Dixons Academies Trust
In June 2024, we were delighted to launch our partnership with the Dixons Academies Trust.
On their website, the CEO Luke Sparkes introduces Dixons as follows:
Founded by Dixons City Academy, our trust has over 30 years’ experience in transforming education through our network of high-performing, non-faith academies, and now operates in Leeds, Bradford, Liverpool and Manchester.
Our schools include primary, secondary, all-through and sixth form. We focus exclusively on sponsored turnaround academies to address educational failure, and on new free schools to meet growing demand. Our diversity is a real strength of our model, balancing common alignment with the autonomy to innovate.
We have achieved a great deal in a relatively short time, which gives us a solid platform from which we continue to build responsibly: our trust will continue to expand, going from almost 14,000 students in 2022 to at least 20,000 by 2025.
Eight of our mentors traveled to Dixons Broadgreen (with students from Dixons Fazakerley too) in Liverpool to support Y9 students with a group workshop focused on readiness for GCSEs, oracy skills and character reflection. This was formatted as the ‘Motivation Day’ similar to what students from the E-ACT trust had received the week before.
The Motivation Day chapter list appears as follows:
Therefore, these students, taken from the pre-GCSE cohorts (Years 9&10) worked with their mentors to foster their character (building a better understanding of self and core values, as well as current strengths and areas to develop), oracy (speaking and listening skills) and their readiness for the opportunities and challenges ahead this year, through horizon scanning, learning about navigating failure and goal setting.
As always the three key outcomes were:
Readiness - Being prepared for academic tests and success after school
Oracy - speaking, listening and understanding
Character- self-reflection, identity, values and goals
