The CEO of a multi-academy trust with several schools across Nottinghamshire has shared his plans for 2023 after looking back on the trust's successes last year. Wayne Norrie has been the CEO of the Greenwood Academies Trust since 2016 and has shared his plans for the upcoming year, including a new school in Nottingham, the development of two new schools to the trust from Mansfield and further community support.
The Greenwood Academies Trust runs almost 40 schools across the UK, including four in Nottinghamshire and five in Nottingham, this includes The Brunts Academy and The Bramble Academy in Mansfield, which officially joined the trust in December 2022. However, the trust will be welcoming its brand new school, The Waterside Primary Academy, in September 2024 which will be opening at Trent Basin, Nottingham.
When asked about the two schools in Mansfield joining the trust, Mr Norrie described it as "brilliant" and explained that following an issue with the previous trust he was asked to go and step in and work with the trust to stabilise the schools. He said: "In August I stepped down from that role as Brunts and Bramble were going to join us, so we are really excited about serving the community and creating a community school for the local community.
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"At the secondary we have lots of work to do around the curriculum and curriculum choices. Brunts had a fabulous reputation at one point but somewhere along the line it kind of lost its way so we want to give Brunts back to Mansfield to make it the shining school it can be.
"So we are really excited about both Bramble and Brunts as we also have a really strong record of school improvement for both secondary and primary that we can give to those children." Both of the Mansfield schools are also looking forward to being part of the trust, and hope they can offer their students better opportunities because of it.
Carl Atkin, Principal at The Brunts Academy, said: “Our whole school community is looking forward to our new partnership with Greenwood Academies Trust. We know it will bring even more development opportunities for our staff as well as a range of benefits for our pupils.
"We are excited to be part of a like-minded community of colleagues who share our vision and are driven to provide high-quality education and experiences for our pupils.” Natalie Aveyard, Principal at The Bramble Academy, added: "We are thrilled to be joining Greenwood Academies Trust.
"It will bring us many new opportunities and we look forward to building on the strong relationships we have already formed to continue to enhance our practices and provide the best possible education for our pupils.” For many schools, 2022 was a difficult year, as Year 11s sat their first GCSE exams uninterrupted or altered by the pandemic, but The Greenwood Academies Trust is "pleased with our improvement in results post pandemic."
Mr Norrie said: "We have actually increased our performance since 2019. I think it is due to the way our schools responded to the communities in the pandemic and the ways we carried on teaching our children.
"Most of our children are in disadvantaged areas, as a trust we have over 50% free school meals. So that academic and personal support throughout the pandemic led to our children actually bucking the national trend and making more progress and doing better than they did in 2019 against other schools.
"We are really proud this year of the work that everyone put in during those years, and we are now reaping the benefits. Our next kind of big movement is we want to build on those successes."
In addition to two years of difficulty caused by Covid, the schools in the trust like many across the county are now feeling the pinch from the cost of living crisis. Mr Norrie explained that the current situation is "really hard" and that the trust is "cushioning the blow to the schools at the moment."
He said: "We have had to find £5m extra from school funds for heating, for gas, for teachers pay rises which weren't funded. Also we are seeing the pressure on our Just About Managing (JAM) families.
"For the threshold for free school meals the household income is £7400 a year, which is incredibly low and we have a number of families that are just above that threshold that don't receive free school meals." He explained that the school works closely with families in their community, and have food banks in all of its schools and deliver food parcels.
Mr Norrie added: "What we are seeing is that the economic downturn is having a huge impact on families that were just about managing, that now are no longer managing, and these are people that work. There is a big kind of Daily Mail rhetoric that these are people that don't work, but the vast majority of my parents work, but they are working poor.
"Their wages are not raising in line with inflation, so we are finding more families are in difficulty and that's why partnerships with Fairshare are really important to us." Looking ahead for this year, the trust plans on working to ensure its schools remain at "the heart of the community."
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