Rowena Hackwood

CEO, Astrea Academy Trust

With a background spanning the public, private and not for profit sectors, Rowena has spent much of her career supporting and leading organisational turnaround and performance improvement. A multi academy trust CEO for seven years, she is currently CEO of Astrea Academy Trust, a large national multi academy trust with a footprint spanning South Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire. She is particularly interested in how we can 'leverage the power of the system to improve the system', including through collaboration and the sharing of strategies and resources.

She is a member of a wide range of educational advisory groups, is Vice Chair of Queen St Group and takes great pride in being Chair of East Midlands Netball, which alongside education is her other passion in life.

Implement improvement initiatives

1 Workshop series one

The right people, doing the right stuff, in the right order

In 2020, the Astrea Academy Trust faced an urgent need to move from being a disparate and disconnected group of 26 schools with a collection of attainment, cultural and/or financial challenges, to being a coherent, collaborative and financially stable system pointing in the same direction. The challenge was to achieve transformation at pace and at scale without a strong anchor school or existing capacity to leverage, and very little in reserves to lean on. Rowena will discuss the importance of recruiting for fit, as well as fearless consistency, accountability and good management in the face of some countervailing sector narratives - the grunt work of organisational transformation. By joining this workshop, participants will learn from both the successes and mistakes of the process, including what was compromised by the need to move at pace. This workshop relates to the 'implement improvement initiatives' strand of the conceptual model.