The Laidlaw Foundation

Laidlaw Schools Trust is generously supported by the Laidlaw Foundation, which invests in the education of the underprivileged and underrepresented in order to break the cycle of poverty, reduce inequality and develop a new generation of leaders.

The Laidlaw Foundation currently supports four programmes:

• Sponsoring the Laidlaw Schools Trust to provide extraordinary education to transform lives

• Developing a new generation of diverse leaders who embrace research-based decision making and ethical leadership, through the Laidlaw Scholars Leadership and Research programme

• Ensuring more women reach senior executive level by providing MBA scholarships at London Business School and Oxford University’s Saïd Business School

• Empowering women in business through higher education by supporting the most disadvantaged and excluded women access degree courses at Trinity College Dublin.

To learn more, follow the Laidlaw Foundation on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Support for Laidlaw Schools Trust

The Laidlaw Foundation provides funding for the Laidlaw Schools Trust central team. This significantly reduces the amount of money each of our academies needs to spend on, for example, People & Culture, Marketing, Finance and IT - leaving more time and resources available for teaching and learning.

Most importantly, the Foundation provides additional funding per pupil so that every child benefits from Laidlaw X: a strategy where our pupils learn character development in school, additional welfare support is provided, so that these skills can be demonstrated through extraordinary experiences.

The Foundation also sponsors a range of special initiatives, some of the most recent of which are outlined below.

Digital devices 

Support from the Laidlaw Foundation allowed us to provide Chromebooks for students to access remote learning while they were learning at home during the Covid-19 pandemic. It also enabled us to supply dongles to families without internet access, helping them to overcome barriers to learning.

Trust-wide school improvement support

Support from the Laidlaw Foundation allows us to drive school improvement by sharing best practice across the Trust, facilitating collaborative working, developing our staff and ensuring we consistently deliver inspirational learning.

Additional capacity

Thanks to the Laidlaw Foundation, we are able to provide additional capacity for key curriculum areas in our schools. This includes teachers and teaching support staff to help facilitate teaching and learning and drive key interventions.

Teaching and Leadership Centre

The Foundation has funded a £3.2m new Teaching and Leadership Centre at Sedgefield Community College. The state-of-the-art building will provide a place for PGCE students from Durham University to continue their teacher training and become a hub for teaching and leadership excellence in the North East.