Why Join Our Trust
Our Trust aims for all schools in our partnership to be good or better. We want to ensure that no child, no colleague and no school gets left behind. We feel that in coming together as a group of schools within the umbrella of an Academy Trust, we are able to work more effectively and confidently to best serve the needs of our children and our communities. We are able to deploy our staff in a more flexible and responsive manner – we share our expertise and grow our own teachers and leaders. We ensure that our staff have opportunities to grow within and across our Trust; a Trust-wide recruitment and retention programme ensures that talent is nurtured and promoted.
Our staffing and governance structure encompasses expertise in both the primary and secondary phases, and includes the Chief Executive Officer having undertaken school improvement work and Ofsted inspections in both phases.
Our Trust encourages innovation. It is also firmly focused on maximising the monies available to our schools and staff. As such we have a highly skilled central Finance team, plus a dedicated Lettings and income generation team, who are directly focused on ensuring that our facilities yield income that is then directly reinvested in our schools. At the current time, the Trust delivers over half a million pounds additional funding per annum, underpinning reduced contact ratios for teachers, plus generous staffing levels across our schools.
The communities that we serve across the Trust encompass stakeholders from both affluent and disadvantaged families, drawn from a variety of ethnicities and religious backgrounds. Our ethos is one of inclusivity, promoting an equality of opportunity for every child across the Trust.
We maximise the freedoms afforded to us by academisation through reinvesting any financial surplus, plus all of the monies generated through our dedicated income generation work, to create additional benefits and opportunities for our children and staff.
At its essence, our belief is that we create strength through alliance.
Individual Identity
Each school within our Trust is encouraged to have its own identity. Nurturing and promoting that individual identity is central to the Trust. There is no insistence on one “top down” model that is applied to every school. Each of our schools has its own unique characteristics, communities and needs, and the Trust encourages each school to retain and nurture that individuality.
Whilst core statutory policies are applied across the Trust, scope is given for each school to adapt these to best meet the needs of their community. Some of these adaptations may be relatively minor, whilst others may be much larger scale: for example, the marking policies of our secondary schools may well be entirely unsuitable for our primaries, and vice versa.
Learning and Teaching
Our approach to learning and teaching is to ensure a consistency of aspiration and expectations across the Trust, founded in ensuring that all students:
- Achieve.
- Feel secure enough to take risks and make mistakes.
- Have high aspirations for learning and for the next phase of their education.
- Have high self-expectations.
- Promote independence, resilience, respect, tolerance, an open-minded world view.
- Are happy and confident.
- Develop independent and collaborative learning skills.
- Have pride in our Trust and community and know how they can successfully contribute to this.
Each school’s implementation and delivery of these priorities will be founded in their individual identity and needs.
Support for Staff
Throughout the year all schools have the opportunity to benefit from:
- Personalised support as requested by the school
- Experienced support and guidance from the Chief Executive Officer
- A centralised business function incorporating HR, Finance, Data/Business Analysis, ICT, Facilities and Income Generation. These centralised functions are there to facilitate the work of school leaders, allowing them to focus on leading their schools. Their support for school leaders includes:
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- Extensive HR support with day-to-day HR and recruitment via the People Director and HR team
- Data analysis and identification of key priority areas, ready for leaders to review and base strategic delivery on
- Financial planning and budgeting support via the Finance Manager Chief Financial Officer and Finance team
- Income generation funding and support via the Chief Financial Officer and Lettings Manager
- Buildings and site development and improvement via the Facilities Manager
- Expert ICT advice and procurement via the centralised ICT team led by the Director of ICT and Infrastructure
- External leadership coaching for key senior staff if desired
- Expert support with all Ofsted inspections and external reviews: there is a practising Ofsted Inspector in the Trust
- Access to a full programme of personalised CPD support for teachers and support staff
- A suite of Trust central policies
- Safeguarding and compliance audits/ongoing support with any identified actions
- Health & Safety reviews
- Peer to peer reviews and support
- Cross-phase groups and work
