The Social Licence

This essay uses the recent events surrounding Athena Learning Trust as a case study. Its purpose is not to adjudicate the rights and wrongs of those events, but to explore the broader lessons for governance, leadership and organisational trust.

Every successful institution depends upon something that rarely appears in organisational charts or governance handbooks. It is not legal authority. It is not regulatory approval. It is not financial sustainability or inspection outcomes. It is something far less tangible, and often far more important.

In the business world, it is what we call a social licence: the continuing consent of the community to exercise authority on its behalf.

Schools rarely speak in these terms, but they experience the phenomenon every day.

A school can be legally constituted, financially sound and educationally successful, yet still lose the confidence of the community it serves. Once that social licence begins to erode, almost every subsequent decision becomes harder. Parents become sceptical. Staff become cautious. Journalists become interested. Politicians become involved. Every explanation sounds defensive. Every silence becomes meaningful.

Watching the events surrounding Athena Learning Trust over recent months, I found myself thinking less about behaviour policies and more about what happens when an organisation loses its social licence.

For some, Athena’s difficulties demonstrated the cruelty of strict behaviour systems and the intellectual bankruptcy of traditional education. For others, the trust’s collapse showed what happens when determined activists, local politicians and hostile journalists are permitted to undermine school leaders who insist upon order. In both versions, Athena became evidence in the long-running struggle between progressive and traditional education.

I find that argument less interesting than the organisational failure beneath it.

Whatever one thinks of Athena’s educational philosophy, it is difficult to regard the dissolution of a multi-academy trust as a satisfactory outcome. A trust is not simply a company number, a board and a set of funding agreements. It is a network of relationships built over time between schools, staff, pupils, families and communities. When that network is dismantled, the legal transfer of the schools may be relatively straightforward, but the educational consequences are not.

Receiving trusts must conduct due diligence, absorb unfamiliar systems and establish new relationships with leaders who have spent months or years operating under pressure. Schools acquire new governance arrangements, reporting structures, policies and organisational identities. Improvement plans are disrupted. Central teams change. Institutional knowledge is lost. Some staff decide that the uncertainty has become too much and move elsewhere. Parents, already anxious, must place their confidence in an unknown organisation whose leaders they may never have met.

The schools may eventually be stronger for the change, but that possibility should not disguise the disruption that precedes it. Organisational instability consumes attention, and attention is one of the scarcest resources in education. Every hour spent discussing transfers, leadership structures, communications and due diligence is an hour not spent improving curriculum, teaching, attendance or support for pupils. The administrative act of moving a school can be completed on a date, but the human consequences run on.

This is why Athena’s collapse should not be celebrated as a victory for either side of an ideological dispute. It should be studied as an example of how an organisation can lose social licence, and how difficult it becomes to recover once that loss has gathered momentum.

Philosophy and implementation

Athena appears to have been founded on an educational proposition that many school leaders would recognise. Children deserve calm, purposeful classrooms. Teachers should be able to teach without constant interruption. Expectations should be clear, routines should be predictable and disadvantaged pupils should not be condemned to disorder on the grounds that discipline is somehow incompatible with compassion.

I share that belief. Calm and purposeful learning environments are an educational entitlement. Pupils who arrive at school ready to learn should not have their education repeatedly disrupted, and teachers should not be expected to negotiate every instruction as though the classroom were a permanent seminar in participatory democracy.

The difficulty begins when an organisation fails to distinguish between its philosophy and the particular systems through which that philosophy is expressed.

A board may be entirely right to support high expectations, consistent routines and firm boundaries. It does not follow that every sanction, every threshold and every operational choice made in pursuit of those principles must also be defended. A coherent philosophy can be sound while elements of its implementation are clumsy, excessive or poorly adapted to individual circumstances.

This distinction ought to be obvious, but organisations under pressure often lose sight of it. Criticism of one procedure is heard as criticism of the whole model. A complaint about proportionality becomes an attack on discipline. A concern about a pupil with SEND becomes evidence that parents oppose high expectations. Leaders begin by defending their principles, move gradually towards defending their systems, and eventually find themselves defending individual decisions about which they may know very little.

