Maritime Academy Trust is a family of 13 schools serving more than 4,000 pupils across Greenwich, Bexley, Kent and Medway. From its beginnings in Greenwich, the trust has grown with a clear purpose: to give every child an excellent start in life. This case study, based on an interview with Nick Osborne, CEO of Maritime Academy Trust, explores how in recent years this has led the trust to be more deliberate about the conditions that shape pupils’ experiences beyond the classroom. The result has been an evolving trust-wide focus on building relationships with families – not least through the designation of Community Ambassadors – to improve outcomes and give each child the best chance to succeed and flourish.
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This work has taken place against a wider system backdrop in which levels of pupil need are rising, expectations of schools continue to expand, and many of the wider services that previously supported children and families have reduced or disappeared. As a result, challenges that would traditionally have sat outside the remit of teaching and learning – such as attendance, wellbeing and home circumstances – are having a direct and growing impact on educational outcomes and pupils’ life chances. Maritime’s response to this has shaped the trust’s approach to working with families. Rather than viewing this work as informal, reactive or dependent on individual school capacity, Maritime has positioned it as a deliberate and structured part of how the trust operates – one that sits alongside, rather than outside, its core educational priorities. As Nick explains: “this is our strategy, not an add-on”.
“This is our strategy, not an add-on.”
Working with families
Nick describes families as partners in pupils’ education, particularly given that what happens beyond the school day shapes how children arrive, settle and engage with learning. “If we’re really going to make a difference for our pupils”, he says, “we have to work with families – because, ultimately, the formal school day only accounts for around 20% of their daily lives”. Crucially, Nick is clear that relationship building is not an end in itself; its value lies in what it enables schools to do. “Through building strong and trusting relationships with families, you earn the right to have the more difficult conversations,” he reflects, drawing on the trust’s experience of addressing issues such as attendance, routines and expectations. “Without trust, those conversations are fragile or short-lived. With it, those conversations are more likely to land, to be understood, and to result in meaningful action”.
This understanding has shaped how Maritime has organised the work in practice. “If we make the work of building strong and trusting relationships with families informal, and leave it to individual schools alone”, Nick explains, “it gets squeezed by everything else they’re being asked to do”. For this reason, the trust has taken deliberate steps to create time, space and structure for this work, while remaining responsive to the distinctive character of each school community. It is within this context that Maritime developed its Community Ambassador role.
