What Joining OAK Means for Your School or Trust

School Improvement and Support for Leaders

At OAK, school improvement is a collective responsibility. We believe that leaders are more effective when they can draw on the experience, expertise and support of colleagues across the trust.

Our Growing Together approach brings school leaders and colleagues together through regular reviews, professional dialogue, peer moderation and shared improvement priorities. It combines support with appropriate challenge, recognising that even our strongest schools have opportunities to improve.

We also value the importance of external perspectives. Our partnership with Challenge Partners provides independent challenge and opportunities for leaders to work alongside colleagues from other schools and trusts. We see this as an important part of professional development, broadening experience, developing expertise and encouraging reflection on our own practice.

Joining OAK means having people to turn to, whether discussing a difficult decision, exploring an improvement priority or sharing something that is working particularly well.

We don’t believe that support should remove the responsibility of individual school leaders. Rather, we want to create an environment in which leaders feel trusted, appropriately challenged and confident that they are part of a wider team working towards shared ambitions.

We would hope that leaders joining OAK quickly begin to appreciate the value of these relationships and the opportunities they create for their schools and their own professional development.

Developing Teaching and Learning

We believe that excellent teaching makes the greatest difference to children’s learning, and that investing in the professional development of colleagues is central to school improvement.

Across OAK, we have developed a shared approach to teaching and learning, supported by our OAK Playbook, professional collaboration and instructional coaching through Steplab.

Our approach is designed to help colleagues reflect on their practice, develop specific aspects of their teaching and learn from one another. Coaching provides regular opportunities for professional dialogue, feedback and the development of manageable, practical steps.

We recognise that introducing instructional coaching takes time. Colleagues need opportunities to understand the approach, experience its benefits and develop confidence in the process. We would work alongside a joining school to support this development rather than expect everything to change immediately.

Our investment in coaching continues to grow, including additional capacity to support colleagues across our schools.

Importantly, we also recognise that joining schools bring their own expertise and successful approaches. We want to learn from these, ensuring that our collective understanding of excellent teaching continues to develop.

Our ambition is for colleagues to feel supported, professionally challenged and increasingly confident in their practice, knowing that their development is a genuine priority across OAK.

Digital Transformation through FRONTIERS

We are educating children and young people for a world that is changing rapidly, where technology is reshaping how we live, learn and work, and where many of the opportunities and challenges they will encounter are difficult to predict.

Through FRONTIERS, we want to ensure that our young people are well prepared for that future. This means developing their confidence, independence, creativity, critical thinking and ability to use technology thoughtfully and responsibly, alongside the knowledge and skills that remain fundamental to an excellent education.

Providing every pupil across our five schools with their own iPad is one part of this ambition. More importantly, FRONTIERS is about how we develop teaching and learning to respond to a changing world, creating opportunities for collaboration, exploration, creativity and more personalised approaches to learning.

Inclusion is central to our thinking. Digital tools can help remove barriers, improve accessibility and enable young people with different needs to participate more fully and independently in their learning.

We are equally clear that technology does not replace excellent teaching, strong relationships or the importance of developing secure knowledge and understanding. Its value lies in how thoughtfully it is used and the opportunities it creates.

For schools joining OAK, FRONTIERS represents an opportunity to contribute to and benefit from an ambitious, evolving approach to education. We recognise that schools will have different starting points and would work alongside leaders and colleagues to support implementation, professional development and the sharing of effective practice.

We continue to learn from our experience and evaluate our approach. As the world changes, so must our thinking about how best to prepare young people for it. We want every school in OAK to contribute to that development.

Inclusion and Specialist Education

We believe that an excellent education must be an inclusive education. Every child and young person should feel that they belong, are understood and have opportunities to achieve, whatever their needs or circumstances.

Over recent years, we have worked deliberately to strengthen inclusion across OAK. Our schools already had considerable expertise and commitment, but we recognised the importance of bringing this together through a more coherent trust-wide approach.

Our specialist provisions, Riverbank at Brookside and Starlings at Overdale, are important parts of this work. They provide opportunities to develop specialist expertise while strengthening the inclusive practice of colleagues across our schools.

Our ambition extends beyond individual provisions. We want inclusion to be understood as a collective responsibility, reflected in our leadership, curriculum, teaching, professional development and the decisions we make about resources.

We recognise that inclusion is an area in which we must continually learn and improve. We are particularly interested in developing relationships with special schools and exploring opportunities for new specialist provision.

We believe OAK can contribute considerable experience in school improvement, professional development, digital learning and strategic leadership. Equally, we recognise the distinctive expertise of specialist colleagues and the opportunities this creates for mutual learning.

For a school joining OAK, we would want to understand its existing strengths, the needs of its children and young people, and how its expertise could contribute to our collective development.

Our ambition is to become a trust recognised not simply for supporting children with additional needs, but for continually developing better approaches to inclusion and helping other schools benefit from what we learn together.

