Lessons in Leadership
🏷️ £150
🎧 Leaders
📍 Canford School
🥂 Refreshments served
Lessons in Leadership is a programme to support boarding school leaders as part of BSA’s new Centre for Boarding Leadership (CBL).
The Lessons in Leadership programme comprises lectures from highly distinguished leaders in different fields, including boarding alumni or people connected with boarding schools. These in-person Leadership events will be held at CBL partner BSA member schools in different parts of the UK. Typical Lessons in Leadership events will be for around a dozen delegates.
Date: Thursday October 8, 2026
Timings: 18:00 – 21:00
Venue: Canford School, Canford Magna, Wimborne, Dorset, BH21 3AD
Session Topic : Lessons in Leadership with Minette Batters
Speaker
Minette Batters
Minette Batters was the first woman to be elected President of the National Farmers’ Union in 113yrs. She’s represented the interests of over 46,000 farming businesses across England and Wales through unprecedented times, navigating the challenges of Brexit, Covid 19 and the war in Ukraine. During this time, she worked with four Prime Ministers – three of them in one year – and six Defra Secretaries of State. She stood down from the post in February 2024.
Campaigning about the importance of British food and farming and its ability to achieve Net Zero has been a key driver for Minette. In 2020 she led the NFU on one of the most successful campaigns ever seen, bringing together a coalition of chefs, including Jamie Oliver, farmers, environmentalists, consumer groups and animal welfare experts – resulting in over one million people signing the NFU food standards petition. Minette also co-founded ‘Ladies in Beef’ and the Great British Beef Week. She has regularly engaged with different media, including frequent appearances on the ‘Today’ programme, ‘Question Time’, ‘Any Questions’, ‘Desert Island Discs’, Woman’s Hour and other national print and broadcast media. She is currently writing a monthly piece for Country Life magazine.
Minette is mother to twins and is a tenant farmer, on the Longford Estate near Salisbury, Wiltshire. She began farming in 1998 having sold her house and negotiated the farm business tenancy, starting with fifteen beef cows but fulfilling a lifetime ambition to farm. Today the farm has a Spring and Autumn calving Aberdeen Angus beef herd, arable crops and a few sheep. The business is widely diversified, with a wedding and events venue in a 17th century tithe barn, holiday cottages, and winter grazing for polo ponies, alongside a recently restored walled garden growing native British flowers. Minette trained as a Cordon Bleu chef, and was a former amateur jockey, riding 30 point to point winners, alongside working for champion National Hunt racehorse trainer David Elsworth.
She’s an ambassador for Farm Africa and a passionate advocate and fundraiser for the Junior Diabetic Research Foundation. She’s run in four marathons, raising over £100,000 for charity. In 2021 Minette was made a Deputy Lieutenant to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, and in July 2024 she was made a Crossbench Peer in the House of Lords. Minette was assigned, by means of a Direct Ministerial Appointment by the Rt Hon Steve Reed MP, to lead a review of farm profitability for Defra. This review ran from April 2025 until the end of October 2025, and reported back to the Rt Hon Emma Reynolds MP.
Host
Robin Fletcher, Chief Executive
Robin Fletcher is CEO of BSA Group, comprising BAISIS (British Association of Independent Schools with International Students), BSA (Boarding Schools’ Association), BSA Legal, HIEDA (Health in Education Association) SACPA (Safeguarding and Child Protection Association) and TIOB (The Institute of Boarding). A former journalist, editor and communications director, Robin is a non-executive director of the manufacturers’ trade body Make UK, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Honorary Fellow of Cardiff Metropolitan University.
This Lessons in Leadership event will be for around a dozen delegates.
