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Welcome to our website!
I am delighted that you are choosing to look at our website and find out more about the Sherburn, Tadcaster and Rural (STAR) Multi-Academy Trust.
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 and then the STAR Multi Academy Trust (STAR MAT) was ‘born’ in May 2018.
Our Trust is an exciting venture which allows us to strengthen our existing partnerships still further. We have chosen to form a Trust of local schools for the following reasons:
- Of significance within our Trust aims and values are wellbeing and safeguarding. We know that effective learning takes place in an inclusive environment, where pupils feel happy, confident and supported, where they are valued for their unique individuality and educated to keep themselves safe from harm . These threads run through all that we do.
- We want our pupils and students to achieve even better outcomes and for all of our pupils to receive an outstanding education. 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 developing shared approaches to the curriculum as well as shared ‘pedagogy’ for teaching and learning. We are actively developing a ‘Digital Entitlement’ for our young people such as they can move on to further education and employment with confidence.
- 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 include shared approaches to curriculum planning, teaching and learning and already include opportunities to share specialist roles across more than one school – getting the expertise in the right place. Our growth strategy has a simple premise – we want to serve our locality with the best possible education.
- Together we want to provide greater opportunities for recruiting new staff, to retain our existing staff, facilitate leadership development and enhance staff professional development. Our staff are proud to work with STAR; we want our ethos and principles to continue to shine.
- 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 we have access to the School Condition Allocation (SCA) which has enabled us to invest £2million into our school buildings over the first two years of our Trust. There is still much to do, but we will strive for world class educational premises for all of our students.
- 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. That said, we continue to look externally for challenge, support and partnership from local authorities, other Trusts and organisations – to be the very best that we can be.
If you would like any further information, please do not hesitate to contact me
Best wishes,
Ian Yapp
Chief Education Officer, the STAR Multi-Academy Trust
