The DEMAT Strategy People

Helen Rothwell, Head of HR

Our People Strategy is aimed at improving the experience for our staff with a key focus on offering exceptional CPD and structuring our resources effectively to ensure we deliver high quality education to all children.

Our strategy for our people is as ambitious as our expectations for our pupils and their communities. It must enable us to be adaptable in the current economic climate and in the face of falling pupil numbers nationally. It aligns with the Ely Diocesan strategy, People Fully Alive: 2025.

Our People Strategy in the making

Since being formed in 2013, the Trust has been on a significant growth journey (2013-2018), followed by a period of consolidation (2019-2025) and is looking towards next steps (2025+). Our aim is to ensure that we become a systems leader, delivering and innovating a high-quality education, in line with our values and maintaining our

As the Trust marks its 10th anniversary this month, we are also thrilled to be launching our People Strategy. Helen Rothwell, Head of HR, explains how the Trust will continue to invest time in its people by putting all of our staff at the front and centre.

Christian distinctiveness. We listened to staff, leaders, trustees, members of the Diocese, governors and union colleagues all presenting feedback from our school communities. This enabled us to design a strategy that will help us to continue to develop the Trust to attract and retain staff who share our passion to achieve our vision.

Organisational Health

As we explored during a recent inset day, we will adopt an ‘organisational health’ model to measure how successful we are over time. Organisational health is the organisation’s ability to align around a common vision, execute against that vision effectively and renew itself through innovation and creative thinking. In summary, align around a vision, execute effectively and innovate. In determining our People Strategy, we have created a ‘People Promise’ which encompasses what we are trying to achieve and enables us to be more specific in our aims and activities

Our People Promise

• We constantly aspire to support high quality education of our children.

• We communicate effectively across the Trust.

• We support the wellbeing of our staff.

• We share best practice to support others to achieve.

A clear vision, inspirational leadership and shared values

We recognise that it is important that our people understand our vision and progress. Therefore, we will regularly communicate the Trust direction and activity.

Further support and investment in leadership pathways while aligning and embedding each academy’s vision and values with those of the Trust will be provided.

A strong reputation for valuing, supporting and developing our people at all levels

We want to be renowned for the development opportunities we offer staff by enhancing career pathways and professional development options for all our staff.

A robust induction, instructional coaching and mentoring will be key features of support to our staff.

We will continue to support ways to effectively manage workloads.

Recruiting for values and a passion to strengthen a diverse and inclusive culture

We will further develop our recruitment techniques to refine our approaches to attracting, selecting and onboarding staff to DEMAT.

Our approach to equality, diversity and inclusion, which runs throughout our People Strategy, will ensure we recruit to continue to embed a diverse and inclusive culture across the Trust.

Structures and processes that are well designed to fit our current and future needs

Our approach to resourcing will be focused on delivering desired outcomes while being sustainable.

We will use digital advancements to ensure staff know and understand our policies and processes which will be designed to maximise effectiveness in all aspects of delivering high quality and safe education.

Next Steps

Our strategy will continue to be incorporated into everything we do. We will also be exploring each pillar in more depth across future issues of our magazine. If you have any feedback or queries regarding our aspirations and plans, please email feedback@demat.org.uk