About The Trust

The RPT recognises that we have essential qualities that we offer to our current schools and those schools considering joining our Trust includes:

  • Highly effective governance with a clear scheme of delegation
  • Access to highly effective policies and procedures, including robust financial management, compliance, scrutiny and audit policies and procedures to ensure financial regularity, effective use of resources and full compliance
  • Access to highly effective shared services & economies of scale (combined/bulk orders), supported by a knowledgeable, highly qualified, well organised school improvement, quality assurance, IT, finance, HR and site management central team
  • A ‘family’ of schools offering highly supportive networking and partnership working
  • An effective CPD, coaching and leadership programme for staff at all levels, to ensure excellent staff development for all
  • Quality assurance and school improvement services led by experts
  • A chance to generate income by offering school to school support.
  • Stability in a fast changing educational landscape
  • Harmony with vision and values, cultural alignment.
  • Retaining each school’s unique identity

Our key aim is to create school environments where all pupils flourish, ensuring both the optimal continuing development of their potential and their ability to live well as rounded human beings.

For us this means a relentless focus on high quality, inclusive education – advancing education for all our pupils.

In our view, deep and purposeful collaboration is at the heart of the Trust structure – it is the way we keep the focus on improvement at scale. And from our point of view, structures are in fact very important because they create the conditions for this intensely focused collaboration. We believe that ‘public benefit’ gives expression to the civic role of Trusts.

The power of purpose and the importance of culture ‘Flourishing together’ comes primarily from the power of purpose: the capacity to link people through a shared belief about the identity, meaning and mission of an organisation. In the strongest Trusts, there is a deep sense of collective purpose. Our purpose is drawn explicitly from the charitable object of most Trusts: advancing education for public benefit. Purpose is enacted across a Trust through the culture that the Trust establishes.

 

Our Key areas of Focus

  • Pupils and educational excellence: We ensure every RPT school provides high-quality, creative teaching and a strong provision that enables all pupils to achieve excellent outcomes. We focus particularly on disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils, while maintaining sustainable capacity for improvement and expanding specialist places to meet local need.
  • Growth and development: We will continue to grow RPT as a family of schools, expanding pupil places, developing new and satellite provision and welcoming new schools into the Trust. Alongside this, we will grow our training and outreach offer and strengthen RPT’s profile and reputation through our expertise, website, marketing and events.
  • Leadership and governance: We sustain strong leadership and governance across the Trust through robust programmes of support, training and development for staff, Trustees and Local Academy Board governors. Clear roles, accountability, compliance and the effective use of the Scheme of Delegation underpin our approach.
  • Our people: We develop an effective and stable workforce through a strong focus on recruitment, retention, EDI and succession planning. We invest in coaching, CPD and progression opportunities at every level, including our Leaders of the Future and Routes into Leadership programmes, while continuing to develop our People and Leadership Strategies.
  • Partnerships and collaboration: We build and strengthen local and national partnerships to improve education, school improvement, SEND policy and practice, training, support and preparation for adulthood and post-19 pathways. We also open our schools and facilities to the wider community through activities, lettings and other opportunities.
  • Finance and value for money: We maintain and improve the Trust’s financial resilience while ensuring effective and efficient use of resources and value for money. We will continue to develop income generation through lettings, training and services, alongside investment planning and robust financial oversight.
  • Data and accountability: We develop a consistent, balanced and usable Trust-wide data strategy, ensuring key metrics are visible and reported consistently across our schools. Robust data systems, monitoring and GDPR support effective decision-making, accountability and school improvement.
  • Equality, diversity and inclusion: We continue to develop our EDI policy and practice so that everyone is included and feels included. EDI remains embedded within our recruitment, workforce and leadership processes, with actions and impact regularly reviewed through Trust and school structures.
  • Climate and sustainability: We work to reduce waste and energy use, become carbon neutral and support the wider climate change agenda. Each school will continue to develop its environmental work, supported by staff CPD and progress towards recognised Eco Schools accreditation.

With RPT you will have:

1. Deep and purposeful collaboration

Working with our central teams (HR, finance, sites); ensuring best VfM, responsive HR advice and support and health and safety monitoring

Working alongside our:

  • Executive Director of Schools; ensuring ambition for every pupil, careful pupil progress tracking and a highly effective school improvement strategy
  • Chief Finance and Operations Officer to ensure robust finance, HR and operational systems are in place for all schools; supporting Heads to track their spending carefully, advise on VfM, be secure in their HR practice and deliver safe and secure environments for all.
  • Director of Communication, IT and Data to deliver excellent systems to provide effective working environments for all pupils and staff and ensure communication with all is highly effective
  • Director of Inclusion to oversee therapeutic provision and behaviour and attitudes, ensuring compliance with legislation and that best practice recommendations are embedded in our policies, procedures and systems.

2. A strong and resilient structure

  • Structural resilience through groups of schools working together in a single legal entity with strong, strategic and focused governance
  • Educational resilience through the deeper collaboration and stronger conditions for building a culture of improvement.
  • Financial resilience through greater economies of scale (VfM) and careful benchmarking
  • Workforce resilience through stronger, shared cultures of career development, with pathways across schools, bolstering the recruitment, development, and retention of teachers, leaders and support staff.

3. Every child a powerful learner

Our theory of change in relation to improvement at scale across the school system is deeper than the typical school improvement service because it is centred on curriculum, pedagogy, and the quality of teaching – the substance of education:

  • The goal is for every teacher/staff member in every classroom to be as good as they can be in what they teach (the curriculum) and how they teach (pedagogy);
  • There is no sustainable improvement for pupils without improvement in teaching, and no improvement in teaching without the best professional development for teachers;
  • Strong structures (in groups of schools) can facilitate better professional development through creating and culture and conditions and thus better teaching and improvement for pupils.

4. Professional growth and development

Professional development at the heart of efforts to improve the school system; we believe it should be underpinned by deliberate and intentional knowledge building. Professional development of teachers/staff is core to these knowledge building efforts. Pupils benefit from more effective teaching; they not only learn more, they live happier and healthier lives. The effect is strongest among pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.

5. Solidarity and interconnectedness

It is our solidarity and our interconnectedness – our shared sense of purpose and our execution of a shared mission – that will make a difference to our pupils and communities we serve. It is the inherently collaborative structure of a School Trust, that can make it more possible for teachers and leaders to put their expertise to best use at multiple schools to help improve the quality of education where their colleagues need more support.

6. Civic duty and public benefit

Our Trust, drawing on their potential for strategic vision and leveraged resources, can serve an important civic function, helping to situate pupils, their families and education at the heart of a coherent public services offer.

 

In these difficult times of upheaval and uncertainty, it is up to us now to build a resilient school system that has the capacity and can create the conditions to keep getting better. We believe that is the potential of a Trust-based system.

We welcome interest in joining our MAT and finding out more from all mainstream and specialist schools.

Please contact Jayne Jardine MBE (CEO) at: jayne.jardine@therisepartnershiptrust.co.uk or call: 07762 986262.

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