

Welcome to the St Francis of Assisi Catholic Academy Trust. We are a family of nine Catholic schools in the Roman Catholic Deanery of the Lea Valley. Our Trust is in its 5th year of existence and over those years, we have developed a highly effective organisation that delivers significant benefits for the pupils, staff and communities as a result of their schools belonging to the Trust.
Those benefits include ensuring our pupils and staff receive significant advantages from the Trust’s ability to support schools’ efforts to constantly evolve and develop what they do and deliver. We make this happen in a wide range of ways, for example, from working directly with our Headteachers and Governors to support their school development plans through to direct work with pupils to enhance their experiences in school. This has led to improvements in pupil attainment, curriculum, quality of teaching, subject leadership, safeguarding, Chaplaincy provision, pupils’ own personal faith journeys, and our sacramental life, to name but a few areas.
We also work ‘behind the scenes’ to support schools by saving and raising funds for each school. We do this, for example, through harnessing the buying power of the collective nine schools and by providing a Trust finance team that looks for efficiencies and fundraising avenues. Working in this way our Trust has saved and raised over £4.5 million for our nine schools since we opened in 2021 – that is an enormous sum of money which is then ploughed straight back into school finances and our classrooms. This means our pupils and staff benefit greatly from being in our Trust, and parents can be assured that their child is in a school which is stronger and more effective as a result of being in the Trust.
It has taken many years of dedicated work from our skilled staff, governors and directors to bring our Trust to its current flourishing state; perhaps flourishing beyond even our own initial high expectations. However, thanks to their efforts we now see that the words of our Patron, St Francis of Assisi have come true in our lived experience:
Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible!
Thank you for your interest in our Trust and for looking at our website. You might like to take a look at our News section and our Newsletters, which will give you further insights into our tireless work to deliver our vision for the very best possible Catholic education now and for generations to come.
Andrew Celano, CEO