. Senior civil servant and now Defra permanent secretary Paul Kissack noted last year that, “We are building services where relationships should be.” Inevitably those services are inadequate and overloaded.

More than one million children were referred to mental health services last year – 10% up on the previous year. At any given point in 2024-2025, half a million children were on CAHMS waiting lists. And yet more than half of all local authorities have cut spending on family hubs and children’s centres. 

This is a spiral of decline. Thriving communities are like any living organism. You can’t take out what was once an integral component and expect the whole system to function just the same – the effects knock on.

When the youth club closes, young people lose relationships with peers and with staff. Associated agencies lose a trusted partner. The social glue so important in a complex ecology, seeps from the system.

Remaining services double down on the things they can control, the things they can measure. Siloes are more sharply defined. We are, all of us, demonstrably, doing our bit, but increasingly valuing part system efficiencies over whole society effectiveness, hitting narrow targets but missing the point.

People – children – fall through gaps with increasing frequency. Then the almost universal reflex is to fortify defences, to fix tighter targets, set controls, reinforce compliance, drill down to those narrow efficiencies rather than rise up to take in the missed opportunities and the path to whole society effectiveness.

We know this is madness, social, human, even economic madness. With every youth club closure exam results fall, crime increases and there are societal costs of £3 for every £1 saved. Not my numbers – the Institute of Fiscal Studies’.

All this we know, and because we know it, thinking about every organisation and every service in the context of that precious nexus of relationships that we call community isn’t a left field indulgence, it is a central imperative.

We won’t rewind the clock, nor should we wish to do so, but together we can weave new networks of relationships, trust and cooperation fit for purpose in this time of rapid social, technological and economic churn, and fit for the needs of future generations.

I gladly accepted Leora’s invitation to join you today because I believe that schools and in particular school trusts have a leading role to play. You are among the very few places where children, families and whole communities do still meet and mingle.

Now I can imagine how you may be feeling: ‘All very interesting and a bit depressing but schools are our business and we’ve enough on our plates already. We can’t do everything.’ I get that, but I want to suggest that it is precisely because you have full plates and precisely because you can’t do everything that this is your business. 

Schools can’t achieve the necessary topline outcomes – academic performance, school attendance etc. if relationships between children in the classroom are dysfunctional, between teacher and child, school and home, school and other services and institutions. If any of these clusters of relationships are broken or even suboptimal your central purpose will be harder, if not impossible. Focusing on rebuilding meaningful connections isn’t one more intervention vying for scarce resources, it is how we do everything else, how we do our best work, how we live our best lives.

And, of course, I agree it is impossible to ‘do everything’, to become the health project or the counselling service, so you could as Leora and James noted, “wish our children good luck in all aspects of their lives beyond the school gates,” or you could “recognise the huge wealth, strengths and talents in every community, build on them together and create the conditions for children to be safe and well supported, to develop strong relationships and to achieve well academically.”

Schools are amongst the few institutions left with the reach and legitimacy to do this work. To build strong relationships within communities (what social scientists call bonding capital). To create meaningful connections across different sections of a community (bridging capital). And to effectively connect communities with the institutions that shape their lives (linking capital).

Only the school, but not the school on its own. 

And this is why trusts are so important: coordinating services and partnerships that individual schools may struggle to sustain alone, relieving them of tasks that lock their focus inward and linking leaders into expertise and successful models. This is social capital, our most precious natural resource, rediscovered and at work. Invested well, it multiplies, stimulating growth – human growth, and the pot grows. Only a trust, managing multiple schools, can do that.

What does this look like on the ground? Here’s some suggestions, for schools, then for trusts.

Bonding capital: Relationships within communities

We had two primary schools close to where I used to live. One had a line across the playground just beyond the main gate and a notice. It said, “For the safety of our children, parents and careers are asked to wait behind this line.” The other school had a canopy extending from the early years building and picnic tables underneath. Guess where parents were most likely to form informal and diverse networks of support – behind the line or on the tables? These ‘bumping places’ are so important in every community. Design them in, not out.

Signal through the Trust strategies and values frameworks that this kind of work is central to the purpose of your schools. Support staff to develop the skills, knowledge, and confidence required.

