In 2019 two well established Multi-Academy Trusts (MAT) combined to form the Cornwall Education Learning Trust (CELT). With four secondary and nine primary schools, CELT serves over 7000 pupils from ages of 2-18 and is now the largest MAT in Cornwall. Whilst the Trust is small in comparison to many of the larger MAT ‘chains’ we see around the country, the journey to develop a school improvement strategy reflective of the Trust’s new mission that was responsive to the needs and identities of each of its schools was no less challenging.
This article tells the story of the steps taken and the lessons learned along the way in the co-construction of CELTs ‘Closing the Gap’ school improvement strategy (SIS) working with external expertise such as the Education Endowment Fund (EEF) and the International Centre for Educational Enhancement (ICEE) at the University of Bolton. One of the schools in the Trust was part of the Kunskapsskolan-Inspired network of schools now facilitated by the ICEE.
Developing a mission driven school improvement strategy
Learning together to help every child achieve more. This is our mission as a Trust. We are focused above all on making teaching in our academies as good as it can be. But how do we do this? How do we begin? With the key word in our mission statement being ‘together’, we identified early on that this was how we would need to begin the process of improvement strategy development. However, drawing together such a diverse group of schools is challenging process and requires a truly collaborative and creative process. All schools have distinct cultures and communities and each of these communities have distinct perspectives regarding who they are, how they fit within their own MAT, and how they fit within the wider ‘MAT world’. With such a complex undertaking, our intention was to keep our approach as simple and succinct as possible.
So, in May 2020, we began our ‘Closing the Gap’ school improvement journey. Driven by a group of passionate educationalists representing all schools in the Trust, we set out to achieve a bold and challenging set of goals. Not only were we intent on improving the outcomes and life opportunities of all the children in our schools, we wanted to use our collective learning and wisdom to help all of our schools and colleagues come back from the disruption of the global pandemic with renewed passion and a determination to create a different future for our children – a more equitable future, a more personalised future that recognises all their individual hope and talents, and a future that allows all of us to continue to have real faith and trust in the power of our profession to make society well.
What we did
Laying foundation principles
Establishing a sense of connectedness was crucial to the success of strategy development, as was the defining of our moral purpose as a Trust. Thus, it was collectively that we co-constructed the key aims and principles of the ‘Closing the Gap’ school improvement strategy (see Table 1).
