ABOUT MIGHTY OAK INITIATIVE

Empowering Future Generations through Alternative Education Provision

Mighty Oak Initiative was first imagined in 2019, and then formally founded in January 2024 by Kate Lindsay, based in the beautiful Lake District, Cumbria.

Throughout the summer of 2024 a fantastic team of highly skilled and passionate teachers and educators joined the team, and in May 2024 we welcomed a diverse Board of Governors, all experts in their own professional fields. We are very grateful to the Board for the generous contribution they will make to the oversight and clarity of vision, ethos and strategic vision we know they will bring, individually and collectively.

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The Mighty Oak dream began in 2019: the vision of an Alternative Education Pathway for young people, to be accessed by anyone unable to find their way in mainstream. It began in Suffolk where Kate and her family lived and worked, and Kate believed that a standardised approach to curriculum delivery found in many education settings, was simply not meeting the needs of a significant cohort of young people, regardless of their actual academic ability (not reflected in formal assessment.) These young people were then becoming disengaged, anxious, suffering with feelings of failure and demonstrating a variety of negative and dysregulated behaviours, associated with specific school related environments. A familiar cycle of school refusal, social and academic exclusion followed and often, failing formal examinations. Kate moved to Cumbria in 2021 with her husband and children, and the plans for an Alternative Education provision flourished into what is now, Mighty Oak Initiative.

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The inability to achieve a formal qualification is never - from the team at Mighty Oak's experience - a reflection of the learner's inability, but simply a reflection of the need for a different learning pathway.

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Here, we seek to use our years of diverse, collective professional experience and lived personal experience from parenting children with educational needs that sit outside of mainstream, to contribute to a new educational narrative in the UK.