Welcome from the CEO
At SET our mission is to deliver the very best education to each and every young person across all of our schools in Suffolk. Our schools are deliberately small and our size allows us to really know every student as well as every member of staff.
We believe in a knowledge-rich curriculum combined with a wide ranging extra-curricular programme so that students leave us with excellent results and extensive personal and character development.
Across our family of schools colleagues collaborate and share learning. Each school receives strong support from the Local Advisory Board, parents and carers and the wider community.
I am immensely proud to lead such a unique Trust. Whether you are a prospective parent, a current parent, a member of staff or you are looking for a position in one of our schools or are interested in another professional capacity, I hope these pages give you a flavour of what our Trust and schools have to offer.
Welcome from the Chair
Seckford Education Trust (‘SET’) was set up in 2012 to help local communities to establish and run a number of academies in Suffolk and East Anglia. The Trust was established by the Seckford Foundation which is a long established charity dedicated to the education and welfare of young people and older people in Suffolk.
In response to local community requests, SET opened three secondary schools: SET Beccles School, SET Ixworth School and SET Saxmundham School. All three schools are thriving and the number of students choosing to attend has increased steadily since opening. In July 2019 SET welcomed two primary schools to the trust: SET Maidstone Infant School and SET Causton Junior School, both situated in Felixstowe. In August 2022, both primary schools merged on to one site and became Set Felix Primary.
SET schools are publicly-funded state schools which are open to local students irrespective of ability or need. We have high academic, personal and social aspirations for all our students and we aim to deliver above national average progress and achievement for every student relative to their starting points and abilities.
Our Schools provide a safe, healthy and stimulating environment in which all of our students can learn and develop and where parents, carers and the wider community are encouraged to be involved.
Our strong emphasis on inclusion and pastoral care is designed to ensure that each and every student is treated as an individual so that they can discover their latent talents as well as realise their academic potential. We are particularly proud to offer specialist units in all our schools for students with cognitive and learning difficulties so that they can learn and develop in true community schools.
SET primary schools focus on creating strong foundations of literacy, numeracy and confidence in each and every child so that they are fully prepared for the move on to secondary school.
SET secondary schools offer a balanced and integrated academic curriculum which is based on traditional subject areas. English, Maths, Modern Foreign Languages, Sciences and Humanities at the core of the curriculum are tried and tested as ways for students to develop their knowledge, skills and understanding. Throughout every subject there is a strong focus on literacy and numeracy.
We aim to ‘provide a foundation for life’ for our students by inspiring them with a love of learning and by ensuring that they have the appropriate skills and qualifications to help them move forward confidently into further education, training and their careers when they leave our schools.
Looking forward, SET intends to build on the successful development of our academies and fully expects that it will work with other like-minded, local communities in Suffolk and East Anglia looking to develop or improve their local secondary or primary schools. If you feel that SET could help your local community to achieve what is needed for the better education of future generations, then we would be delighted to hear from you.