Our Values

We feel strongly that academies should enhance the educational provision of an area, drive up standards, particularly for the most vulnerable, and play a central role in the regeneration of communities.

We believe that improving young people’s life chances is essential to developing a strong local economy. Our philosophy and values are reflected in the ten underlying principles of our trust:

  1. We always put ‘Students First’. We care deeply about children;

  2. We want to be known for our track record in raising standards: we are obsessive about results;

  3. Our staff are experts in their field and through the Outwood Institute of Education (OIE) we will always aim to recruit, retain and continuously develop both our own staff and help to develop the whole education system; in particular supporting the development of multi-academy trusts, to the best of our ability;

  4. We want to transform the life-chances of our children by focussing on raising standards, particularly the basic skills of literacy and numeracy as well as employability skills so that our students have the best possible start in life;

  5. We believe that local children should attend local schools and we are not, and never will be, selective in our admissions: we are fully inclusive and welcome children from vulnerable groups, e.g. SEND, Looked After Children, etc;

  6. We play our full role in behaviour partnerships/hard to place protocols;

  7. We follow the guiding principles of School Teachers Pay & Conditions and National Joint Council conditions of service and want to work positively with trade unions and actively involve them in our decision making;

  8. We always put collaboration before competition and will never do anything detrimental to a young person, member of staff, school or college in a neighbouring community;

  9. We believe in the implementation of a systematic model, our 7 strand transformation model, across our multi-academy trust which enables every individual academy and all our academies collectively, our ‘family of schools’, to significantly raise standards and transform children’s life-chances. Individual academies are encouraged to retain and develop their own unique local community links and character alongside our transformation model;

  10. We will ensure we create capacity in advance of need at every level of the organisation. Decisions to support new schools will be led by the capacity available and in our confidence that our existing academies continue to perform. Parents/carers and students would quite rightly never forgive us if standards in our existing academies declined.