MAT December Update

Hello everyone

Here is the end of Autumn term update on our plans to form a new Multi-Academy Trust with schools across East Riding, North Lincolnshire and Hull with the founder settings of the Riverview Family of Schools comprising of Baysgarth School and Castledyke Primary School in Barton upon Humber, The Market Weighton School and Market Weighton Infant School and Wyke Sixth Form College in Hull.

I am pleased to say we are making considerable progress with overcoming the delays to the approval of our project.  Firstly, we had a surprise general election.  Then we have had a new Labour administration who have not been clear about academisation. And, now we are almost sorted in terms of the private loans that Wyke holds that were taken out to invest in creating our fantastic estate.  A process called novation, in which the loans are simply transferred from the college to the new Multi-Academy Trust, is underway. These delays mean that our application to form the new Trust has not received formal approval yet, but we are hopeful this will be confirmed early in the new year.

Despite the frustration of the delays, all other aspects of preparing for the new Trust have continued at pace.  My visits to settings have been invaluable in gaining a real sense of the people, the culture and, most importantly, the young people in each of the schools and the college.  I’ve spent time in all the year groups in the Market Weighton Infant School, had the privilege to see lessons and hold a forum for feedback from the children at Castledyke, and the two secondary schools have allowed me a lot of time to get to know the senior teams as well as seeing lessons and interacting with the students as they go about their school life.

More widely, we now have fully worked through governance processes and an excellent group of proposed governors to play this crucial role going forward.  In terms of our staff, we have a draft People Strategy along with the first steps of our staff development plans and significant work on our policies.  The school business managers and the team at Wyke have been working hard around everything to do with finance and operations with several processes in place to decide on joint systems.  Perhaps most interestingly, we have begun to discuss the opportunities for sharing our approaches to education, with staff from each setting coming together to share our current practice and identify areas that we could do even better together. Initial themes are our expectations for teaching, how we share data and organise our assessments, initial teacher training and, straight after Christmas, safeguarding.

So, another remarkably busy term.  I am pleased to say that the shared values and beliefs that brought us together at the outset continue to be the bedrock of our project.  We all believe in genuinely inclusive education that provides the absolute best for the young people of our region with schools and colleges where staff are supported to perform their great work in a spirit of mutual trust and development.

As ever, please do get in contact with any questions or suggestions about how we can make our project better to paul.britton@wyke.ac.uk. If you want more details on the project these can be found at www.thewlt.co.uk.

Very best wishes and I hope you all have a very Happy Christmas!

Paul Britton 

Proposed CEO of the Wyke Learning Trust