Joanne Dawson

Chief Operating Officer / CFO, Ormiston Academies Trust

Jo Dawson started her career training as a chartered accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Birmingham, after being educated at the University of Birmingham. She joined the trust in 2019 from the private sector where she had held a number of senior global leadership roles. Jo’s previous role was at Jaguar Land Rover Overseas where she was responsible for an annual turnover of £6 billion. Having been a chair of governors at an academy in Birmingham for 10 years, Jo is now a co-opted member of the audit and risk committee at the University of Liverpool. In her role as Chief Operating Officer / CFO at Ormiston Acadmies Trust, she performs all aspects of the role of Chief Financial Officer in addition to having responsibility for all areas of operational activity outside of educational delivery. This includes leading the following professional services: estates management, governance, IT, administration, communications, HR, and finance.

15:25

1 CST Finance and Operations Conference

Keynote: Designing and delivering excellence: My learnings from business

Excellence in operations is key to the sustained achievement of any organisation's goals, whether it be to optimise shareholder returns or achieve social impact. Whilst the context of education is significantly different from other sectors, there are proven approaches in business that are highly relevant to school trust leadership. In her keynote, Joanne Dawson, Chief Financial Officer at Ormiston Academies Trust (OAT), shares her experience of applying the learnings from her global roles in FTSE100 companies in her trust, including applying bottom-up design principles, what relentless talent management requires, and how to address the barriers of silo working, and how this is enabling OAT's educational goals.