Monday 19 December 2022

Dear Parents/Carers,

As we head toward the Christmas holidays, I wanted to write to express my thanks for your support of the school, pupils and staff so far this Academic Year.  

This has been a successful year for all our schools following several years of challenge and disruption. I hope that you see that schools are beginning to thrive as we establish strong leadership, a greater focus on a strong culture of behaviour in our schools, and better standards of teaching driven by high quality training for our teachers. 

I’d like to pass on my thanks to our leaders, teachers and associate staff that play such an important role in supporting the young people in our schools.  

In September of this Year, Mark Whitby stepped down as Chair of Trustees to make way for James Toop. James is CEO of a charity called Biteback and is passionate about raising standards within education. We are both committed to creating outstanding schools for our pupils and while there is plenty left to do, we are pleased with the progress that we have made so far. 

This has not been a term without its challenges. The national context of political instability, rising costs, staff shortages for both teachers and associate staff make the educational context as challenging as it ever was. However, I am confident that our schools and our trust are well placed to face these with confidence, and we will give you more information in our annual report in February. 

Over the next two terms we aim to focus on building our own resilience to face these challenges. We also aim to build the resilience of our pupils to ensure that secondary attendance builds once more and that pupils are well prepared for the next stage of their education when they leave us, either from infants, primary or secondary.  This means creating lots of opportunities for wider experience and ensuring clear pathways for our pupils. You want your children to be safe, to enjoy going to school and to learn. Collectively, we also want them to thrive. Together I am sure that we can achieve that.  

I hope you get some time to relax over what is always a very busy holiday. My thanks again for your support of our schools and we look forward to going from strength to strength in the New Year.  

Best wishes

Simon Garrill

Chief Executive