Our Professional Central Offer
Our core offer to schools gives leaders the space and capacity to focus on what they do best: making sure every pupil in our schools receives an ambitious, high-quality Catholic curriculum. We want our pupils to leave with a strong faith and with the skills and knowledge to thrive, in modern Britain and in the wider world. We hold ourselves to that standard every year, and keep asking whether we are giving our pupils what they need.
The Emmaus Directors have agreed a central contribution for every school in the trust, which funds a shared set of services and adds real capacity at school level. That contribution is how we raise standards together, and how we make sure a genuinely great education reaches every pupil in every one of our schools.
Our School Improvement Strategy
School improvement is strongest when schools work together. Collaboration brings constructive challenge, sharpens practice, and makes real, lasting change possible. Being part of Emmaus means a long-term commitment to schools, pupils and communities who face the greatest challenges, and it means continuing to build on the strengths of schools that are already thriving. Our aim is that every pupil in every Emmaus school receives an ambitious, high-quality education, grounded in our Catholic faith’s values and driven by a moral commitment to social mobility and educational opportunity. It is built on an honest, challenging, and open culture, partnership working and shared determination for success in every school.
Our school improvement strategy sets out how the central team and our schools work together to keep improving. We take a partnership approach, built on trust and close coordination between the central team, the Emmaus Development Board, and school-based leaders. Everyone in Emmaus has a part to play in supporting peers, lifting standards and making sure every pupil has a broad, rich curriculum, shaped by Catholic values.
Emmaus Institute of Professional Learning
Talent is at the heart of everything Emmaus does. Not just finding it, but nurturing it, at every career stage, across every role, in every school in our family.
The Emmaus Institute of Professional Learning is where that commitment takes shape. It is the professional home for every member of staff in our trust: a structured, research-informed offer that covers CPD, career development and initial teacher training, all grounded in our Catholic values of humility, faithfulness and service.
Everything the Institute does starts with the evidence. Our CPD and training programmes are built on research-informed pedagogy and current educational research, which means staff are working with teaching strategies that have been tested and shown to make a difference. The result is teaching that deepens over time, career paths that build on each other, and pupil outcomes that continue to improve across our schools.
We believe that when staff are genuinely invested in, when they can see a clear path forward and feel properly supported along it, they do their best work. And when staff do their best work, pupils flourish.
At the centre of the Institute is the Talent-Ed Matrix, an online platform that puts staff in the driving seat of their own development. It maps out the career paths available across Emmaus, signposts relevant CPD for both current and aspirational roles, and helps every member of staff, from a newly qualified teacher to an experienced senior leader, see where they can go next and how to get there. We want people to build long careers with us, and this is how we make that possible.
Professional development at Emmaus is not a programme of one-off events. It is a career-long commitment, shaped by research, responsive to individual need, and built on the kind of genuine collaboration that only a family of schools can offer.
The Institute also encompasses our Initial Teacher Training programme, delivered in partnership with Liverpool Hope University. This gives our schools a direct role in shaping the next generation of teachers, with experienced colleagues working as mentors and curriculum tutors. Acting as an ITT mentor or curriculum tutor is itself a powerful form of professional development: it deepens your own understanding of pedagogy through critical reflection on your practice, keeps you close to emerging research, and builds the kind of collaborative relationships between experienced teachers and trainees that strengthen the whole school community. For trainees, it means the teachers coming into our schools understand what a great education in Greater Manchester, rooted in Catholic values, looks and feels like from day one.
Our full professional development approach is set out in our strategy document, which you can read below.
Our Guiding Principles
Every Emmaus school has its own character, its own parish, and its own community. Our guiding principles are how we protect that individuality while making sure every school is pulling in the same direction. They give school leaders a clear framework for aligned autonomy: the freedom to shape each school around its pupils and community, within principles we share as a trust.
The principles are not a rulebook. They are the building blocks from which each school develops its own approach. They are co-constructed through the academic year with headteachers and school staff, and they evolve as we do.
