Our culture of review and refine

We are an organisation funded by public money – taxpayers’ money. We have an absolute responsibility to ensure that we provide the public with the very best service we can as we use their money.

We operate a culture of ‘review and refine’. We plan, prepare, implement, review and refine what we do; knowing that iteration is a natural part of learning together as we work.

Several ways we do this include:

• Our Trust self-evaluation which is done annually and presented to trustees. We test ourselves against our descriptors for excellence and our strategic plan goals and we set an action plan that allows us to get closer to excellence year by year.
• A termly report to our trustees that includes an update on our goals and actions.
• Our Reviewing Together days in our schools where we work with school leaders to take a holistic look at school performance both academically and operationally. Our collective findings feed in to school self-evaluations and improvement plans.
• Our annual service reviews where any of our people can contribute to a collaborative review of each area of our work as experienced by all users, whether school-based or centrally-based.
• Our annual Trust surveys where we look together at a range of areas and receive the most comprehensive set of statistical data from across the Trust from parents, students and staff.

We know that this range of activity will show us gaps for action and we welcome this. We all come to work to do the best we can – all ultimately in the service of our learners. If we can make each other smarter, wherever we work and in whatever role, that’s a good thing and is a blame-free experience, whoever we are and whatever we do.