Catherine became Co-CEO of Abbey MAT in January 2020 after a successful year as interim Co-CEO/Director of Education, demonstrating her passion for educational excellence and her commitment to supporting schools across the Trust. Catherine shares the CEO role with Helen Pratten through our innovative leadership model. In addition to her role as Co-CEO, Catherine continues to serve as the Director of Education, where she leads the Central Education Team to drive performance, standards, and overall effectiveness in all our academies.
Working closely with academy leadership teams, Catherine provides strategic guidance, clear direction, and effective management to support the continuous improvement trajectory of all 8 academies and the Trust as a whole. She ensures that every academy achieves its full potential through supporting leaders to orchestrate effective improvement plans which lead to actionable improvements and are informed by robust self-evaluation processes. Catherine also leads academy reviews, focusing on the quality of leadership, management, teaching, learning, and assessment.
Catherine’s leadership style is rooted in collaboration, continuous improvement, and a deep commitment to the success of every student and school within the Trust. She is dedicated to creating a supportive and ambitious environment where leaders, teachers, and students can thrive. Her work ensures that Abbey MAT’s academies are not only meeting expected standards but are continuously striving for excellence.
Catherine started life as a secondary school English teacher, was awarded Advanced Skills Teacher status for North Yorkshire prior to leading two successful English departments in Wakefield and Leeds. She became an assistant principal in 2007, deputy head at the same school the following year and under a successful co-headship model, led the school to an outstanding judgement in 2014. Catherine served as an Ofsted inspector from 2014-2019.
Catherine loves learning and exhibits a firm commitment to her own professional development. She has a degree in English Literature and Latin and a master's in education. Her dissertation focussed on the impact of coaching as a mechanism for supporting sustainable leadership development and she is using her learning to inform the development of professional programmes for leaders at all levels across the Trust. She has also successfully completed NPQEL, an Executive Leadership qualification through Ambition Institute and the Professional Qualification for School Inspectors (PQSI) through Liverpool Hope University Catherine serves as a foundation governor at a high-performing secondary school in Leeds.
Linked to our Trust-wide focus on Oracy, one of Catherine’s favourite words is ’Humanitas’ (Latin noun). Humanitas is widely translated as ‘kindness’- a value which Catherine believes should underpin all our interactions with pupils and staff at the Trust.
