MARK Education Trust Conference 2024

MARK Education Trust Members, Trustees and Local Governors joined together to participate in the trust’s annual Governance Conference on Wednesday 3 July 2024.

The event hosted at Beacon Academy was the second of the trust’s annual sessions providing an opportunity for governance volunteers and staff to attend presentations focusing on school improvement and meet colleagues from across the two schools within MARK Education Trust – Beacon Academy in Crowborough and Uplands Academy in Wadhurst.

The schools’ Headteachers and members of the Senior Teams delivered presentations focusing on behaviour, curriculum and pedagogy, and teacher training and development. The trust was delighted to welcome a consultant from the Association of School and College Leaders, Tiffanie Harris, as this year’s keynote speaker, for an update on national policy.

Students from Beacon and Uplands were invited to join the governors for group discussions, providing valuable feedback on school behaviour policies and core values, and giving their views on the support available for students and the use of mobile phones at school.

Trust CEO and Executive Headteacher, Anna Robinson, said:

“It is always so valuable to be able to join up the collective governance brain of our trust which includes our members, trustees and our local governors from both schools on our second annual conference day. We benefitted from the national policy update and input from the senior leadership teams from both of our schools. A highlight for us all, however, was to be able to include a selection of our students from both Beacon Academy and Uplands Academy. They are the reason we do what we do, day in, day out.

 

They provided us with their views on a number of discussion points that we wanted to know regarding our behaviour policies. They were articulate, confident, honest and funny. Each one of them unique in their views but united in their passion for rightly wanting the very best education to enable them to go on and be happy and successful in life. We are already considering how we can adapt our plans for next year to make the students far more of a feature next year. They all excelled themselves and were superb representatives or our trust, our schools and their families.”