Our Vision.
Our Vision is to create a specialist trust that improves the lives of children and young people whose chronic illness prevents them from attending school by:
Providing excellent education to the children and young people we teach.
Playing a proactive role in meeting local needs and helping to steer and develop local and national practice and policy to ensure all children and young people are able to learn and develop.
Our academies teach children and young people receiving their health care programs in Hospitals or community settings aiming to minimise the effects that chronic illness has on education.
We believe that the children and young people we teach are best served by highly skilled specialist staff and that being part of a specialist trust provides the best training and development opportunities for staff working in this highly specialised education sector.
We have a set of core values which have been devised from discussions with the whole Trust community. We ask all people who are involved in the work of the Trust to adhere to these core values which are:
The Children and Young People we work with.
The Children and Young People we work with have one thing in common, they are unable to engage with education in their school due to the effects of their chronic illness. The specific way that each individual child or young person is affected by their illness is unique to them, they all need specific plans that help them to continue learning.
Some of our students hold on to their joy of learning, for others their belief in themselves as learners is the fundamental challenge that we have to help them overcome. Our staff have the skills and knowledge to work successfully with all of our students to give them the courage, belief and skills to become successful independent learners on their own learning journeys.
Our Structure
Individualised provision for students provides the foundation for our trust structure. Academy Heads and Local Academy Boards are expected, encouraged and supported to become key players in their local authorities’ local offer. They know their students, the schools and partnership organisations that they work with and strengths and gaps in what provision is available to their students in their locality. Our structure enables our Head teachers to respond flexibly to local needs while providing support from the collective knowledge and expertise held by staff across The Skylark Partnership.
We encourage all staff to work creatively to meet the needs of the children and young people they are teaching.
Resourcing
The role of our central team is to ensure that as much of our resources as possible are used at academy level in giving our students direct learning experiences.
Responsibilities are held at academy level where it enables heads to provide responsive and flexible provision, and at trust level where it is the most efficient and effective way of ensuring that we are compliant and our Academies are safe places for children and adults to learn and work.
Throughout the Trust all levels of management are focused primarily on enabling staff working with children to carry out their responsibilities to the highest standard.