Broken system full of over-inflated egos - Teacher Lighthouse Schools Partnership Employee Review

• Working for this trust builds your determination and willpower to get out and work in a place that appreciates you and the students.

Leaders are more focused on their egos and control rather than collaboration, making staff feel completely undervalued. • There is a lack of appreciation for diversity. The main 'showcase' school leaders boast about having low levels of EAL children rather than celebrating having children from different cultures and ethnicities. • Support plans are given out as a punishment for staff rather than as a support tool for development. This has created a fear culture within schools. • Teachers are unfairly judged based on brief lesson drop ins by MAT leaders that ignore the context of the class. • There is constant scrutiny by school leaders and MAT leaders. • The trust pay to hire out football stadiums and fly out speakers rather than using that money on schools and children who need it. • Due to 'budget' issues, teaching assistants have been let go. • Leaders try to get staff out who are different and don't fit in with their vision by bullying them, putting them on support plans and targeting them. • Staff bullying and racist incidents are ignored and leaders get defensive and lie when questioned. • Same leaders and staff then go on to get promotions.

Some lovely people still work at this Trust, though they're doing everything possible to push them towards the door.

Wholly unmanageable working demands: *Zero appreciation of a work/life balance - A senior member of the MAT Leadership Team once told me that if a teacher is not judged to be fulfilling all roles and responsibilities then it doesn't matter how many hours they're working in a week. *Be ready to follow dull, uninspiring plans that cannot be deviated from and are pitched way above the level of the children (to say nothing of often having been lifted directly from websites and breaching copyright law!) *If your face doesn't fit or you're not prepared to buy in to the vision or (God forbid) you actually have a bit of personality about you, be prepared to be placed on a support plan until they've drained the creativity right out of you. *Watch through your fingers as you're told there's "no money" and TAs are rapidly laid-off, then attend large scale, expensive INSET days with many speakers which would cover the wages of the support staff ten-fold.