Welcome from the CEO

As the CEO of Athena Learning Trust, I would like to extend a warm welcome to our website, where we champion knowledge, strategy, creativity, and wisdom. Athena Learning Trust is a family of schools that was founded in 2022 to bring schools both high support and high ownership. We chose the name Athena because she represents wisdom, knowledge, learning, strategy, conflict, freedom, endeavour and the arts. Athena is supportive, creative, appreciative, thoughtful, combative and determined. Athena inspired the world’s first-ever democracy, the Athenian democracy of 2,500 years ago, that still inspires the world today. Athena Learning Trust stands for a world where all children get to go to a great school and where all trusts work together for all children. We believe in creating a leading school improvement strategy, world-class support for school leaders, and curricula for all staff in all schools. We are against bad ideas and practices that drag teachers, schools, and kids back and damage their lives. Athena believes in encouraging staff to speak their minds and creating leaders. 

At Athena Learning Trust, we are always learning together. We learn from the world’s best thinkers and school leaders, and we aim to be a leading trust for knowledge-building. We want to be the best home and family for our schools and staff. Our top priorities are to bring world-class education support and world-class people support to our schools.

We believe in a world where all children get to go to a great school, and we want to see all trusts working together for all children. We are against bad ideas and practices, including the hornets that are: overstretch, disruption, distractions, overload, forgetting, confusion, demotivation, bullying, dogma, entitlement, and school shamers. Our struggles and inner demons include doing less better, anticipating and preempting pitfalls and blind spots, simplicity-complexity tightrope, and balancing alignment with autonomy.

At Athena Learning Trust, we believe in knowledge-building, investing in our staff teams teaching and leading, priorities, clarity, encouragement, heart, honesty, feedback, involvement, and creating leaders. 

Thank you for visiting our website. We hope that you find our resources and information helpful and informative.

Ben Parnell,
CEO