Business

B4 Sustainability Ecosystem Roundtable discussion with Dr Fiona Hammans, CEO.

Abingdon Learning Trust is hosting a discussion at Fitzharrys School for the local business community regarding how Abingdon Learning Trust is embracing sustainability and the challenges faced in doing so.  For more information, please follow this link:

Sustainability Ecosystem Roundtable discussion with Dr Fiona Hammans

Located in Abingdon, we are a government-funded, charitable company running schools in the north of the town.

Our three schools came together in autumn 2018, and we have established a Learning Trust aiming to support not just the school communities, but the wider community, including beyond the Abingdon area.

We run our Trust as a business, and our annual accounts are available here:

Abingdon Learning Trust Annual Accounts August 2023

At a quick glance we have tangible assets of £26M with an annual income of just under £13M. We employ over 260 staff and provide education to 2060 students aged from 4 -18 years old. All our schools are graded Ofsted ‘good’.

As are all School Trusts, we are governed by Trustees – non-executive Directors - with a CEO and a small executive team including a Chief Operating Officer, Director of Education and Chief Technology Officer. Most staff are employed in the three schools but there is also a small central team who provide support directly to schools in areas such as finance, HR and payroll, H&S and so on.

As a significant employer we want to engage with businesses in the area, to build relationships with the commercial sector, find opportunities and synergies for joint working or influencing and to share solutions to common challenges. We are member of the B4 network and of ROBIN.

Whilst we do have the advantage of being government-funded, we have the same inflationary pressures as all businesses. There is no doubt that the cost of energy, food supplies for our school catering and the strong pressure on salary increases are putting huge pressures on the sector and on our Trust.

We have taken full advantage of the opportunities offered us as a charitable company and leveraged significant funding through the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme of over £1.15M into our schools, and this will help us meet our stated Net Zero Ambitions.

The Trust Board is always keen to hear from colleagues from a non-education background who might be interested in offering non-executive support to the Trust either as a Trustee or a Member, bringing your commercial and business skills and perspective.

If you would like to know more, then please send a short email to enquiries@abingdonlearningtrust.org and we will ensure someone gets back to you quickly.

 

We would also welcome any thoughts or ideas that you might have for a collaborative project, for example. Please contact the CEO, Dr Fiona Hammans on CEO@abingdonlearningtrust.org