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Step Up Network

The grassroots network turned community interest company and social enterprise empowering educators to make the step up they wish to make.

Yesterday saw our team travel to the northern city of Leeds to host of our final face-to-face event of the academic year. The weekend started off with team members, Adam and Ben travelling to Manchester (where we hosted our northern event last year), to catch up with Vicki Maguire amongst food and live music. The following morning, we met up with Brooke, our volunteer based in the North, and caught the train to Leeds. After the picturesque journey through Yorkshire we finally reached Leeds and quickly walked through the centre to our venue, Browns and set up our event space.

Our Lunch and Lead Meet format is the format we used in Birmingham last year, our first ever face-to-face event. This format is where we have a smaller number of attendees, smaller venue or part of a venue and speakers speak within a shorter time frame. This event blends professional and leadership development with sociable networking.

Once set up it was great to be joined by so many people, those who have been with us since the start and those who have not ever engaged with the network yet. After everyone settled in, we started by sharing the Step Up story and explaining more about the event; our founder, Ben, then gave a more in-depth presentation to our story on the ‘resilience rollercoaster’ which was a great starting point and link for all the presentations of the day. We then had three fantastic speakers:

• Patrick Ottley-O’Connor, the self-proclaimed wellbeing super model and former executive headteacher who spoke all about wellbeing and then becoming a supermodel yourself.
• Dr Nasima Riazat, WomenEd network leader and educational leadership guru who presented on practical strategies to develop leadership resilience.
• and launch event speaker, Jaycee Ward, primary senior leader who spoke about expectation vs reality in terms of leadership.

All three speakers were fantastic and provided so many practical strategies that you could implement straight away! In between talks, lunch was served and the opportunity for discussion and to ask questions to the speakers. Towards the end of the event, we provided time for feedback and networking before closing just after 3pm.

It was lovely to see another successful event come together. The events take up much of the energy and time of volunteers, therefore, to be able to bring this together successfully was incredibly rewarding. We will soon be planning next year’s events and we cannot wait to share with you our plans for the future.