Bradford Diocesan Academies Trust (BDAT) was set up in 2012 to support and sponsor Church of England Academies and other schools in Bradford and the surrounding areas on behalf of the Diocese of Leeds. We work with our schools to provide a network of support and challenge, so working together we can achieve our vision of improved outcomes and results for our children and young people.
Our mission is “At BDAT we want every child to have a happy and high-quality education enabling them to grow and flourish during their time at school.”
Here are ten things you might like to know about what makes us BDAT:
We are a group of distinct and different sibling schools that work together as part of a strong family. Each of us is different but we all work towards the same endpoint, focussed relentlessly on providing quality education and life experiences for our students because we believe that every child only has one chance at a good education. Our schools are not just part of BDAT, they are BDAT.
We are a multi-academy trust of 21 schools, supporting more than 10,800 children and employing 1,525 staff (as at March 2025). To add real value and support our schools, we make sure we get to know each school from the moment it joins our family, taking the time to get to understand their strengths, points of difference, uniqueness, character and challenges. By taking this approach, we have successfully built our Trust gradually from three schools to 21 over the last ten years. We only grow at a steady and sensible pace with schools that share our values.
Our Trust values are Inclusion, Compassion, Aspiration, Resilience and Excellence (I CARE) and these are at the core of all we do across the Trust for our students, colleagues and communities. We believe our students must always be at the heart of our thinking and decision making.
Whilst as a Diocesan Trust our values are grounded in Christian values, we are proud to recognise our values are fully inclusive, equally accessible and applicable to all faiths and none. It is for this reason we are equally proud to support non-church schools as well as church schools, providing a strong education for children across the City of Bradford.
4. We are passionate about ensuring the highest quality education for our students and developing the whole child to give them the tools to succeed.
We believe each of our students is entitled to an excellent high-quality education experience. We have a series of networks amongst teachers and subject specialists as well as a robust CPD programme to ensure our teachers remain at the forefront of fantastic education practice.
We also want our students’ time in our schools to be full of exciting and diverse cultural and life experiences, so they fulfil their wider potential. Our schools offer a range of clubs, societies, trips and events to ensure students can explore their passions, discover new talents and build life skills to support them in the world after education.
Inclusion is a very important value to BDAT. We recognise Bradford is one of the youngest and most diverse cities in the UK and want our Trust to model and reflect this. To us, inclusion is about understanding that everyone is equal, without exception, valuing and encouraging diversity and difference and proactively seeking to learn from others.
During the pandemic, our students told us that while “we are not all the same, we all want the same chances”. Celebrating diversity, difference and inclusion and championing and responding to student voice are two key trust priorities.
As part of this, we are developing our BDAT Inclusion Strategy. This is about ensuring inclusion and equality amongst our staff and recruitment process, revising our school curriculum to ensure it is relevant, topical and inclusive for all our children, embedding a zero-tolerance approach to discrimination and bias and spending time listening to our students, families and communities to understand what inclusion means to them and what we can do differently to ensure we are inclusive and accessible to all.
As a Trust, our school improvement approach is about schools supporting schools, grounded in evidence-based improvement and interventions and sharing good local and national practice.
We recognise school improvement is not one-size-fits-all and needs to be tailored to our schools’ individual context and communities. As a Trust we support each school through bespoke school improvement customised to its context and needs, framed through a unified Trust-wide intent and ambition to drive up standards and a rigorous quality assurance process to ensure impact and improved outcomes.
We believe everything we do and focus on should add value to our schools and ultimately to our students. That is what we are here for.
Whether it is about improving teaching and learning by facilitating the spread of excellent practice through high-quality CPD, or by reducing the workload burden on schools by removing the administrative burden of policy and risk assessment, or by ensuring our schools are robust, safe, secure and well-managed through robust compliance and governance support, we are stronger together as a family.
Our team of senior leaders are experts in their field, working with our school leaders and colleagues to support, advise and enhance practice to ensure the best possible education for our students.
With previous careers in the Department for Education, policy development and school and trust leadership as well as finance and IT, our Trust’s senior team is able to lead the Trust effectively and share knowledge, insight and experience with our colleagues to ensure the successful running of our schools for our students.
We drive school improvement by recruiting, developing and retaining highly skilled, expert and confident staff to deliver high-quality education so every child can fulfil their potential and goals.
We strongly believe that we can’t have great schools without great staff. We have developed our BDAT People strategy to ensure we do everything we can to recruit, develop and retain our talented staff.
BDAT People provides the strategic direction to ensure our professional and career development supports school improvement and drives our vision of BDAT as an employer of choice. Our people matter to us, and we have developed many fantastic pathways, training, networks and support to ensure they reach their potential so the children can reach theirs.
We value and enjoy working collaboratively with a range of school partners both locally and nationally. We believe working across and within the system can only build our professional knowledge as an organisation.
As an established MAT, we believe it is important to support other schools and trusts whenever we can, as by working together, we are all stronger. We have helped to set up and support several trusts across the Yorkshire area.