At that point, confidence hardens into inflexibility.

Boards that have lived through similar crises would recognise that acknowledging weaknesses in implementation can protect the underlying philosophy. The Athena board could have said, with no contradiction, that the trust remained committed to calm, orderly schools while also commissioning an independent review of sanctions, removals, toilet access, reasonable adjustments and the experiences of pupils with SEND. It could have published the evidence, made changes if needed and explained why other elements would remain.

Such a response would have demonstrated that the organisation possessed enough confidence in its principles to examine its own practice objectively.

How social licence is lost

Academy trusts possess substantial formal authority. Their boards employ the staff, set policy, appoint leaders and exercise powers delegated through funding agreements and articles of association. Local authorities and councillors cannot simply instruct them to change course.

Formal authority, however, is not the same as social licence.

A school retains social licence when families believe that its leaders will listen, even when they disagree. A trust retains social licence when staff believe that difficult questions can be raised without being interpreted as disloyalty. A board retains social licence when the community can see that it is capable of testing the assurances it receives from executives rather than simply repeating them.

The collapse of social licence usually begins from something small. A parent raises a complaint and receives a response that appears procedural rather than curious. Another family reports a similar experience. Staff members begin to exchange concerns privately. The organisation treats each case as isolated, while those outside it gradually recognise a pattern.

When internal routes appear ineffective, people look for external ones. They contact councillors, MPs and journalists. They create online groups in which individual experiences are assembled into a collective narrative. Public meetings are organised. Former staff and pupils add their accounts. Every new testimony strengthens the belief that the organisation has been concealing a systemic problem, even where the underlying cases differ considerably.

It is tempting for boards to dismiss such groups simply as activists, but that misunderstands their role. Campaigns do not emerge from nowhere. They usually begin because at least some people have concluded that existing channels are no longer capable of resolving their concerns. At the same time, campaigns develop their own momentum. They naturally attract those with negative experiences, reinforce shared narratives and become increasingly organised around a particular interpretation of events. Wise boards therefore resist two equal and opposite mistakes. They neither dismiss campaigners as a noisy minority nor assume that a campaign automatically represents the settled view of the wider community. Instead, they ask a different question: what conditions allowed this campaign to become credible in the first place?

By the time television producers become interested, the story already has a plot. There is an institution with power, a group of people who believe they have been ignored and a collection of emotionally compelling examples through which the conflict can be told.

The trust may still possess formal authority, but it no longer controls the meaning of its own actions.

This is the stage at which many boards make their worst mistake. They retreat further into formalism. Statements become shorter, more defensive and more heavily lawyered. Leaders avoid interviews because they fear being misquoted. Trustees remain invisible because they regard communications as the executive’s responsibility. The organisation says little, partly from caution and partly because it believes the facts will eventually speak for themselves.

But facts rarely speak for themselves. People speak for them.

A public-relations vacuum does not create neutral reporting. It creates a story in which the only human voices belong to the disgruntled party. Journalists can report only what they can see, hear and verify. If one side offers parents, pupils, former staff, documents and detailed testimony, while the other offers a short corporate statement, the resulting account is almost inevitable.

This does not mean that every hostile report is unfair. It means that organisations cannot complain about the absence of their perspective after repeatedly declining to provide one.

Social licence is not the same thing as popularity. Every good school occasionally makes unpopular decisions. Nor is it achieved by agreeing with the loudest voices. Rather, it is built through a sustained belief that, even when the school reaches a different conclusion, it has listened carefully, acted fairly and remained open to scrutiny. Parents do not need to win every disagreement. They need confidence that they are being treated honestly.

The anatomy of a media storm

Once a controversy reaches national media, the incentives change. Complexity becomes difficult to sustain. Television works through scenes, testimony and recognisable characters. A policy may have been introduced for defensible reasons and may have benefited many pupils, but neither fact is easily dramatised. A distressed child describing an apparently disproportionate sanction is vivid. A table showing improved attainment or reduced classroom disruption is not.

The media therefore gravitates towards the human consequences of policy, particularly where those consequences appear harsh. This is simply how stories are constructed. The problem for a trust is that the accumulated weight of such stories can make any attempt at explanation sound like evasion.

