Shaw Education Trust
Website | Branding
The brief
Shaw Education Trust is a growing multi-academy trust of primary and secondary mainstream and special schools sponsored by the disability charity Shaw Trust. Our brief was to create an online identity for the Trust and its schools to communicate the story of its family of educators working in vastly different settings, all committed to opportunity and high expectations for all.
Our response
Key considerations when responding to the brief were cost-effectiveness, impact and ease of updating. We also needed to ensure that the Trust brand identity came through on both newly commissioned member school websites and on school websites that didn’t require a complete redesign. We agreed standard core content to be used across all Trust school websites and, where a school needed a new website, we created a set of design templates that could be easily and quickly adopted by the school.
This approach ensured consistency of content and brand identity. We agreed a clear academy onboarding process for new schools. This covered both initial adoption of the Shaw Education Trust brand and then ongoing work around updating their websites, which included providing bespoke face to face training and updating manuals.
Schools within the Trust have reported that their new websites have been received well by parents and other community members, with one school saying that their new website was praised by Ofsted when they were recently inspected.
Communitas has helped us through all stages of our MAT communications, from identifying our stakeholders and their possible areas of support and objection, through to helping us plan and write our website, create compelling information to help us attract schools that share our ethos, and create news stories for the media and our own website, as well as manage our social media channels.
They are currently working with SLT and teachers within our schools to ensure we have a consistent look and tone to communications across the MAT’s academies. In our experience Communitas are extremely knowledgeable, patient and also good fun to work with.
