Joining CAT

Strategic Vision

The Trust aspires to quality over quality, and as such will limit future growth to approximately 10 further schools, so that there are around 15 total schools supporting roughly 10,000 students.  At the current scale, the Trust is extremely solvent, successful, and able to offer a huge range of central services. Therefore, growth isn’t driven by a financial imperative, instead looking to attain the positive benefits of greater sharing of knowledge, support, and expertise across the Trust. We believe that beyond the 15 school/10,000 student threshold, support becomes less personalised and remote with consequential implications for quality and school standards.

Trust Philosophy

The Trust doesn’t employ an autocratic ‘top down’ approach, where the Trust is the centre of focus being served by individual schools. Instead, we turn that philosophy around and favour a ‘servant leadership’ model where the focus of Trust operations is to serve and support the schools in creating outstanding outcomes for our students. This is not to the detriment of effective strategic leadership, as the Trust has a clear vision, purpose, and structures to fulfil these. With that defined, we devote all Trust resources to assisting and supporting schools in attaining these goals, making their lives easier rather than more difficult in the process.

In line with these philosophies, we don’t favour the rigid systems favoured by many MAT’s, where all schools are instructed to do the same thing irrespective of context. Instead, we prefer to strike a balance providing specific high-quality systems to create the framework for outstanding, but also allowing significant space and autonomy at school level. This greater freedom allows leadership and innovation to flourish and enables the flexibility for schools to fully reflect local needs and the communities they serve.

Trust Leadership Philosophies

The importance of leadership is recognised, with the Trust actively looking to recruit and develop staff who can bring ideas, innovation and effect improvements. This approach has and will continue to be a major factor in its success. In acknowledgment of this, the Trust has developed a set of Trust Leadership Philosophies, which are used to guide the work of leaders and safeguard effective leadership across the Trust.

Want to Know More

If you like the sound of how we work and want to know more, please contact the Trust CEO via  email contact@catrust.uk 

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