The media rarely destroy an organisation's social licence. More often, they reveal a loss of confidence that has been developing for months or years. Television cameras are usually the final act, not the opening scene.

By the time this happens, a chief executive is in a nearly impossible position. An apology may be reported as an admission that the whole model was wrong. A defence may be presented as evidence of callousness. A refusal to comment appears evasive. An interview conducted under pressure can generate a sentence that comes to define several years of leadership.

This is why crisis communication must not begin with the crisis.

Boards should know long before trouble arrives who will speak for the organisation, what principles will be defended, what evidence can be published and what forms of independent scrutiny will be accepted. They should maintain relationships with communities before those relationships are needed. They should understand that trust cannot be manufactured through a press release once people have concluded that the organisation is not listening.

The most effective response to a developing controversy is rarely to win every argument. It is to prevent the dispute from becoming a totalising account of the organisation. That requires leaders to concede what can properly be conceded, investigate what remains uncertain and defend only those principles and practices for which they have reliable evidence.

An organisation that attempts to rebut everything often ends up making nothing credible.

Measuring social licence

Social licence cannot be reduced to a single metric. Instead, it reveals itself through a pattern of signals. Are similar concerns emerging independently across different schools? Do families believe they have been heard, even when they disagree with the outcome? Do staff feel safe raising uncomfortable questions? Are journalists hearing about issues before trustees are? Has the organisation begun explaining itself primarily through lawyers rather than educators?

None of these observations proves anything in isolation. Together, they reveal whether an organisation still possesses the confidence necessary to exercise authority effectively.

The challenge is not to choose between data and testimony. It is to use each to test the other. A collection of distressing accounts does not automatically establish that an entire system is harmful, but neither should positive headline outcomes be used to dismiss recurring accounts from families. When patterns emerge, independent examination is a basic instrument of responsible governance, not a concession to activists.

The question trustees should ask is not whether they believe the chief executive. Trust between a board and its chief executive is essential, but it is not a substitute for assurance. The better question is whether the board has sufficient evidence to know that the organisation’s principles are being implemented proportionately and intelligently across every school.

The loneliness of the chief executive

The treatment of Athena’s former chief executive has been one of the more depressing features of the episode.

Institutions do not collapse anonymously. Once an organisation loses its social licence, the search for an individual embodiment of the failure begins almost immediately.

But institutional failure is rarely reducible to one person.

Chief executives exercise power and must be accountable for how they use it. Inexperience, poor judgement or excessive certainty can have serious consequences, particularly in organisations responsible for children. It is therefore reasonable to examine the decisions that brought Athena to this point and to ask whether different leadership might have produced a different outcome.

From the outside, it seems likely that there were several moments at which a more seasoned response could have altered the trajectory. Earlier engagement, greater openness, an independent review, more visible trustees and a clearer distinction between principle and implementation might have prevented the conflict from becoming existential. Leadership experience is often little more than the accumulated memory of disasters avoided. Those who have lived through comparable situations recognise the moment when a complaint is ceasing to be operational and becoming a crisis of legitimacy.

Yet acknowledging mistakes is not the same as turning a person into a grotesque.

The public appetite for a villain is powerful. Complex institutional failures are easier to understand when responsibility can be concentrated in one individual. The chief executive becomes the face of every disputed sanction, every unsuccessful complaint and every unpopular policy across several schools. Their motives are reconstructed from the outcome. Decisions made in good faith become evidence of cruelty or vanity. Professional failure becomes moral corruption.

This serves nobody well.

One of the purposes of governance is to prevent organisational failure from becoming personalised failure. A chief executive is not the sole author of a trust’s culture. Trustees approve strategy, oversee risk and appoint the executive. Senior leaders design and operate systems. Headteachers apply them. Regulators inspect the schools. A failure serious enough to dissolve a trust is, by definition, an institutional failure.

There is also a human being at the centre of it. Whatever mistakes were made, the destruction of a person’s reputation should not be treated as a necessary part of organisational learning. They will have family, friends and colleagues. They will have begun the role believing that they could improve schools and expand opportunity for children. They may now spend years being known principally through the most hostile interpretation of events.

