David Ross Education TrustAcademic Excellence
Academic excellence is at the heart of the Trust.
Through the geographical hubs, our professional development programmes and education teams, targeted support is available to all academies to enable them to achieve their academic aspirations.
Collectively, our academies are closing the gap on, or meeting and exceeding national averages. The progress that our students make to achieve these grades is amongst the very best.
The Trust is acutely aware that raising attainment, however, needs to sit hand-in-hand with raising aspiration.
Our enrichment programmes, scholarship schemes and inspirational partners help students to comprehend the opportunities that are available to them. This ensures increased purpose in the classroom, and maximises the impact that improved outcomes have on the life chances of our students.
Our Curriculum
We value the power each school subject provides, and we endeavour to ensure students are able to accomplish a secure foundation in every subject, so that this will serve them in their future learning and life more broadly.
Access to the knowledge sought and laboured over by previous generations and an understanding of its structure, its origin, its status (such as its revisability and whether it is contested) is the entitlement of every child.
To achieve this, we invest significant time and resource in the development of ambitious and rigorous curricula across all schools within the Trust.
Our primary curriculum is already well-advanced, and we continue to develop and refine our common approaches to reading, writing and mathematics. Wrapped around our Core Knowledge Curriculum (CKC) we aim to develop the subject knowledge of our teachers to ensure that the curriculum enhances pupils’ understanding of the world. Our aim is that we remain consistently one of the top-performing primary trusts in the country, with a growing number of children achieving the “Greater Depth” standard, and the disadvantage gap disappearing completely.
In our secondaries, subject communities are central to curriculum and teacher development. Our subject communities are made up of subject specialist teachers deeply engaged with curricular questions, renewing and holding ownership of the Trust-wide curriculum and sustaining their own subject expertise. Our focus on the quality of curriculum ensures that we equip our secondary students to achieve their full potential at Key Stage 4 and Key Stage 5.
IT Strategy
As a Trust, we are committed to providing experiences and teaching values that prepare young people to be adaptable and confident users of technology.
Our priority is to educate students to use new technology as they encounter it, both thoughtfully and effectively in order to give them the best possible opportunities for the future.
We are all immersed in a highly connected world where IT affects every aspect of our lives. As a Trust we aspire to both make the best possible use of technology and to harness mobile and web technologies to support every learner.
Our IT strategy sets out our principles and aims for Showcase Classrooms across our Trust.