Developing and Supporting Colleagues

We believe that investing in our colleagues is one of the most important things we can do for the children and young people in our schools.

Being part of OAK creates opportunities to learn from colleagues across different schools and phases, develop expertise and explore new professional pathways.

Our approach brings together professional development within schools, trust-wide collaboration, instructional coaching and opportunities to work with external partners. We support colleagues undertaking NPQs and further study, while our work with organisations including Challenge Partners and Steplab provides opportunities to develop professionally and contribute beyond their own schools.

We also recognise the value of learning from one another. Our subject networks, shared professional development and opportunities to work across schools enable colleagues to exchange ideas, develop their practice and benefit from expertise that might not otherwise be available to them.

For leaders, being part of OAK provides opportunities to contribute to trust-wide developments, work alongside colleagues facing similar challenges and broaden their experience beyond an individual school.

We recognise that professional development needs to be accompanied by appropriate support for colleagues’ wellbeing and workload. We want people to feel valued, listened to and supported, particularly during periods of change.

A school joining OAK would bring its own talented colleagues, experience and approaches. We would want to understand and build on those strengths, creating opportunities for colleagues to contribute to the wider trust as well as benefit from it.

Ultimately, our ambition is for colleagues to see OAK as somewhere they can continue to grow professionally, feel part of a supportive team and make a meaningful contribution to education beyond their own school.

Governance, Finance and Collective Decisions

Joining OAK means becoming part of a trust with shared governance, accountability and financial arrangements. We believe it is important that schools understand what this means in practice, including the responsibilities of the Trust Board, school leaders and Local Governing Bodies.

Our Local Governing Bodies are a crucial part of OAK’s leadership. We often describe them as our ‘eyes and ears on the ground’, providing an invaluable understanding of their schools, their communities and the experiences of children, families and colleagues.

We want local governors to be actively involved in the life and development of their schools, providing support and challenge while helping to shape our understanding of what is working well and where further improvement is needed. Their perspectives are important to our strategic thinking and decision-making.

At the same time, the Trust Board retains ultimate accountability for the trust. We believe that effective governance depends on clarity about responsibilities, strong relationships and meaningful communication between local and trust-wide leadership.

Collective strategic leadership is central to how OAK works. We want leaders and governors to contribute to discussions about priorities, understand how decisions are reached and see how those decisions benefit children and young people across our schools.

Working together also creates opportunities to use resources more effectively and make decisions in the interests of the trust as a whole.

GAG pooling is an important example of this. Rather than allocating funding solely on the basis of individual school budgets, we consider how our collective resources can best support the needs and priorities of children across OAK.

We believe the success of GAG pooling depends on transparency, trust and a shared understanding of the benefits. School leaders need to understand how decisions are made, contribute to those discussions and have confidence that resources are being used fairly and in the interests of children across the trust. This mutual understanding has been important in developing confidence in our collective approach.

During our first year of GAG pooling, we were able to make significant and welcomed improvements to outdoor learning environments across our early years settings. This provides a practical example of how transparent, collective decision-making can deliver visible benefits for children and their schools.

Our central team provides expertise and support across finance, HR, estates, operations and technology, allowing school leaders to draw on specialist colleagues and spend more of their time focusing on education.

We recognise that joining a trust involves important changes, and we would want these to be discussed openly and carefully. Our ambition is for leaders and governors to understand the arrangements, contribute meaningfully to our collective direction and develop confidence in the decisions we make together.

Your First Year with OAK

Joining a multi academy trust is an important change, and we recognise that becoming part of OAK will involve a period of adjustment for leaders, governors and colleagues.

Our starting point would be to get to know your school properly: its community, strengths, ambitions and challenges. We would want to understand what is already working well and where being part of OAK could make the greatest difference.

Some changes, particularly around governance, finance and central services, would need to happen relatively quickly. Other developments, including instructional coaching, FRONTIERS and aspects of our shared approaches to school improvement, would be introduced thoughtfully, recognising the school’s starting point and the importance of bringing colleagues with us.

Throughout this period, we would want school leaders to feel supported by colleagues across OAK, with opportunities to share ideas, discuss challenges and contribute to our collective thinking.

We would also want colleagues to begin experiencing the benefits of being part of a wider professional community, whether through collaboration, professional development, shared expertise or the practical support available from the trust.

We recognise that change is rarely entirely straightforward. There will inevitably be challenges and adjustments along the way, and we believe that openness, good communication and a willingness to work through difficulties together are essential.

By the end of the first year, our hope would be that leaders, governors and colleagues increasingly feel part of OAK, understand and value our approach, and recognise the opportunities that come from working together.

We would also expect to have learned from the joining school, with its experience and expertise beginning to influence our own development.

For us, joining OAK is the beginning of a relationship, not simply the completion of a process.