Our Trust
Our Vision, Mission and Aims
Together in Strength and Partnership - You, your school, your world – make the most of it!
The Tennyson Learning Community is a newly established primary-only Academy Trust with the aim of supporting and leading the growth and improvement of primary academies across Luton and south Bedfordshire. We are driven by a mission that ensures every child has the right to outstanding teaching and, every academy, exceptional leadership. It is our vision to work with our children, their parents and carers and our staff to create and to sustain excellent academies.
Our beehive logo echoes the Tennyson Road Primary School ethos, a school that has provided the inspiration for the Trust and one that has given outstanding school-to-school and peer support for teachers and leaders in the Luton area for many years. This is an association of which we are very proud and one that provides an excellent foundation for the Trust. Whilst there is no ‘right’ geographical distance or travel time, the Trust believes that its vision incorporates local school improvement in close partnership with the local authority and academies in the Luton and south Bedfordshire locality and other neighbouring authorities.
A Local Primary Trust
- We believe that the Trust will enable local schools, their governors and leaders and the communities that they serve, supported by a common ethos, to come together and take responsibility to provide better education in the local primary community, rather than just in their individual schools.
- The local school-to-school partnership that draws on and learns from good practice, will be developed, shared and strengthened as relationships grow beyond critical friendships to shared accountability.
- A Trust that promotes and celebrates the individual identity, ethos and traditions of the academies, where this adds value to educational outcomes, including an earned autonomy for school improvement for those that are providing a good and outstanding education.
- The Trust will continue to support, to draw upon and contribute towards local Teaching School Alliances for teacher training, teaching and leadership programmes and professional development.
- We intend to ensure strong governance right from the outset in all our academies. We will recruit Trustees and local governors for their skills and then ensure they govern in the best interest of our schools and the pupils.
- We will be clear about the arrangements for the local governing body and what decisions will be delegated to school level and which will be managed centrally in the interests of efficiency and best value for schools within the scheme of delegation.
- We will work hard to ensure that the workforce is committed to the vision of the Trust to deliver school improvement and our ambitions for the pupils
- We will provide outstanding support for recruitment and retention of great staff, including strong support for their career aspirations across a new, exciting and aspirational multi-academy trust
- Our academies will be supported by a highly experienced Trust executive with expert educational backgrounds that enables schools to focus on improving life chances and outcomes for children
- We will ensure that safer recruitment, safeguarding, keeping the children safe and all related policies are at the heart of all that we do, with teaching that helps children identify when they are at risk and what to do about it.
- We will make sure that we engage with parents in all our schools at Board and local governing body levels to take responsibility for understanding what parents think as they will have important perspectives to bring to bear in discussions and decisions about the education of their child.
- The Trust will not only generate school improvement economies of scale, but will also enable cost efficient commissioning and purchasing of goods and services to free up individual school leaders’ time to focus on school improvement and making sure teaching and learning is as good as it can be.
- The Trust will require schools to commit to its Integrated Curriculum and Financial Planning tool (ICFP) so that the academies benefit from benchmarking of best practice and high quality curriculum planning that is accurately costed.