Joining Our Trust
Our Purpose
We are a Wolverhampton-based trust serving more than 3000 young people. We currently have six schools: one secondary school, three primary schools, an infant school and a junior school.
The name of the trust, Lykos, accurately reflects the nature of our trust and the schools within it. Lykos is Greek for ‘wolfpack’ or the plural of ‘wolf’, reflecting our geographical roots in the city and highlighting our collaborative foundations: ‘For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack’. (Kipling)
As a trust we truly believe that highly autonomous, accountable and locally-led schools rooted in their community can provide the strongest outcomes for learners. Our purpose is to provide, support and champion the highest-quality provision at the heart of our community, enabling all of our children and young people to be ambitious and aspirational and to achieve outstanding outcomes.
We are committed to building a genuine family of schools that are aligned with our ethos, values and culture of providing high-quality and inclusive education for all.
Inclusive Leadership
The expectation is that each school will retain their own unique identity and enjoy high levels of autonomy in order to serve and support their learners, parents and local communities to the highest possible standard. It is critical that school leaders retain their own vision for their school in the context of our shared community.
However, through working together, we will find greater strength, drawing on the quality of leadership, experience and expertise from all schools joining the trust to provide the highest levels of support and challenge to teachers, support staff and school leaders.
Continued leadership development and planned succession will underpin the development of the trust’s schools. Strong recruitment, retention and succession practices, effective continuing professional development and extensive opportunities for staff to work creatively and collaboratively across our schools, are vital as we continue our commitment to growing the leaders of tomorrow.
School Improvement
The growth of the trust will be aimed at expanding the role our schools play at the heart of their communities. Our ambition is to continually drive-up standards, outcomes and aspirations by providing a rich, broad and balanced learning experience for as many children in Wolverhampton as possible.
By sharing the academic, inclusion, extracurricular and enrichment expertise across our family of schools, our learners and staff will have access not only to new and innovative teaching and learning resources and strategies but also to collaborative and supportive communities of like-minded individuals and leaders who can support their journey of continual school improvement.
Working collaboratively and learning from each other across all phases, we will be able to more effectively meet the needs of all our learners from a diverse range of backgrounds including those who need more specialist provision. We will also be able to ensure that learners have more effective and meaningful transition from primary to secondary education and that families have a clear pathway through their child’s educational provision.
Centralised Support Services
By developing the trust’s central services, we are able to provide joining schools with high quality services in HR, finance, health and safety, estates, ICT and digital services, payroll and procurement and income generation. As we grow, we are increasingly able to find the appropriate economies of scale through the provision of efficient and cost-effective central services supported by rigorous and robust local management.
Our central team will benefit all schools by identifying the most effective practice across all schools and sharing this across the trust. We are able to offer additional capacity and capability in a wide range of areas of school improvement including inclusion, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, safeguarding, preparation for inspection, parenting support, media, marketing and timetabling.
These central professional services will increasingly allow headteachers to focus on what is most important to their schools: inclusion, curriculum, teaching, learning and assessment and their learners’ extra-curricular and enrichment experiences.
Initial Growth
In our initial stages of growth, we have looked to expand our provision with schools that are geographically close to Highfields, with a particular focus on this side of Wolverhampton. This has enabled us to develop a cross-trust support system that is logistically manageable and has helped to ensure that our network of leaders, staff and support services can be shared and further developed.
This first phase was intended to bring the number of learners in the primary phase broadly in line with those in the secondary phase. Our focus has been on more strongly performing schools, whose values are clearly aligned with our own, to ensure that we have been able to add capacity and capability into the trust and thereby lay the foundation to support schools in more challenging circumstances in the future.
To ensure that the trust has sufficient capacity to build our family of schools whilst maintaining the excellent standard of provision at our current schools, we have grown the trust gradually and incrementally.
Highfields School was established as a Multi-Academy Trust for many years, but it was only in January 2024 that Springdale and Warstones joined the trust, followed by Spring Vale in September 2024, Westacre in December 2026 and Uplands in April 2026.
Future Growth
The next phases of our growth will be driven by our vision to provide, support and champion the highest-quality provision at the heart of the communities we serve in Wolverhampton, enabling all of our children and young people to be ambitious and aspirational and to achieve outstanding outcomes.
Our purpose is fundamentally to provide excellent provision for all of the children in our trust rather than to grow for growth’s sake. Any decision to grow is contingent upon the health of the schools already in the trust.
Our Trust Board has recently reviewed the position of the trust and considered the performance of our existing schools. As such we will continue to pursue opportunities to grow our secondary and primary provision in the geographical area in which we are based considering all like-minded schools from our local community who share our vision and values and would receive significant benefit in joining the trust or add value to the trust.
All schools that join must be dedicated to working in partnership as part of an inclusive shared vision that values the achievements of every child. It is critical that all school leaders retain their own vision for their school in the context of our shared community.
For further information on joining our trust, or to request a copy of our Potential Joiners information pack, please contact enquiries@lykos.org.uk
WHERE EVERY CHILD MATTERS
Joining Our Trust
We will carefully consider any school who has indicated an interest in joining the trust on a case-by-case basis to ensure that our ethos and cultures are sufficiently aligned and that they will benefit from the trust and our existing schools. We will however prioritise those schools that would benefit the most from the value that we can add to them and to the local community and those that can add greatest value to the trust.
Financial performance is also an essential factor to consider when bringing in a school to the trust. To ensure the financial viability of these relatively early stages of growth, we will prioritise schools that are in a more stable and sustainable financial position. Any school whose financial standing is unclear will be further evaluated with a more detailed due diligence programme to be assessed by our Trust Board.
The Lykos Trust will use the following to evaluate any proposal for a school to join our trust.
The school(s) will share our vision and values, have the same high expectations for young people and be committed to working together to improve all schools within the trust and the local community.
The proposal will extend the trust’s impact in terms of raising standards of education for more young people in our local area.
