Steve Munby's speech to the National College Annual Conference 2010 from The National College on Vimeo.

Steve Munby, Chief Executive of the National College opened the second day of the conference with an inspirational speech on leadership as service.

He spoke about acting with moral purpose - asking "what is wanted of me?" rather than "what do I want?" - is key to being a servant leader. And the best way to make a positive difference to children's lives is to lead.

Servant leaders get satisfaction in empowering and developing others and watching their people grow. In great schools, everyone is supporting everyone else to get better.

Servant leaders are careful stewards of the resources available - especially now as budgets are reduced. We need to continue to support our most vulnerable children despite this.

Arm's length bodies like the College are facing a reduction to their budgets, with the College losing £16 million this financial year.

The use of federations and collaboration, clustering and pooling costs like sharing school business managers across primary schools can all help in reducing costs. Leaders will need to manage budgets and find new models of working, helping schools and communities to work together to make a difference. It's challenging, but can make us more creative, more effective. He reminded the audience (in Latin!) that 'times change and we change with them'.

However, innovation and creativity need to be tempered with leadership of the basics: keeping order, managing behaviour and holding people to account for their performance. The key is knowing what to change and what to leave.

Servant leaders understand their context - their communities - and do what is right for them. People will support change is they have faith in you and the process - people don't mind change, but they dont like being changed.

Steve reminded the audience that every leader needs to be a learner. Being reflective and trying out new approaches is key to developing as a leader - he referenced Malcolm Gladwell's observation that around 10,000 hours of practice is needed to master any skill. Great leaders are always searching for new challenges and are never satisfied - they keep driving forward with moral purpose.

Steve spoke on the problem of variation between schools. The impact of National Leaders of Education is clear - working together drives improvement and school-to-school support is vital in order to develop 'collective capacity'. Steve also said that he is delighted that academies will be expected to offer support to other establishments.

Those leaders who are driven by status and not moral purpose are a risk - empire building and isolationism is very damaging when collaboration and professional networks are clearly seen to have such a positive impact.

Leaders need to be resilient. Steve gave the example of Eddie Izzard running dozens of marathons back to back, depite never having done it before - we can make amazing things happen if we just believe we can. But we can't do it alone - Izzard relied on team of colleagues and support from the public and the same applies to servant leaders, who need to have the humility to ask for help when
they need it.

Director's of Children's Services (DCS) have a job that requires enormous resilience and Steve stressed his admiration for the role. He spoke about how the College is helping DCSs work together and develop their own and their group resilience

Finally, Steve talked about how servant leaders must be willing to hold courageous conversations, never avoiding difficult discussions as the outcomes for children matter so much and children rarely get a second chance.

He concluded by reminding the audience that their challenge is to lead in a time of reduced spending but to make more of a difference to the lives of children and young people - by collaborating, being a learning leader, being resilient and always being courageous in our conversations.

Finally, he spoke about what the future will bring for the National College. We have our part to play in these times of austerity and we're always aware that our responsibility is to make a difference to the lives of children and young people, not to protect ourselves. We're building on the best of our past work and doing everything we can to reduce our impact on the public purse.

We exist to serve the government of the day, children and young people, and leaders - helping them to be the best they can be, because in times of change what we most need is great leadership.

Peter Clarke