It dawned on me yesterday that we’ve held more than 10 face-to-face events as the Step Up Network. Whilst it’s a lot of work in the making, I always love seeing all of the wonderful people in our community coming together – both people who keep returning and those who have become part of our community along the way.

Each year, we change something up about our events; upon reflection, this year for our London event we introduced a panel discussion, a podcast room and had a theme: Launching Leadership Learning. 

The day started as it always does our committed volunteers coming together to set up. Once again, we were very kindly hosted by Opogo Education, a social enterprise, EdTech and supply staff provider working across parts of England and the US. Hannah, Conor and Paul are just the most incredible humans and I am forever grateful for their support. Once we’d set up the rooms and had time to catch up and reconnect our guests started arriving.

One of the things we pride ourselves on is ensuring we provide a warm welcome whether that be by volunteers, fellow attendees or through the welcome talk which was led by my volunteer colleague, coaching group buddy and friend, Vina Sondh – a phenomenal educator who six months ago started her headship journey.

After Vina’s introduction, I delivered a keynote on our new Step Up Leadership Curriculum – an intentional delivery model of content that we believe is not being taught in many other places in education. It’s a model that our offer this year is being built around and also is a model that can be replicated in a school or academy trust (if you’d like to talk more then do hit me up).

We then transitioned into a panel discussion expertly moderated and curated by Ziggy Moore; who was joined by Vina alongside Claudio Sisera, Mark Pritchard and Rena Johnson. As Ziggy posed the questions to the panelists you saw the many nods around the room as many of the answers resonated with so many guests.

After a short break we started our first workshop led by the wonderful Laura McPhee who led a workshop on her topic of expertise, psychological safety. Whilst I wasn’t able to attend for the full talk, what I observed from outside and when I popped in there was so much that was to then be built on by the future talks.

Then the networking continued whilst we had lunch. Throughout the day, the BookedIn team (Angelica and Claudio) were busy interviewing guests, promoting their work ahead of launch and connecting dots with potential speakers. You can find out more about BookedIn here.  

After lunch, for the first time in Step Up history, I ran a workshop. The title intrigued most guests: ‘Jerks at Work, The Devil Wears Prada and Timpsons: The Art of Leading People’. I gave a basic overview of some things I had learnt through my journey and to start a conversation for future work in leading and managing people by Step Up.

Our final workshop was led by the lovely Utha Vallade, a founding volunteer of Step Up who ran an interactive workshop all about opening the doors to leadership. Utha expertly provided mental models and frameworks for people to be successful.

The day was then expertly brought together by the amazing Kimberley Evans – she pulled the thoughts of the day together and facilitated a coaching and feedback circle.

Whilst many the day finished there, a few people continued the conversations and learning at Spitalfields Market. Another great day of connection; more work to be done by Step Up to enable our community to thrive but a fantastic day to launch our leadership curriculum.