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Claire Druery, Chief People Officer at Bishop Chadwick Catholic Education Trust

 

Our mission, vision and values are at the heart of everything we do – they give the Trust a foundation to provide a sense of shared direction for everyone.

 

We aim to not only make sure we have the best possible provision for every young person, but for every employee too. We are not purely just an education establishment; we are a large employer, and we have a duty of care to all individuals.

 

When I joined Bishop Chadwick Catholic Education Trust in 2019, our Trust values had been established. As we are a Catholic organisation, our values reflect the core values of our Catholic faith. Our Trust mission is “better schools, better communities, better futures in Christ” and everything we do links to being the best version of yourself.

We are a family of Catholic schools. Often in business, talking about being a family can be perceived as a negative, but we believe, it’s our strength. We are a family of schools, all working towards a shared goal – to provide the best education and develop our young people in all aspects of life.

 

To emphasise the feeling of being part of a family with people at the centre of our Trust, we rebranded the HR Department to our ‘People Team’. We are a people organisation. Whether that’s pupils, staff, Governors and parents – it all comes back to people. Rebranding the team was an outward sign of this and better reflects our ethos.

 

Learn more about BCCET's values

Transitional Growth

 

Having a very clear narrative around the mission, vision and values is important for any Trust, but when experiencing transitional growth, these need to be at the forefront of everything you do. We grew very quickly in such a short period. Expanding from two schools to 30 and transferring almost 1,500 people into the Trust– many of whom transferred during lockdown when schools and education were facing unique challenges.

 

Each school had different levels of enthusiasm about joining the Trust, so we needed to be very clear about who we were, what we stood for and be willing to invest the time to encourage staff to come on the journey with us.

Honest Communication

 

It was a busy time, and we didn’t get everything right. In 2022 when we welcomed the 30th school into the Trust we decided to pause, reflect and ask staff for their feedback. We genuinely wanted to hear what our colleagues had to say, so we encouraged open and honest communication through a series of focus groups made up of senior leaders, teaching and non-teaching staff.

 

Having the opportunity to hear the feedback, consider it and communicate back is important. My experience has taught me to be brave, admit when something has worked and be bold enough to try something different. That’s why we were transparent when communicating the feedback from the focus groups to our colleagues. If we could fix things, we would tell them how we planned to do this and if we couldn’t, we explained why we couldn’t.

 

The integrity in being transparent, communicating and being honest has helped to generate trust. Our employees are very open with us now and we have seen positive outcomes in our twice-yearly engagement survey which indicates that the changes have been positive. We used this feedback to sense-check our values and ensure that the values are still aligned with what we are trying to achieve.

Cohesion, not uniformity

 

As a Trust, we also made a conscious decision that each school would still have its own mission, set of values and it would keep its school branding, logo and colours.

 

Their values are often historically linked to their school. We believe parents choose a school because it is an important and familiar part of their community. We don’t want our schools to lose their individual uniqueness.

 

Our schools haven’t changed their values, but we have all taken the time to ensure that they align with the fundamental values of Catholic Social Teaching. They might have different words, but they all reflect the same thing.

Living and Breathing the Values

 

Although each school has their own mission and values, we encourage our employees to know and be aware of our Trust mission and all our school priorities link back to our overall Trust priorities. It’s not about having values on our websites or hanging posters in our schools, the values and mission outline ‘why’ we do things and ‘how’ we do things. As a leader, you need to fully invest in those values. From a personal perspective, our Trust values are also my values, whether I am at work or home. The values don’t switch on when I arrive at the door and switch off when I leave work. It’s about understanding what those values mean to me and intentionally building these into our everyday behaviours.

 

We ensure that our values are embedded into the way we work. All our policies are considered carefully in terms of our values and whether they align with our goal to be an employer of choice. A question we always ask is “How does it reflect on us as an organisation?” An example of this is our Trust-wide Behaviour Framework. The framework is underpinned by our values and sets out a really clear framework of descriptions to outline what our values mean in terms of our behaviours. For example, one of our values is community, our framework includes a commitment to ‘be welcoming and serve’.

 

Our behaviours framework has been developed over the last 18 months; 150 of our colleagues were involved in developing the framework, which has hopefully helped everyone to feel ownership of the document.

This is a journey

 

The work of implementing our values will be ongoing. We have made significant inroads, but we are young as an organisation and our growth has been rapid. What we have tried to do is prioritise communication and opportunities to network with other people, as this is where our colleagues tell us they feel the most value of being part of a larger organisation.

 

There are things that we have tried that have made a big impact. Attendance is improving, our staff wellbeing scores continue to rise, and we have a more engaged workforce which is evidenced through our colleagues actively wanting to be involved in conversations, project groups and other activities.

 

We know that we still have a long way to go. Creating a feeling of ‘one team, one vision’ will take time and we are fairly early in that journey as a Trust.

We are very clear about how much we care about our people. All of the decisions we make are made through a lens of providing a great education to our young people, but we are also unapologetically focused on being an employer of choice.

 

Our Trust is full of incredible people who deserve to work for an employer who cares about them. We have a genuine commitment to reducing workload, creating positive working environments, improving wellbeing, offering professional development opportunities and enabling every individual to be the very best version of themselves.

 

Learn about our partnership with BCCET