Your Invitation to be a part of the Alumnis family – shaping our future together
Our Alumnis mission, vision, values and virtues are much more than a statement. We are delivering inspiring plans that focus on ‘our why and what matters’ with the opportunity to refresh and reimagine by working backwards to scale forwards. We are committed to the delivery of equity and excellence as standard in every classroom.
This is a remarkable time for the Alumnis Trust schools and their communities. We are making considerable investment into powering up classrooms and building essential teams around learners, staff and schools; enabling teachers and staff to feel empowered and to connect with what brought them into the profession – a spirit of enquiry, a habit of collaboration and a joy of working with young people with a belief in a cohesive shared humanity that develops the whole child.
We are a family of interdependent schools with a shared ambition; where character is shaped and lives are lived. We work with collective ownership, a habit of collaboration and shared accountability across each other’s schools with a focuses on developing individuals in every role, who will pioneer leadership and seek the opportunity to inspire transformation.
An Inspiring Family to Join
The principles of our ‘why’ sit around our Strategic Plan:
Governance and Accountability: “The guidance Building Strong Academy Trusts states that ‘Strategic governance is one of the defining characteristics of academy Trusts’. By operating under a single governance structure, a strong board of academy Trustees can effectively oversee the strategic direction of the academy Trust and hold executive leaders to account for the outcomes of all pupils within the Trust.
Strong governance of the legal entity of the Trust hardwires collaboration and shared accountability Trust boards carry both the accountability, along with powers of intervention where necessary, at a governance level of its schools.
Quality of Education: Alumnis places the quality of education at the core of our work and decisions. We have strongly theorised models of improvement alongside continually improving high-quality implementation and delivery. We are able to deliver high standards of education systematically because we scale improvement by knowledge-building, evidence-informed professional learning and creating communities of improvement. We are a specialist organisation that exist to improve schools; securing equity and excellence as standard in all our Trust classrooms to advance education for public benefit.
The Characterful Adult: People matter, if we as a Trust are to build sustainable infrastructures to lead change, improve schools and respond to the legacies of the pandemic. We embrace and understand our responsibilities, duties as good employers. We recruit, develop, deploy and retain great teachers, support staff and leaders throughout their careers, supporting their professional learning by using evidence-informed professional opportunities and ensuring a manageable work-life balance, paying close attention to wellbeing.
Efficiency & Effectiveness (Finance, Business, Operations, Compliance & Sustainability:
The guidance, Building Strong Academy Trusts, states that ‘Trusts can make the most effective use of centralised processes and back-office functions to empower schools to focus on teaching and knowledge-building’. Trust effectiveness (obtaining the best educational outcomes) is made possible through efficiency (which may be defined as obtaining the best possible outcome for the resources available).
System Leadership and Civic Responsibility: The Trust is a new form of civic structure. As a legal entity which is independent from local government, Alumnis has a wider civic responsibility to advance education for the public good in the communities we serve.
The primary focus on the quality of teaching as a means to improve education quality is necessary but not sufficient. Education has wider purposes in intellectual, social and cultural development, the formation of character and helping pupils understand and play a role in society and contribute to the common good. We are explicit in our commitment to creating the conditions for human flourishing.
Alumnis provide all staff with a thorough induction, though a team approach:
Social induction – This element of induction is about helping a person to feel valued and become part of the team, as well as helping them adjust to their new work environment.
Understanding the culture and ethos of the school/Trust – This element of induction is about helping the person to quickly understand the culture and ethos of their new environment. It is not always easy to define organisational culture as it is more about the way things are done, said, and presented than what actually happens on a day-to-day basis.
New employees will be signposted to whole school information on the website before they start work along with copies of key policy documents or summaries as appropriate to their role. They will also be provided with a link to their onboarding module via or online training suite*
Understanding the new role – helping the new employee to quickly understand what is expected of them in their new role.
