The Trust’s ethos is underpinned by a collaborative support model, with expertise being drawn upon from across the schools – enabling people within the Trust to develop and grow with opportunities to enhance their own professional learning. This ensures that leadership development remains at the heart of Kingfisher Learning Trust, with opportunities being provided to ensure quality and growth for leadership succession and different ways of working. In developing roles to ensure that Trust Schools are well led, optimum learning opportunities are provided for all children and staff, while working across the system to develop the professional practice of others.
Collaborative Trust Support
- CEO
- Deputy CEO
- Chief Operating Officer (COO)
- Director of School Improvement
- Special School Directors, SLEs & school expertise
- Mainstream School Directors, SLEs & expertise
- Trust Accountant
The expectation of movement between schools within the Trust (where staff desire this) will produce a pipeline of future leaders, by enabling a greater array of leadership positions, with shared practice and a stronger, larger specialist team from all schools. Staff expertise is developed across the continuum of need within a wider group of schools improving outcomes for all children within the Trust. A key design principle of the Trust is the bringing together of the best practice from the special and mainstream schools– addressing the rising SEND provision issues both locally and nationally.
The Trust has well established curriculum subject expert forums held termly to allow staff to support each other in fulfilling school priorities and ensuring that we are all up to date with the latest information and best practice in specific subject areas. The teams are led by members of staff from across the Trust alongside support from outside agencies and lead subject experts from our neighbouring high schools. In addition to this we have a collaborative approach to the development of practices and procedures in safeguarding and run half termly Trust-wide network meetings to facilitate this.
To enhance this, we work collaboratively with many partners beyond the Trust. Engaging with Local Authority Hubs, the Research School and local Teaching Schools to deliver and access high quality training. We actively participate in borough wide conferences, lead on practices such as writing moderation across Oldham schools and lead a highly effective Special School Collaborative Partnership.
Our commitment to improvement can also be seen through our collaborative opportunities for Governors across the Trust with a training programme being developed to ensure skilled governance across the Trust.
Central Team
Schools pay a central support fee from their GAG funding to enable the Trust to run and support the Central Team and Central Support Services. This is regularly reviewed as the Trust grows to ensure it is kept to a minimum and schools can retain as much funding as possible to enhance each child’s educational provision.
The Trust Central Support Service provides legal and statutory services on behalf of all schools in the Trust as well as a range of other leadership/governance and school improvement services. These are outlined in the Central Collaborative Services document.
Additionally Trust schools access centralised procurement of contracts and Service Level Agreements, maximising the benefits of Trust wide purchasing.
As the Trust grows and develops, the model for the Central Support Service will evolve and the range of services will be able to grow and diversify to support the needs of the schools within the Trust.
