Tracy, Tell us a bit about your career history… 

I’ve been in recruitment and talent acquisition for 18 years, across various sectors including manufacturing. I completed my professional qualification in HR about 5 years ago with a CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) level 5. I’ve always been interested in helping to make people’s working lives better (which in turn helps organisations and people to thrive and perform).

 

What attracted you to this role?

I have some personal ties to the local area and Brooke Weston Academy was actually my old school (formerly called Brooke Weston CTC) so the vacancy really piqued my interest for that reason initially!

The People Business Partner role was a natural next step for me in terms of my HR career. The BWT educational agenda and values really spoke to me and I knew a role in the education sector would be incredibly rewarding.

 

What are your top priorities for this role?

Initially, I want to establish the role across the wider trust, as it’s a brand-new position. My personal mission is to ‘be there’ for our schools and understand how I can support them and we can work in partnership. Our People team is also recruiting for a second role like mine (‘People Business Partner’) so eventually I will be responsible for half of the Trust’s schools, with my colleague looking after the other half. For now, though, I will be meeting ALL of our family of schools across the trust providing both strategic and operational guidance, support and engagement for the new 3-year People Strategy that we’ll be rolling out imminently. I will also be working with Senior Leadership teams in each of my portfolio schools developing people plans tailored to each individual school.  It’s important to work together, with two-way feedback and build great, honest and open relationships at this early stage.

The People Partner role also has allocated strategic work areas linked to the people strategy with mine being the ‘Workload and Wellbeing’ strand.  A working group is in the process of being established for this, so that we have a number of engaged individuals all working together to develop a Wellbeing charter on all aspects of managing and reducing workload wherever possible. We will also be working closely with our unions to ensure our charter is reflective of both best practice, including DFE toolkits and our employee needs, whilst being aware of the education sector challenges we all face with regard to finance.

In terms of our new People strategy, there will be 3 main workstreams for year 1:

• Workload and Wellbeing
• Continuing Personal and Professional Development
• Recruitment and Retention

We have people from across our schools involved in each workstream. ‘Workload and Wellbeing’ is something of a passion for me and I have specific experience in this area.

What are your first impressions of BWT?

There’s a lovely, supportive culture here and I don’t sense hierarchical barriers. Everyone is approachable. I spent some time with Andrew (Campbell, CEO of BWT) a few weeks ago (he happens to be my old teacher!) and it was great to get his thoughts about workplace and educational wellbeing.

There’s a big challenge ahead, in order to establish our new people operating model, build great working relationships and trust to deliver and embed the People Strategy and really ‘walk the walk’ regarding wellbeing and all aspects of managing, leading and developing our employees and the environment in which we work.

 

What are your hobbies?

I’m very into fitness, particularly when it’s outdoors – it helps me both physically and mentally – with my wellbeing and am keen to use my wellbeing day on that . I love visiting new places and we walk a lot, as a family. We’ve recently got a rescue dog, a lurcher called Brodie, so we’re looking forward to lots of adventures with him in the Peak District and other beautiful places around the UK!

Thank you, Tracy!

 

We continue to evolve our wellbeing offering across the Trust, to support our colleagues to have a healthy work-life balance. For more information about how we’re doing this, click here.