School Improvement

The Trust exists with the advancement of education at its core, and we know that every school is constantly evaluating its provision to provide the best opportunities for their young people.

We have a strong focus on enabling schools to improve by providing the best in field support services so that headteachers, governors and their staff can focus on student learning.

In the last six months we have been building our provision to ensure that we can offer the best quality of support. We have a balance between highly experienced, direct employees of the Trust, combined with market leading service providers.

The Trust employs a Director of Secondary and a Director of Primary Education. Both Lisa and Jeremy are highly experienced and very successful headteachers. Lisa has extensive secondary headteacher experience, leading three different schools; whilst Jeremy has led All Saints in Anfield for several years as well as supporting other schools as Executive Headteacher.

Our Trust is very committed to collaboration. All our common approaches, from the Trust quality assurance mechanism to our approaches to curriculum design and assessment have been developed with the Headteachers and senior leaders in our schools. We have built in opportunities to share good practice and undertake joint developments.

We facilitate school to school collaboration and common learning as well as the sharing of resources to help reduce workload. At the same time our CMAT encourages schools to continue to engage actively with the established networks they have; we work closely with Archdiocesan school improvement teams.

The Trust is committed to providing a similar offer of excellent school improvement support for primary schools, as and when they join the Trust. This offer will build on existing partnerships as well as providing more targeted support in line with the needs of individual schools.

We see being part of our CMAT as belonging to a family of schools. At times there will be a need for some schools, or teams within schools, to be given more intensive support, we will provide it.

Read our School Improvement Offer 

Due to the experience of the central team, we have been able to access nationally renowned experts to support the school improvement journey in our schools. They include:

• Dr Antony Edkins is an experienced school leader who has led local authority schools and schools within a MAT as a MAT CEO. He has led schools from Inadequate to at least Good. Today, he is the Regional Lead for the DfE’s Advanced Maths Support Programme in the Northwest and is an Ofsted inspector. His specialisms include mathematics, safeguarding and the special educational needs and/or disabilities of pupils with autism.

• Laura Kay is a highly regarded School Improvement Partner and works with MAT leaders and individual schools. Laura has been a cohort tutor for NPQML and NPQSL. She represents School Improvement Liverpool as their lead for improving reading and literacy across Liverpool secondary schools and is the content manager for their curriculum networks. She has supported numerous teams with curriculum writing and assessment. With a business background, before moving into teaching, she is keen on tightening up operational systems to enable educational success and developing operational synergy across organisations.

• Vicky Atherton is a highly experienced school leader and school improvement professional with a demonstrated history of working collaboratively in supporting leadership and whole school wider development. She is also skilled in all area of school improvement. Vicky is the former Director of Loreto Grammar Teaching School Alliance and previously worked as Senior Secondary Adviser for Trafford LA. She is a serving, experienced Ofsted inspector.

• Alison Burrows is the Former Head of Thornleigh Salesian School in Bolton and now works for the Archdiocese of Liverpool leading Catholic Leadership/CPD programmes. The Trust also has experienced Ofsted and CSI inspectors within its leadership team to help colleagues prepare for inspection.