Improvement for all

Steve Munby's recent school visits have been unlike any throughout his long career in education. "It was a 45-minute boat ride through a jungle and eventually we came to a swamp," he says, recalling his recent trip to a school in Brunei. "We have four teachers teaching in the swamp. They love it out there with the monkeys, crocodiles and snakes."

Brunei is one of the 40 countries where CfBT Education Trust delivers educational support. Since joining CfBT last November, Munby has also visited the organisation's Middle Eastern offices in Abu Dhabi several times and will travel to Kenya at the end of August. Munby is preparing to visit the areas most holidaymakers never see. "I've had all my injections to go off to the slums and the northern Muslim agricultural area to find ways to get primary-aged girls into school," says Munby. "I'm going to some very challenging places."

The trust began life in 1968 as the Centre for British Teachers, a charity that sent English teachers abroad. Munby admits CfBT's current international aim to improve education with local governments and aid agencies is "all completely new to me". He is still on a big learning curve and his jet-setting around the world is a far cry from the National College for School Leadership, the government agency he led from 2005 to 2012. Munby says the international opportunities were part of the role's appeal for him, while for CfBT, his wealth of experience in almost all of the sectors it covers must have made him stand out from the crowd.

Multi-academy trust

One of its newest areas of work in England is its multi-academy trust. Having begun his career as a secondary school teacher and later a lecturer, Munby is looking forward to September when CfBT's 20 academies begin a "unique" operating model. "It's called the Academic Council," says Munby. "All of our heads already meet regularly, but this is a new thing where the council looks at the schools' data together and decides how to allocate their collective resource."

The number of academies CfBT manages has grown from two to 20 in the past two years. Five of these are free schools, with two opening in London in September - a German bilingual school and another that specialises in Mandarin. The academies are located across the country, from Doncaster to London. "When I started at CfBT, they talked about a family of schools," he says. "But it was a family that got together two or three times a year in polite conversation - went to the occasional wedding or funeral," he jokes. "It wasn't necessarily real collective responsibility for how every child in the trust was doing, and we've tried moving towards that concept. That means that we create roles whereby schools help other schools. We also create a collective pot of money from all the schools and make collective decisions with the heads as to how that funding should be used to meet all the schools' and children's needs."

Munby, who has a gentle yet authoritative tone, is emphatic about his "passion" for pooling resources. "It's something I really believe in and I spent a lot of time in my last job leading this work nationally," he continues. "I'm a very strong believer that the expertise to improve schools is in schools, and that the secret to build capacity to improve is to tap into the expertise of teachers and leaders within schools. One of the best ways to help a school is not to send in a load of advisers; it's actually to link schools so they can do some joint practice, on-the-ground development and build capacity. It's two-way learning."

Munby's enthusiasm for school-centred improvement comes at a time when local authorities' role in school improvement is under question. Ofsted announced in January that it would inspect local authority arrangements for supporting school improvement - a move criticised by the Local Government Association on the grounds that councils no longer have the legal powers to intervene in poorly performing schools.

With the experience of three years as a former assistant director of education at Blackburn, Lancashire, and five years as director of education in Knowsley in Merseyside, Munby pauses before he delivers his opinion on the matter. "First of all, I think no local authority should have the automatic right to provide school improvement services for its schools," he says. "If it wants to provide school improvement services for its schools, it better do it well otherwise the schools will reject it. It either has to be very good at this in the traditional way of providing school improvement services with high-quality people providing services that people rate, or it has to stop trying to provide school improvement and set things up in a way that schools are able to do it for themselves."

He qualifies his view by suggesting some local authorities (he cites Wigan and Rochdale) still provide credible improvement services. He says others are developing frameworks to enable schools to improve themselves and improve each other. "What the local authority cannot do is say: 'It's got nothing to do with me'," says Munby.

School improvement is, indeed, one of CfBT's major areas of work. In Lincolnshire, the organisation has held responsibility for school improvement for several years and, since 2012, it has provided all education services for the county council. "There are 380 schools and we also oversee all its children's centres," says Munby. CfBT is also six months into a 44-month contract to deliver the Welsh government's national literacy and numeracy framework.

So Munby can see both sides of the improvement agenda. "Since we're spending public money, we should be accountable to the local authority, Ofsted and the Education Funding Agency for how we spend it."

CfBT also delivers all of Ofsted's inspections for schools, further education colleges and teacher training in the north of England. It is four years into a six-year contract with the inspectorate, which Munby says can sometimes restrict CfBT's activities. "We can't inspect Lincolnshire schools," he says. "And we can't operate in the north of England in terms of focused school improvement work because we also inspect those schools." But Munby, who worked as a former inspector in Oldham, is unwilling to comment on Ofsted's new schools inspections framework, which comes into force in September.

Education in secure units

Another area that has grabbed Munby's attention is the opportunities that might arise from a government consultation on youth custody - CfBT operates young offender institutions in Feltham and Cookham Wood - the details of which are due to be published in the autumn. The government wants to "put education at the heart of detention" for young people in secure units. Munby believes CfBT can respond to this agenda.

"We are uniquely placed to engage on this and ensure there's even better teaching and education provision going on for vulnerable young people in secure units," he says. "We're interested in the concept of how you might link an outstanding academy with a secure unit and have teachers from the academy also teaching in the secure unit."

Munby says the approach could improve the quality of teaching in the secure estate. "Quite a lot of people would not choose to teach in a young offender institution - they'd find that quite scary," he says. "But if they were teaching in an academy, which is an attractive career move, and also had an opportunity to teach in a secure unit, you could probably attract a greater number of staff."

If CfBT succeeds in increasing its involvement in delivering services for the youth estate, the charitable trust's coffers would almost certainly increase beyond the £189m turnover posted in 2011/12. But Munby realises that being a growing organisation presents challenges.

"One of the biggest challenges of this job is to have a sense of one organisation," he explains. His constant shuttling between his Manchester home to be present at CfBT's offices in Reading, Cardiff and Linconshire - not to mention the international offices - is one way he achieves this. Another, he says, is his belief in the organisation's "mission to develop a sustainable education solution to transform the lives of millions of children worldwide".

MUNBY'S WORLD

• Munby sums up his belief in collaboration between schools with the African proverb: "If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together"
• One of his heroes is Professor Tim Brighouse, who set up the successful school improvement programme the London Challenge
• He says schools working in collaboration must possess both power and love: "Some networks are full of love and everyone is nice, but there's no determination to change outcomes. Sometimes you have groups that are powerful, but they are not inclusive and collaborative.The key is the combination of power and love"
• He is married to a former head teacher