It is the Trust’s responsibility to ensure that all the schools have the resources they need to sustain strong provision for the community they serve. When a school joins a Trust then the reserves, or deficit, of that school become part of the Trust’s accounts. We operate with complete transparency, with TGAT maintaining individual balance sheets for all of its individual schools.

When a new school joins the Trust a local governing body, or LGB, is formed which focuses exclusively on that school. You can find out more information in our Articles of Association and Terms of Reference, available as a download from the Trust website.

The Board of Trustees of the Trust nominates the Chair of each LGB, and decides on an ongoing basis, what powers to delegate to the LGB.

The Board has devolved responsibility for day-to-day management of each academy to the relevant Principal and Leadership Group. Each Principal is responsible for the appointment of staff, though appointment panels for teaching posts usually include a local governor. The Board is responsible for the appointment of the principal where this is required, though the panel would include local governor representation.

We prefer that schools do adopt the uniform of the Trust as we are proud of our uniform and this gesture symbolises the fact that the school is part of a greater whole. Some schools in the Trust choose not to adopt the traditional Tudor Grange uniform. Where there are good reasons for retaining their individual uniform colours, we will listen to this.

We follow the Teachers’ Statutory Pay and Conditions Document and Burgundy Book conditions of service for Teaching staff. Support staff sickness entitlement mirrors the nationally agreed Green Book for support staff. We have a legal obligation to ensure that transferring employees can be members of the Teacher Pension Scheme or their Local Government Pension Scheme as appropriate. Staff will usually transfer on their current terms and conditions and for most it will be a simple case of their employment being transferred to the new employer: Tudor Grange Academies Trust. Some staff will transfer to our contractors if services are outsourced.

One of the benefits of being within the Trust is that we can support schools in ensuring they maintain operations within statutory guidelines. Policy deployment is very important in this respect. The Trust provides centralised template policies which we expect to be localised by individual schools through consultation with their LGB.

We do recognise Trade Unions. We encourage staff to explore memberships of recognised Trade Unions as we see them as a strong source of advice, guidance, support and opportunities for CPD.

All academies produce an academy development plan adhering to the guidance we produce. This document is then used to help inform targets which enable us to shape milestones which we monitor throughout the year. All academies submit data at agreed common assessment points and participate in calendared Trust quality assurance activities. All monitoring information is shared with the Board.

We do not force schools to adopt a particular curriculum model if it is clear that their current model is strong and supports strong outcomes for its students. It is common for our schools to offer unique subjects or curriculum provision to meet local needs.

We do insist that schools joining the Trust align their assessment calendar and, where they are teaching the same subjects as other schools, make use of Trust assessments so that they are able to join our system for projected grades. This compares the performance of similar-age students in all of our schools so that they are able to benefit from accurate assessments of progress of children in all age groups.

As we grow we are investing resource in ensuring that there are exemplary lesson resources to support the teaching of all key stage three national curriculum subjects and a range of key stage four subjects. We will never insist that teachers make use of a particular resource but we know how important it is that everybody has access to high-quality resources to support their planning. These resources are collaboratively created and are the way we pool the collective wisdom and experience of teachers throughout the Trust to benefit every teacher of a given subject.

We are not able to answer this question with any precision at present, but as a Trust we are not driven by an ambition to grow. We are managing a number of approaches from potential primary and secondary partners and we are therefore looking to build our capacity to support a greater number of such partners. We are clear that we do not have aspirations to become a national chain; we wish to work with schools that are geographically close enough for our staff to be able to travel comfortably between schools.