A profession worthy of the name should be able to criticise decisions without dehumanising the decision-maker. It should be able to say that someone was not ready for the situation they faced, or responded badly to it, without implying that they were monstrous. Accountability requires candour. It does not require cruelty.

The board had a particular duty here. Its role was not to protect the chief executive from legitimate scrutiny, but neither was it to allow him to become the sole container for the organisation’s failures. If trustees supported the philosophy and approved the direction of travel, they shared responsibility for what followed. Removing or losing a chief executive may sometimes be necessary, but placing the entire burden on that individual is an abdication.

The cost of being right

There will be people on all sides of the Athena controversy who now feel vindicated. Campaigners will argue that their persistence forced change where internal processes had failed. Supporters of the trust will argue that an effective school-improvement model was destroyed by selective reporting and political pressure. Both groups will be able to identify facts that support their interpretation.

The more important question is what their victory has cost.

A trust has been broken apart. Schools will transfer. Staff and families will experience another period of uncertainty. Receiving organisations will devote time and resources to stabilisation. Children currently in examination years will continue their education while adults rebuild governance, leadership and confidence around them.

Those consequences do not prove that dissolution was the wrong decision. By the time trustees reached it, the organisation may have become impossible to sustain. But they do show why boards must act long before the available choices have narrowed to survival or collapse.

The purpose of crisis leadership is not merely to determine who is correct. It is to preserve the institution’s capacity to serve children while problems are examined and corrected. A board may win a technical argument and lose its community. Campaigners may expose genuine failures and still inherit years of disruption. Journalists may produce important reporting while inevitably simplifying the institution they describe.

Being right about one part of the story does not remove responsibility for the whole.

A lesson for every trust

Athena should not become a cautionary tale about strict schools. That would allow too many boards to reassure themselves that the story has nothing to do with them.

The same pattern could emerge around curriculum, inclusion, attendance, restructuring, school closures, executive pay or the handling of a safeguarding concern. The policy area can change while the organisational dynamics remain remarkably consistent.

A group of people believes it is not being heard. The organisation responds procedurally. Complaints accumulate. Leaders become defensive. Trustees remain largely invisible. External actors enter the dispute. The media finds a story with clear victims and a recognisable villain. The institution loses the ability to describe itself in terms that anyone outside it still believes.

Boards must not abandon conviction whenever opposition appears. Leadership by opinion poll would be disastrous. Schools sometimes have to make decisions that are unpopular, and determined groups do not acquire a veto merely by becoming loud.

But that conviction must be accompanied by curiosity. Boards must be willing to test whether the organisation is achieving what it believes it is achieving. They must be able to defend a philosophy without defending every practice associated with it. They must regard social licence as something precious to be maintained rather than an entitlement conferred by legal status.

They must also communicate before a vacuum forms.

A trust that believes deeply in calm, purposeful education should be able to explain why. It should invite families to see what that means in practice. It should publish evidence about outcomes and unintended consequences. It should give voice to pupils, parents and staff whose experiences are positive, while taking seriously those whose experiences are not. It should make its trustees visible at the moment when trust begins to fray, not after the story has reached national television.

Most of all, boards should remember that the purpose of governance is not to protect the organisation from criticism. It is to protect the organisation from becoming incapable of learning.

Athena’s story is depressing because so much of what followed appears avoidable. The original educational ambition was not absurd. The concerns raised by families were not inherently incompatible with it. A mature institution might have held both truths together, corrected excesses, defended what mattered and rebuilt confidence.

Instead, the dispute hardened until every concession looked like defeat and every defence sounded like denial. Once that happened, the argument ceased to be about improving schools and became a contest over who would control the final account of their failure.

The purpose of governance is not simply to govern the organisation. It is to preserve the organisation's social licence to lead.

Athena's story will eventually fade. New trusts will arrive and new leaders will be appointed. But for the pupils living through the transition, this is not an argument about progressive or traditional education. It is several years of their education.

That is the part of the story the rest of us should be careful not to forget.