As part of the ACEL Conference, I attended a presentation by Dr Phil Browning about the importance of trust in school leaders. Basically, I found this interesting for three main points:
1) Trust and transformative schools are closely linked.
2) Trust in the head is linked to trust in the whole school.
3) Trust is perceived as part of practice – not an inherent skill.
According to his research (which, it must be said, had taken place in large independent schools in Australia, and so the context is a little bit different to systemic schools in the Catholic system), developing trust is very much correlated with successful practice in transformative skills.