Greenwood Academies Trust, which is responsible for managing a growing number of academies including Nottingham Academy, Skegness Academy, Western Favell Academy and Nottingham Girls School, asked Absolute web design to create a web design and CMS structure that would enable them to roll out a single solution across all of their academies. They also asked us to extend the design to a Foundation Trust website that represented the organisation behind the academies.

Academies are state-maintained independent schools set up with the help of outside sponsors. Their objective is to drive up standards by replacing failing schools in struggling education authorities. The private organisation runs the school outside of the local education authority's (LEA) funding control, but still operates it within all the national requirements for curriculum and standards.

We used the Absolute CMS v4 to create the CMS framework that would act as a useful resource for students and parents, provide a single source for daily updates and a forum for news, results and open evenings. We also created bespoke functionality for the sites which allows the client to manage subject areas, plus a recruitment module to allow users to apply for vacancies throughout the Trust.

The Nottingham Academy, Western Favell Academy and the GAT websites all went live last week and will be followed by a number of academy sites in the next few weeks, together with printed prospectuses.