You may recall that back in May, we consulted parents and the wider community on our conversion to academy status. The proposal was to become a primary, multi-academy trust (MAT) with Sawley Infant & Nursery School, Dovedale Primary School and Shardlow Primary school.       

We are excited to announce that following a positive consultation, the conversion is planned to go ahead on Monday 3^rd November, 2014. We will retain our name as Sawley Junior School but will part of Willows Academy Trust. We just await some final bits of paperwork to complete.

Why Willows? The ground in Sawley was originally covered with sallow willows, ‘salh’ in Anglo-Saxon, they called it 'Salloe' or 'Sallé', meaning the hill with willows, and this eventually became 'Sawley'. There is also a strong connection between the Willow Tree and Shardlow – hence the name – Willows Academy Trust to join the four schools together.

To remind you, academy conversion:-

• will give us freedom to agree and establish our own curriculum and share staff expertise across the four schools;
• will closer develop and embed the current collaboration between the four schools and provide opportunities to develop initiatives which might be too costly or time consuming for an individual school;
• will give the school access to additional funding which is currently retained by the local authority;
• Will allow the purchase of services and resources across a group of schools reducing cost and enabling services to be more tailored to our needs.

The day to day running of the school will continue to remain the same for our pupils. Each school will maintain its unique characteristics and ethos.  There are no plans to:-

•  make alterations to the school uniform;
•  change the school name;
•  alter the employment rights of the staff;
•  make alterations to the school year or the school day.

All documentation shared including the full consultation report is available here.