Tina Lovey OBE, CEO, Rivermead Inclusive Trust
Kerri Edge, Director of School Improvement Rivermead Inclusive Trust
This case study provides a compelling model for trust leaders on how harnessing and sharing specialist expertise across a locality can significantly enhance support for children with complex needs. The journey undertaken by Rivermead Solutions – part of Rivermead Inclusive Trust – provides inspiration and ideas for trust leaders developing similar models to meet particular needs across their own localities. The approach has not only maximised resource efficiency, but has also demonstrated that by leveraging their unique strengths, trusts can create sustainable, community-focused initiatives that ensure comprehensive support for all children, particularly those with SEND.
The Rivermead Inclusive Trust was established in 2016 by Tina Lovey, the headteacher of Rivermead’s founding Community Special School. Recognising the unique challenges and needs of special education, Tina envisioned a multi-academy trust that could eventually extend its special-sector expertise to primary schools and other special schools locally. She envisaged an ethos for enabling all children to be the very best they can be, with a particular emphasis on ensuring children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are fully included within this.
This vision was driven by a desire to foster an educational environment that embraces a holistic, therapeutic approach, ensuring that all students – no matter what their background or circumstances – receive the comprehensive support they need to thrive. From the outset, Tina believed that, in order to adopt this approach, the trust would first need to grow to become sustainable and benefit from a degree of scale. In its first year, the trust expanded to three schools, allowing Tina to form a strong central team. This included the crucial recruitment of Kerri Edge as Director of School Improvement in 2017, enabling a focused division of responsibilities between educational leadership and business management.
“This vision was driven by a desire to foster an educational environment that embraces a holistic, therapeutic approach, ensuring that all students – no matter what their background or circumstances – receive the comprehensive support they need to thrive.”
Concurrent with the establishment of the trust, Tina also set up Rivermead Solutions, a not for profit, community interest company, under the trust’s umbrella. The vision for Rivermead Solutions was to address significant gaps in the availability of specialist education services within Medway’s local education landscape, informed and driven by a deep understanding of the challenges faced by so many schools in meeting compliance requirements and supporting learners with SEND. These services include outreach services, training and development for staff, therapy services, facilities hire, and more. In short, as an initiative, Rivermead Solutions aimed to create a sustainable, not-for-profit subsidiary that would both enhance the trust’s internal capabilities whilst also offering valuable services to other schools across the locality. Kerri’s arrival in 2017 brought the capacity needed to start realising this vision, marking the beginning of a new chapter in Rivermead’s journey. So what did the development of Rivermead Solutions – as a charitable arm of a trust – involve?