Alumnis has a relentless commitment to being an excellent employer that enables employees to reach their full potential. We are committed to great employment practice, so we attract and retain employees from diverse backgrounds and comnmunities. We are an employer of choice with staff cohesively committed to:
• Education for a shared humanity, where character is shaped and lived
• valued, optimistic and professionally progressed
• Innovative and part of something bigger
an understanding of excellence and how to add value to children’s educational experiences
• A sense of personal responsibility to all of our children
• Servant leadership and kindness
• Connected to your colleagues and inspired about working together to shape the future
reducing unnecessary workload and investing in professional training and providing opportunities for growth and career development
• Our vision is to create people and communities who flourish as inspiring changemakers through accomplishments that make a change individually or collectively
An Inspiring Family to Work In
We offer a comprehensive range of benefits for all employees including:
• Competitive salaries with continued recognition of national terms and conditions for teachers and support employees
• Personal and Leadership Development Roadmap with meaningful appraisal
• Excellent pension schemes
• Annual Well being days
• PERMA (character and well being programme)
• Family friendly policies and flexible working opportunities
• Supportive colleagues within and beyond your own setting
• Comprehensive employee assistance programme & Medical information services
• Access to a Social Inclusion Team including Social workers
• Qualified Mental Health First Aiders
• Cycle to work scheme
Future Developments:
• Gym membership
• Personal Wellbeing Budget
“Where schools and workplaces promote positive cultures of character and virtue, so other outcomes are positively affected. These outcomes include higher performance levels among staff, greater sense of professional purpose, good citizenship, greater staff commitment and feelings of well-being”.
Extract from Bringing Character to Life – Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues
As a Trust of Character: our Characterful Adult framework encourages us all to discover our individual strengths; appreciating what is best in us as well as championing strengths and accomplishments in those around us. Character strengths are a core and foundational part of who we are, a collection of positive individual character traits that we all possess and that are linked to our fulfilment, purpose, wellbeing and flourishing.
Character strengths influence how we think, act, and feel and represent what we value in ourselves and others. As a Trust we believe that by putting character strengths into action our individuals and teams through a shared humanity will continue to grow inspired and supportive cultures across our schools and communities.
We believe our curriculum will enable our young people to become inspiring change makers and global citizens of the future. We aim to inspire a quest for learning throughout life that is marked by positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and achievements ensuring flourishing for all.
Our framework encompasses four key cornerstones that support in developing the whole child whilst driving standards ensuring all pupils leave our schools ready for the next stage in their educational career. These include:
• Academic Excellence
• Character
• Community
• Digital Innovation
As part of these cornerstones we expect our teachers to address certain principles to lift quality, engagement and standards at every level.
It is important that our performance reflects our aspirations.
Our challenging key performance indicators hold us to account and create dialogue for our own change:
A Family Where Your Learning and Growth Shape An Inspiring Future
Alumnis Trust is committed to the recruitment and retention of talented staff, investing in professional development and providing opportunities for leadership within and across the schools.
Exceptional in-service training is available within the schools and across the trust, provided by our own staff in securing ‘everyone a leader’. Where appropriate, the trust commissions external providers to offer opportunities and programmes, and quality assures these carefully.
Our professional learning programmes secure at all levels:
• Excellence as Standard – with teachers delivering an exceptional education
• Pioneering people – subject experts with inspiring ideas which influence learning and curriculum design
• A global outlook fuelled by a vibrant community of professionals
Alumnis provides a programme of ‘professional pathways’. Staff choose the pathway relevant totheir own professional needs or ambitions.
This includes:
• Staff members ‘off timetable’ to visit other schools.
• A mentor beyond their existing team or school.
• Cross-trust innovation task teams.
• Half termly professional learning sessions held for relevant pathway.
We see the Professional Learning & Training Centre providing blended teaching and learning as an entitlement for all Alumnis staff – a cornerstone to ensuring ‘equity and excellence’ for all children in our schools.
In the same way that no school is better than the quality of its leadership, no learning is better than the quality of its teaching.
This rubric builds out of the Teachers’ Standards, providing the cornerstone of all teachers’ practice across the trust. We harness it for weekly coaching and benchmarking our teaching against national ‘best in class’.
Best practice is shared regularly amongst teachers and where an individual teacher requests coaching in a particular aspect of their practice, that is put in place by peers in a supportive way,
ambitious for improvement.
Alumnis promotes models of co-teaching with a deep belief that we learn from our fellow teachers and that too often in education teachers are alone in their classrooms.
Alumnis Trust promotes ‘teachers teaching with their doors open’ in the spirit of: ‘look at what I am doing, come in and enjoy my practice, do you see what I see? and I am proud of the way I teach’.
