Warning about pressures on senior staff at Gorse Academy Trust, after leak of management presentation
Gorse expects "very hard work," including allegedly extra hours at weekends, from its senior leaders.
Picture posed by actor. Image: iStock.
Slides say Leeds-based chain has "routine expectation" that senior leaders are "working very hard". "Success does not come from cutting corners regarding the implementation of GORSE Code," slides warn.
A well-known academy trust has been asking its leaders to work multiple hours at the weekends and putting pressure on all staff to “work and work…till they are ill,” sources have told Education Uncovered.
The National Education Union’s branch in Leeds, where the trust operates, also told me that it had dealt with cases of members having been “off with stress, burnout” and damaged health “because of the toxic culture, from above, that is widespread in the trust”.
The concerns come with slides from a presentation given 10 months ago to senior leaders by Sir John Townsley, chief executive of the Gorse Academies Trust, showing what seems a fierce commitment to raising standards for its schools’ pupils.
This is implemented, say the slides, via what the trust calls the "GORSE Code".
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By Warwick Mansell for EDUCATION UNCOVERED
Published: 6 October 2025
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This is, yet another, example of the toxicity of neo-liberalism coming into education. The metrics by which success is measured are these headlines. The metrics of test scores can be likened to the "bottom line" that we see in many areas of the wider marketisation / neoliberal economic system, where profit and growth are seen as the KPIs (and this very language of business has crept, in an unwelcome fashion, into education). The human capital costs are seem as acceptable (and replaceable) by products of this system be this, in this incidence, the teachers, SLTs or the costs to pupils - as we know English pupils are among the unhappiest in the OCED. The "success" that is crowed about by Gibb et alea is all linked to test scores and league table places; the human cost of mental heath, unhappiness, dissatisfaction, staff turnover, burnout and street is not measured. This is the very definition of a toxic system.