Vision and Ethos
We are blessed to have been given the name of St Clare of Assisi. We follow her example of simplicity, love of God and love of His creation. Our trust community and the work we do is for the service of people, not the other way round.
Ethos
We build community and relationships between schools, rooted in prayer and responding to the call of Jesus Christ to live in love and fellowship
We follow principles of subsidiarity, solidarity and the common good. These are the main ideas in Catholic Social Teaching, applying the model of Jesus to the way we work with one another. They tell us that decisions should be made as close as possible to the people they affect, that we all have a responsibility to stand with each other especially in times of need and that in all our decisions we should think about the whole community, especially those whose voice may not be heard.
Our trust exists to serve the schools in their work of Catholic/Christian education and care. We believe in local leadership. Our job is to help each individual school community flourish in its own unique way. We do this by standing by each other in times of challenge, by encouraging and celebrating each another and by doing together things that we can’t do alone to make our schools even better.
We know each other. The foundation of everything we do will be quality relationships between people across schools. We will be transparent and open with one another and interested to understand the unique characteristics, strengths and challenges of each school.
We do no harm. This is very important as we begin to form our trust. The purpose of coming together is to find ways to make things even better for pupils, staff and parents but along the way we must also take care not to damage the many great things we love about our schools.
We are not afraid to take risks and try new things to get the very best for our children and young people. We will try new ideas and, whether things work as we intended or not, we will learn from what happens so that we continually improve.
Vision
Every Catholic Christian school exists to help each child and young person to grow and thrive spiritually, socially, morally and academically. Every school has strengths and expertise in this work.
Every school aims to meet the needs of each individual, so that every child has a great education. There are many successes in meeting this aim and there is much to celebrate in every school.
Whatever the successes and achievements, there is always ambition to go further. Every school will have governors, leaders and staff who can see how things could be better still. Every school will have children who are not thriving, often because the challenges that they face are hard to overcome.
Our vision in forming St Clare CMAT is to preserve and protect the unique character of each school while helping each to build on their strengths and overcome challenges in new ways by working together.
We will do this by:
- Finding simple ways to help staff share expertise and strengths, so that we build the range of expertise in every school
- Helping schools to work together to solve shared challenges and, where it helps, pooling our resources to draw in help that we could not afford individually
- Freeing up time and money in schools by sharing common tasks and, where appropriate, buying services together to get the better value for money
- Coming to the help of one another when a community is facing a difficult time
Our aim is that every child and member of staff will benefit from this work, but we expect and believe that the greatest benefit will be for those children who are facing the greatest challenges. This is in line with our Catholic Christian mission to serve our brothers and sisters, especially at the times when they are in greatest need.