In attendance at the Leadership Group meeting were Stuart Mansell (CEO), Neil Reilly (Nene Valley Primary School Headteacher), Colin Marks (Orton Wistow Primary School Headteacher), Becky Ford (Woodston Primary School Headteacher), Nick File (OWN Trust Executive Headteacher), Trevor Goakes (OWN Trust Executive Headteacher), Sarah Levy (Director of Education), and Fiona Schneider (Marketing and Communications Officer).

The Leadership Group came together for one of the final times under the stewardship of our current CEO and had its full complement of attendees.

As ever, we were straight down to business. The meeting followed the usual format of discussing action from previous meetings, and ensuring priorities were on track and actioned. We discussed school and trust-wide data, reviewed the current QA/QE process, the status of current impact networks, and much more. The Leadership Group also discussed the upcoming SATs, with the group making sure all of the schools had the right support in place to ensure a smooth running of the SATs for staff and children.

During the main body of the meeting, we looked at our internal communication procedures and discussed the great work our Marketing and Communication Officer has been doing. We discussed how we could better align our communication lines across the 3 schools and the trust, with part of the discussion focussing on launching a new social media platform for the trust and the schools. At this point, Stuart shared the work our estates team has been undertaking on centralising our risk assessments through our shared platform ‘Every’.

Nick File gave feedback from our recent Edurio staff survey, sharing the positive responses, whilst raising areas where staff felt they could be better supported. We benched marked the survey against the previous year, and it was reassuring to see so many positive responses. We were particularly pleased to read how staff felt the leadership team had been proactive in making changes to areas they felt could support them better, with positive responses higher than from the previous survey. Nick also discussed the current CPD program on offer to all trust staff and the positive impact this is having in all the schools, within the trust, and with governors and trustees. We then discussed the important roles our governors and trustees play and how we can best support them to have the biggest impact in their roles.

Headteachers fed back to the CEO regarding the progress against their school improvement priorities and where they could be supported by the trust with any challenges they were having. We discussed our shared school improvement platform ‘Perspective lite’ and the benefit of all leaders being able to access each other's school improvement plans. With the transition to a new CEO, the format and priorities of the trust improvement plan were discussed. Stuart shared, that although not starting until September, our new CEO, Lorraine Greco, has already been spending a lot of time getting to know OWN Trust. We look forward to welcoming Lorraine during her upcoming visits to the trust and the 3 schools.