The STAR Mat

Coronavirus (COVID-19) CEO Letter to Parents – Monday 6 July 2020

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Welcome to our website!

There has been a strong tradition of collaboration between our 11 partner schools for many years which culminated in the establishment of the STAR Teaching School Alliance in 2016. The formation of the STAR Multi Academy Trust (STAR MAT) is an exciting new venture which will strengthen our existing partnership still further. There are a number of reasons why we have chosen this path:

• We want our pupils and students to achieve even better outcomes and for all of our schools to become outstanding. We will continue to build and secure local school improvement capacity, and shared development strategies, which will help us do this, by providing appropriate levels of challenge and support within the partnership. We are building on strong relationships and high levels of trust.
• We are near enough to each other to build a strong local partnership, building greater community cohesion, and more shared activities across all of our schools, benefiting pupils and students as well as our staff. These will include shared approaches to curriculum planning, teaching and learning and potentially opportunities to share specialist roles across more than one school.
• Together we want to provide greater opportunities for recruiting new staff, to retain our existing staff, facilitate leadership development and enhance staff professional development.
• At a time of reduced funding in schools, our formal partnership can more easily achieve ‘better value’ and financial stability by having more efficient central and shared services and enabling individual schools within the partnership to focus more resources on teaching, learning and pupil/student support. As a MAT of over 4000 pupils and students, and partner schools, we will have access to the School Condition Allocation (SCA) which will enable us to access capital funding for our school buildings.
• We will work together to support – and challenge – each other through effective governance and accountability at local level. As good and outstanding schools working together in an already strong Teaching School Alliance, we are very well-placed to achieve this.

If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact me

Best wishes,

Martyn Sibley