Central Services
Human Resources
The HR Manager leads a very experienced in-house central team who provide strategic HR management and HR administration support.
Being part of Great Academies, includes:
- a suite of HR policies, procedures and template documents
- a trust-wide employee benefits package to help recruit and retain staff
- management of national HR-related requirements, for example the apprenticeship levy, gender pay gap reporting and other mandatory returns
- HR support to help new academies joining the Trust.
Governance
Governance is serviced by a full-time Governance Officer who is also responsible for GDPR and compliance, and as the Trust grows the intent is to extend this service. Each academy has a Data Protection Officer guided and supported by the Governance/Compliance Officer.
Being part of Great Academies, includes:
- Central Trust team presence at every full Governing Body and finance meeting, plus clerking of those meetings
- guidance on producing terms of reference
- guidance on policies to be noted or approved
- guidance on succession planning for governing bodies
- termly governor update and development sessions
- new governor induction sessions
- access to the Governor Hub, Trust Governor Handbook, copies of training materials, and other useful documents including the DfE’s Governance Handbook
Commercial Marketing and Communications
The trusts Commercial and Marketing Manager delivers the marketing strategy for the trust and our academies, ensuring activities cover the full marketing mix and remain within budget. The role includes leading and implementing creative marketing campaigns for each scheme as well as working closely with internal teams to identify marketing requirements and ensure messaging and outputs are aligned
Being part of Great Academies, includes:
- each academy has a marketing and recruitment plan to ensure we achieve pupil recruitment targets.
- support for proactive and reactive communications. This includes liaising with national and regional media, preparing and distributing media releases.
- support for developing a stronger social media presence and promote the brand to external audiences.
- coordinates our academies and trust websites’ and ongoing support with content management.
- assists the Trust and the academies with income generation, lettings support, additional grant funding and sponsorship.
Information and Communication Technology
The Trust has a ‘live’ ICT Strategic Plan. This is overseen by an ICT strategic group, chaired by the Trust ICT Manager, who works across all of our academies. Our ICT investment and refresh, comes from the academies’ capital allocations and from Trust reserves.
We also have a ‘Digital Champions’ network across the Trust which works alongside the ICT strategic group, ensuring synergy between technology and pedagogy.
Being part of Great Academies, includes:
- we can seek economies of scale in procurement of software programmes for information management, for teaching, and in the procurement of hardware.
- the ICT strategic plan is costed, and we have a commitment to ensure that digital technologies are embraced across the Trust’s academies, and used strategically to their full potential.
Estates
The Estates Manager works across all of our academies with the academies’ site managers, caretakers and cleaners. The estates manager supports all Health and Safety activity and risk management relating to the estate.
Our Estates Manager monitors all contracts relating to premises and maintains a compliance register to ensure that we are up-to-date on all contract renewals and H+S checks.
Being part of a Great Academies, includes:
- we have a very good track record of success in securing grants from CIF bids.
- we have a strong track record on delivering capital projects of every scale. The bid writing process is undertaken by the Financial Director and Estates Manager with the assistance of academy-based staff.
- we undertake detailed condition surveys and deploy reserves appropriately to meet capital needs across our estate.
