The Consortium Trust is driven by core education principles: Personal Development, Creative Development and Community Engagement. These drivers are not "add-ons", nor are they haphazard outcomes; they are the foundation of the education in our schools. These three drivers are broken down into a further eighteen Learning Characteristics (the hexagons) which we use as the building blocks of our character education.

The principles of character development are taught in every aspect of the school day so pupils learn to build links between their knowledge, skills and character.

LearningPi.org allows pupils to develop their character further by providing well-planned activities linked directly to these eighteen Learning Characteristics.

This year we have continued to work with our development team to design and develop a Learning Pi standalone app that works on both Android and Apple operating systems. Our key focus being to develop and improve our parental engagement.

The Learning Pi app has two new features that we believe will further support and improve communication between home and school. The first feature is "Snap and Share" - this allows both parents and teachers to take a photo of a child or their work and tag it directly with one of our eighteen learning characteristics, these "Snaps" are then uploaded to the Learning Pi platform and can be viewed in the feed of each child along with a caption.

The second feature is direct messaging between parents and teachers - a feature that we see replacing the book bag notes. This allows parents to communicate quickly and easily with their child's class teacher and vice versa.

The app is currently being trialled by staff and parents at Rendlesham Primary school and Riverwalk school. Staff across the Trust will be trained on its use in the Summer term and it will be launched to our parents in the Autumn term.

Written by: Joel Vaughan, Assistant Academy Head