Vision

Our vision is for Future Academies to become a beacon, a national leader of educational excellence and social mobility. Our Trust motto libertas per cultum encapsulates this vision. 

We believe that a good education provides a child with the building blocks to lead a purposeful and fulfilling life:

• it brings choice 
• it brings freedom 
• it is empowering
• it levels the playing field 

A good education ensures that birth and background will not constrain a child’s chances in life. 

To become a national leader of educational excellence is an ambitious vision for our Trust and one that has been a long time in the making, but I do believe, particularly now you have all joined us, that it is eminently achievable.

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Knowledge

So, what is a good education? What do we mean when we say that someone is well-educated? At Future Academies, we firmly believe that a good education is about acquiring knowledge. Knowledge is at the heart of everything we do. Our primary purpose as educators is, we believe, to increase the quality and quantity of what our students know, to give them a rich hinterland of cultural knowledge and conceptual understanding.

• We believe in recruiting teachers with deep subject knowledge.
• We believe in teaching an academically challenging, knowledge-rich curriculum, focussing on ‘the best that has been thought and said’.

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Knowledge retention

We know that knowledge builds on knowledge. The more you know, the easier it is to acquire more knowledge. New knowledge sticks to existing knowledge, building an ever-increasing schema.

We also know that for knowledge to be retained, it needs to be stored in long-term memory. This is what learning is all about. 

The cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham, tells us that ‘memory is the residue of thought’, so, in order for our students to commit knowledge to their long-term memories, they need to think deeply about what they are learning. 

Regular and repeated questioning, recapping of prior knowledge and low stakes quizzing are all very important, as is the careful sequencing of knowledge in the curriculum, with conceptual knowledge revisited and explored in ever-increasingly complex ways. 

We must always consider what is it that we are asking our students to think about in a lesson, or a scheme of work, and ask ourselves whether these thoughts will help them retain and embed knowledge.

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Scholarship

We want our schools to foster scholarship, for our teachers to open our students’ minds to the joy of knowing, for our students to develop an insatiable curiosity in life, for them to soak up as much knowledge as they can. 

We want our students to work hard and be proud of doing so.

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Character

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School environment

Our vision is for our schools to be nurturing yet rigorous environments, where:

• effort and hard work are lauded and rewarded
• a healthy spirit of competition is encouraged
• student rankings for effort and achievement are publicly displayed
• horizons are widened, doors are opened and imaginations are fired

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Cultural heritage

We believe that cultural knowledge is very important in life because it opens the door to a world beyond our own individual experiences; it gives us a wider worldview. Cultural knowledge develops our ability to understand, to reason and to critique; it sparks our imagination and hones our judgement.

Our cultural heritage is for us all to share and enjoy. We want our students to be able to decode with ease the literary quotations, the religious metaphors, the historical references and the scientific citations that are used so often, implicitly, in public discourse. In short, we want our students to have a seat at the table.