Joining Our Trust
Our Offer
We are committed to building a family of schools that are aligned with our ethos, values and culture of providing high-quality and inclusive education for all.
As a trust we believe that highly autonomous, accountable and locally-led schools rooted in their community can provide the strongest outcomes for learners. Our vision is to provide, support and champion the highest-quality provision at the heart of our community, enabling all of our children and young people to be ambitious and aspirational and to achieve outstanding outcomes.
The name of the trust, Lykos, accurately reflects the nature of the trust and the schools within it. Lykos is Greek for ‘wolfpack’ or the plural of ‘wolf’. Lykos reflects our geographical roots in our city and unashamedly borrows from the local football team to highlight our collaborative foundations and our desire to be a genuine family of schools: ‘For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack’. (Kipling)
Inclusive Leadership
We insist that each school will retain their own unique identity and enjoy high levels of autonomy in order to serve and support their students and local communities to the highest possible standard.
Through working together, we believe we will find greater strength, drawing on the quality of leadership, experience and expertise from all schools joining the trust to provide the highest levels of support and challenge to teachers, support staff and school leaders.
Continued leadership development and planned succession will underpin the development of the trust’s schools. We offer extensive opportunities for staff to work creatively and collaboratively across our schools, as we continue our commitment to growing the leaders of tomorrow.
School Improvement
Our ambition is to continually drive-up standards, outcomes and aspirations by providing a rich, broad and balanced learning experience for as many children in Wolverhampton as possible.
By sharing the academic, extracurricular and enrichment expertise across our family of schools, our students and staff will have access to new and innovative teaching and learning resources and strategies along with collaborative and supportive communities of like-minded individuals and leaders who can support their journey of continual school improvement.
By working collaboratively and learning from each other across all phases, we will be able to more effectively meet the needs of all our students from a diverse range of backgrounds including those who need more specialist provision. We will also be able to ensure that students have a more effective and meaningful transition from primary to secondary education and that families have a clear pathway through their child’s educational provision.
Centralised Support Services
Our central offer will benefit all by identifying the most effective practice across all schools and sharing this across the trust. We anticipate that we will also be able to build additional capacity and capability in a wide range of areas of school business management and improvement.
By developing the trust’s central services, we will be able to provide joining schools with high quality services in HR, finance, health and safety, ICT and digital services, payroll and procurement.
These central professional services will increasingly allow headteachers to focus on what is most important to their schools; curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment and their students’ extra-curricular and enrichment experiences.
Growth
At this current time, we are looking to build a trust of like-minded schools from our local community who are already successful in their own right and who share our ethos and culture. All schools that join must be dedicated to working in partnership as part of an inclusive shared vision that values the achievements of every child.
We currently have excellent capacity to support and improve schools and would particularly welcome Good or Outstanding schools who can add capacity to the trust. It is critical that all school leaders retain their own vision for their school in the context of our shared community.
We will carefully consider any school who has indicated an interest in joining the trust on a case-by-case basis to ensure that our ethos and cultures are sufficiently aligned and that they will benefit the daily operations of the trust and any existing schools. We will however prioritise those schools that would benefit the most from the value that we can add to them and to the local community and those that can add greatest value to the trust.
Joining Our Trust
We will evaluate any proposal for a school that wishes to join our trust, ensuring they share our vision and values, have the same high expectations for young people and be committed to working together to improve all schools within the trust and the local community.
Following this, there are a number of things that need to happen before a school formally joins the trust. This includes legal application and due diligence processes, leading into a transition and induction period.
We will also work with schools to manage the communications during the transition process so that all stakeholders are fully informed about the developments that are taking place and that there is positive media coverage.
