A multi-academy trust is at its best when each school is free to focus on the work only that school can do (knowing its children, shaping its curriculum, building its culture) while the trust takes care of the work that benefits from being done together. Getting this balance right is the most important strategic question a trust faces.

Three things are now true across our family of schools.

What each school owns

Each school keeps full ownership of the things that make it that school. The headteacher leads the curriculum and pedagogy. The school sets its own day-to-day priorities, its behaviour culture, its pastoral approach, its relationship with its community. School development plans are written at the school, by the school. Local Governing Bodies hold the school to account on behalf of its community.

We are deliberate about this. The work that touches children directly belongs as close to the children as possible. The trust does not write your school’s curriculum or set your school’s tone.

What schools share

Some work benefits from being shared across all our schools. Subject leaders meet across the trust to share what is working in their subject. Middle leaders are paired with counterparts in other schools. Early-career teachers join a trust-wide induction so they meet colleagues from across ODBST in their first weeks. School improvement happens through a single trust methodology that respects each school’s context.

Sharing is not the same as standardising. Our schools learn from each other; they do not become each other.

What the trust does centrally

Some work is best done once, well, on behalf of all our schools. Our HR, Operations and Finance functions are organised through dedicated partners who work across hubs of schools. Each hub has named partners who know their schools deeply, are present in them regularly, and are accountable both to the trust executive and to the heads they serve.

Our shared services team handles the work where scale matters: trust-wide compliance, estates strategy, digital infrastructure, cyber-security, statutory returns and assurance. This is the work that is hard to do well at the level of an individual school, and it is the work the trust is here to lift off heads’ shoulders so they can focus on the children.

 

Meet your partners

Trusts are sometimes described as if they were structures. Ours is more like a community of people. Beneath the How We Work landing page, profile blocks introduce the team that works alongside our schools day to day: by name, with photographs, and a short note about who they are and how to reach them.