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Aim 5 - Systems .......................................................................................................................................................... 20
Amy Taylor, Chief Financial Officer
Aim 6 Growth
Whilst most people in education seem to equate this with increasing the number of schools in a trust, at The de Ferrers Trust we have a different interpretation of this.
We have grown a lot internally as an organisation over the last few years with our central services developing, our governance arrangements improving, as well as systemic growth in terms of how our schools work together.
Our current Chief Executive on his appointment in 2018 evaluated that the Trust was not in a strong enough position to welcome more schools on board in good faith. Some school results and other events that followed reflected that this was indeed the case. However, despite the challenging circumstances of the pandemic, improvements have been made to the extent that we are now in a strong enough position to consider supporting and working with other schools.
However, we are not the type of Trust to bang on doors and actively go looking to recruit for our own purposes. If there is a local school which feels they would benefit from working with us and would like to, we are happy to do so – further, given that our whole strategy is underpinned by a commitment to collaboration for school improvement, this actually does not necessarily mean officially becoming a member of our Trust. We are happy to share our best practice for the wider good. Officials from the Department of Education visited the Trust at the end of the last academic year and thought that this philosophy was refreshing. 6.1 Rebrand the Trust to create a more appealing and consistent image, including websites of the
Trust and its schools
Trust Central has committed to a large financial investment and contracted leading specialists in our sector to design new websites for the Trust and all of its schools.
Launching early in the academic year 2021-22, these are a vast improvement, especially in terms of visual design, to their predecessors. These give a much better impression of the professional image we wish to convey as an organisation. They have also been accompanied by new logos for some of our schools and new signage for all.
6.5 Ensure that our vision and values are understood and acted upon by every stakeholder, creating a positive culture
We have made great progress towards this objective over the last academic year. Although the vision statement doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, it does need to be comprehensive rather than a mere soundbite. It is important. Our values (‘Work hard, be kind, choose wisely) are very simple and memorable and are visible and referred to on a daily basis in all of our schools. Every school has new, prominent signage to reflect what our values are.
