Highlights from our all-staff Summer Conference
As Alice Cooper once sang, “school’s out for summer”, and with that, (nearly) all 500 staff across The Key Group decamped to Manchester last week for our summer conference.
It turns out that getting 500 people in one shot is harder than you’d imagine, but here’s CEO Chris Kenyon launching the event:
Our objectives?
Celebrate success + discover the future + be together.
Before we got into those objectives, we were incredibly privileged to kick off the conference with an inspiring speech from Sarah Smith MP, the government’s champion for the Opportunity Mission.
Sarah talked about the work going on to break down the barriers to opportunity for young people: everything from a renewed focus on the Early Years, to free breakfast clubs in primary, to how the implementation of a unique single identifier for children - across schools, social services, health, housing and employment - will allow a more joined-up approach, from safeguarding to day-to-day support for families. It was a great framing of why we all love working in this incredible sector.
In what might have been my favourite moment of the whole conference, Sarah’s toddler decided to join her on stage, throwing her speech notes into the wings and dropping a mic on the floor. With every parent in the room feeling the primal dread of this ever happening to them, she showed us all how the professionals do it, calmly handing him a wallet to play with and powering on as though nothing had happened. Here he is enjoying the limelight (he’s got a fantastic royal wave, not captured here):
So, how did we do against those objectives?
Objective 1: Celebrate success
It’s been a busy year, supporting over 20,000 schools to transform the way they work. This year, our brands have moved 4,000 of them onto cloud-based MIS, through Arbor. They’ve launched new products like Robin, new features like Auto-absence, solved 1.3 million problems for school leaders using The Key, and many tens of thousands of governors, teachers and leaders have completed our training courses. Nearly 90,000 job applications have been handled by SAMpeople against 18,000 recruitment campaigns. Habitude joined the Group, automating workflows for MATs, and saw usage double more than 100%.
A lot to celebrate. And lovely to witness everyone appreciating each others’ hard work.
Objective 2: Discover the future
Of course, AI was everywhere. It was brilliant to see teams giving each other a product demo, to learn about the incredible innovation happening across the Group. The marketplace allowed staff to ask questions of colleagues working on totally different product sets, to understand the art of the possible.
But we also got to hear an external perspective, courtesy of a keynote from Donald Clarke, an academic in AI. Hot off the heels of publishing his latest book on AI and Productivity, Donald gave us many examples of where AI is being used both around the world and in the UK to transform education - from supporting dyslexic learners to tracking attendance through facial recognition.
We then got to have a go ourselves - we were split into 50 teams and given an hour to solve a problem for either schools, MATs or our own teams using AI. This might have been the single best example of cross-function product ideation I’ve ever seen, and the winning entry, which would save SENCOs weeks of time each term writing EHCPs, will I hope make into schools at some point (it might need a bit more than an hour’s development though…).
Objective 3: Be together
This was the first time this group of 500 had got together in person, and we were deliberately mixed up with colleagues we’d not worked with, but looking around, you would have assumed we’d all known each other for years. There’s something very special about the “vibe” across the Group - different cultures, same vibe. So actually this was the easiest bit.
We therefore went one step further - and brought in some customers to be truly inclusive of ‘being together’. Our customer panel was, I know, a highlight for many. It included Ruth Agnew MBE, Chief Relationships and Engagement Officer at the Co-Op MAT, who spoke about the challenges of governance, HR and taking on new processes in a large trust. We also had Vicky Bray and Emma Gibbons, a school business manager and deputy head of Westbrook Lane Primary, a small maintained school in Leeds, articulating the issues of everything from resourcing SEND to staffing cover. And finally Danny Garton, who leads the MIS and data team at Consortium Trust in Hull, gave us the lowdown on how they’ve implemented PowerBI across their schools, training up SLTs to be data insights gurus.
Beyond that, it was amazing to see loads of little chats like this going on over a cup of tea…
…before we built up to the main event - a festival-themed party where we could truly let our hair down and “be together”:
Objectives met.