How do you do that? How do you change behaviours across a system, make people more relational? It almost certainly isn’t by rolling out a change programme from the centre. Even the phrase ‘roll out’ sends shivers down my spine. Where context matters, blueprints rarely work. Share stories from elsewhere, support the copy cats, encourage the adaptors. Facilitating the horizontal transfer of experience is what works in this space, weaving webs of collaboration. Rolling in the best from elsewhere, not rolling out the injunction from above.

The bridges: Relationships that connect different parts of a community 

Both schools’ core curriculums and enrichment activities can connect pupils from different backgrounds. Maybe schools could run joint lessons or learning programmes with other schools; shaping extracurricular offers to encourage students from different schools to work together, or participate in structured social mixing initiatives such as those of the Linking Network. 

Maybe incorporate intergenerational dialogue and community expertise directly into the curriculum. Involve residents in oral history initiatives or cultural projects. Develop partnerships with local organisations, enabling students’ learning to contribute to real community needs or projects.

Trusts are uniquely positioned to connect schools across geography, intake profiles and phases – reducing the fragmentation that often characterises the English system.

And how much further could we go? Maybe redesigning learning programmes to centre real-world issues, local partnerships, and expert input. Maybe cross-disciplinary projects with a focus on community- based fieldwork or campaigns designed with and for residents. The ‘expeditionary learning’ approach developed by the likes of Big Education and the XP Trust illustrates how learning can be shifted into the community in a responsible, safe, and effective manner.

Linking capital: Relationships that connect communities with the institutions that shape their lives 

Schools can be anchor institutions within local public systems (as well as within communities). They can build deep and sustained partnerships with other services and actively support families to navigate institutions they might otherwise experience as distant or opaque. Models like those of Shift UK, All Child, and Right to Succeed illustrate how schools can sit within, and help to coordinate broader systems of place-based support.

Individual schools often lack the capacity to build and sustain those partnerships. Trusts can provide the essential strategic leadership, convening power, and organisational stability .

And equally, they must walk the talk, embedding meaningful community governance, ensuring that parents, carers, pupils, and local stakeholders have real influence over decision-making, strategic priorities, and accountability structures across the system.

None of these suggestions are rocket science. Many of you are doing bits of this already but, as the economist and cultural historian David Fleming said, “Large-scale problems don’t always require large-scale solutions. They require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.”

Repairing the social fabric is all about ‘small-scale solutions’ – day by day putting relationships first.

It is also and equally about a large-scale framework; schools and school trusts with the confidence and the vision to set the pace and set the example, leading in their own communities now, as well as raising the leaders of the future. 

In a time of fracture and rapid transition this is the leadership, the local leadership, that the moment demands. Not only doing more, but being more.

In a society where 62% of us no longer trust politicians or democratic institutions and where poor behaviour in public life has time and again set bad examples in recent years. If not you providing that leadership – being more – then who? 

Can it be done? Can it be done now? 

I’m a community worker and a community worker without optimism is like a plumber without a wrench. So yes, of course I am optimistic. But I am also a realist. 

Bridget Philipson has focused on “public value” and “long-term social outcomes”. This work on the social fabric has been ingrained in her approach. Andy Burnham will be PM next week. In his Theos lecture shortly after the Heaton Park synagogue attack last year, he spoke about moving “from a crisis of trust to a culture of encounter.” “The answers,” he said, “lie in a local state; built around trust, community, faith, belief and connection.” 

This work is our work, yours and mine. We know how to do it. In some places we are doing it already. We need to do it more.

We established the Relational Practice Academy to help with training. Please do talk if you’d like to know more about what we do. For now I’d like to end with a very personal memory.

Twenty one years ago almost to the day, 52 people were killed in the London bombings. The Tube system in particular was horrifically attacked. The next morning, July 8th, I went to my son’s primary school for its annual dads’ breakfast. We were allocated randomly into tables of eight. Few of us know anybody. 

I asked the man sat next to me what he did. He said, “I’m a tube train driver.” 

I couldn’t think of anything to say so I said rather feebly, “What are you doing today?”. He said, “I don’t know.” 

The business of the breakfast moved on. Talks about phonics and reading schemes.

Then after a while my neighbour picked up his bag and said he was leaving. He was going to work.

I remember every man at my table stood up, we shook hands and we hugged him – this man we’d barely met.

Twenty one years on we still talk. Jamal and me.

I can’t think of any other place, any other context in our community where for us that could have happened as it did happen that day. 

Only the school.

More than ever we need you now. Being more.

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