Happy May, one and all!

The weather still hasn’t had a turn for the better—though I do hear that we could have a sunny Spring Bank (here’s hoping I’ve not jinxed us all by putting that in writing...)!

I’d like to start this month’s briefing by welcoming a new parent governor to Kelford School—Dave Trickett! Dave is one of two parents who enthusiastically applied for our parent governor vacancies following the recent departures of Lynn Heeley and Emma Birch. Lynn and Emma made a really positive difference to the work of Kelford LGB, and I’m very grateful for their contribution. Dave brings a lot of experience, having been chair of governors at Kelford a few years ago.

We’ve had some recent appointments to key leadership roles in our academies: Viki Drew has been appointed as Deputy Headteacher at Kelford for the 2017/18 academic year, and Chris Hodgkinson has been permanently appointed as Deputy Head at Hilltop School. Big congratulations to both—they bring real strength and quality to the wider Nexus leadership team.

I’m really proud to report that a national accolade for quality has been awarded to Kelford School for its work in developing pupils learning, behaviour, well-being and self-esteem. The Quality Lead Award has been developed by leading education charity Achievement for All (AfA), and recognises the impressive work being done by the school to improve progress in reading, writing and maths for all pupils. Well done to Jacky, her team and all of our children at Kelford!

We’ve secured some amazing investment in our Trust recently, with £870,000 of Condition Improvement Funding being secured from the Education & Skills Funding Agency. This is a huge amount of capital investment for our most dilapidated academies, and is in large part down to the hard work of our CFO Tracey Brooke and our partners at E3 Cubed. What a difference this will make!

We’re also providing more investment as a MAT into our academies, as we will be funding new, faster broadband to help with educational delivery in all our schools from September 2017!

Finally: all of our Rotherham academies were awarded the “Regional enterprise business award” on 9th May for our work with the RMBC coordinated “enterprise advisor” initiative. It’s great to see the fruits of such investment in multi agency working, and I’m delighted we’ve had this recognized.

What a team!

I’ll write again soon!

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