The Story
Digital Schools became the digital partner of choice for Venn Academy Trust – a growing multi-academy trust across Yorkshire and beyond. Website design, photography, film, and branding across multiple schools, built to a consistent standard that reflects the Trust’s ambition and values.
Yorkshire. 2016.
Some partnerships change the shape of a business. The relationship between Digital Schools and Venn Academy Trust is one of them. What began with a single school website has grown into one of the most comprehensive and sustained digital partnerships in the Yorkshire education sector – a multi-year collaboration spanning websites, photography, film, branding, and digital strategy across a growing portfolio of schools from Hull to South Yorkshire and beyond.
Simon Witham – trust CEO and friend
Every significant partnership has a person at its centre. For the Venn Academy Trust relationship, that person is Simon Witham – CEO of Venn Academy Trust, and one of the most forward-thinking education leaders Digital Schools has ever worked with.
Simon’s decision to bring Digital Schools in to manage the Trust’s digital estate wasn’t just a procurement decision. It was an act of trust — and a signal of something rarer and more valuable than trust in an agency’s technical ability. It was trust in a shared vision of what digital communication in education could and should look like.
What makes Simon exceptional as an educational leader – and as a client – is his instinct to think ahead of the crowd. At a time when many trust leaders were still treating school websites as compliance checklists, Simon understood that digital communication was a strategic asset. That photography and film weren’t luxuries but essential tools for telling a school’s story. That consistency of brand across a multi-academy trust wasn’t cosmetic – it was a statement of shared values and collective ambition.
Time and again, Simon has embraced new technologies, new approaches, and new ideas before the wider sector caught up with them. He creates the conditions in which genuinely ambitious digital work becomes possible. That’s an unusual quality in any client. In the education sector, it’s rare.
Over nearly a decade of working together, Simon has been far more than a client. His advice, his challenge, his clarity about what schools and trusts actually need from their digital presence – and his friendship – have shaped Digital Schools in ways that go beyond any individual project.
Thank you, Simon. The work speaks for itself. The partnership is the thing.
What Venn Academy Trust needed
Venn Academy Trust is a growing multi-academy trust with schools across Yorkshire and beyond – primary schools, special schools, and alternative provision settings spanning Hull, the East Riding, South Yorkshire, and further afield. Each school has its own identity, its own community, its own story to tell. The Trust as a whole has its own vision, values, and strategic ambition.
The digital challenge for a trust like Venn is significant. Every school needs a website that meets Ofsted’s statutory requirements – completely, consistently, and without exception. Every school needs photography that captures its individual character. Every school needs a visual identity that is distinctively its own while sitting coherently within the Trust’s wider brand. And the Trust itself needs a digital presence that reflects its leadership, its ambition, and the quality of education happening across its portfolio.
That’s a substantial brief. Digital Schools has been delivering it, school by school, since 2016.
Building the digital estate
The Venn Academy Trust digital estate has been built incrementally – each school brought onto the Digital Schools platform as the Trust has grown, each one given the same level of care, creative attention, and compliance rigour as the first.
The work across the Trust includes:
School website design and development – bespoke websites for each school in the Trust portfolio, built from scratch, reflecting each school’s individual identity and meeting every DfE statutory requirement from day one.
Professional photography – on-site photography at Trust schools capturing authentic school life – pupils learning, playing, creating, and being themselves. The photography that appears on Venn Trust school websites isn’t stock imagery. It’s real.
School film production -promotional films and curriculum content for Trust schools, including aerial drone footage that showcases school sites and surrounding communities from above.
Brand and logo design – visual identities for Trust schools and the Trust itself, ensuring consistency across the portfolio without flattening the individual character of each school.
Ongoing compliance monitoring – proactive checks across all Trust school websites whenever DfE statutory guidance changes, ensuring every school in the portfolio stays compliant between formal review cycles.
The Venn approach to digital
What the Venn Academy Trust partnership demonstrates – more clearly than almost any other relationship in the Digital Schools portfolio – is what happens when a trust leadership team genuinely understands the strategic value of digital communication.
Under Simon Witham’s leadership, Venn has consistently embraced new thinking – AI content tools, 360 virtual tours, pupil-led digital media, multilingual accessibility features — before those approaches became mainstream in the sector. That willingness to move first, to experiment thoughtfully, and to invest in quality rather than minimum viable compliance has produced a portfolio of school websites that are among the strongest in the Yorkshire education sector.
The trust in Digital Schools to manage that portfolio – to photograph the schools, film the stories, design the brands, and maintain the websites – has been sustained and consistent across nearly a decade. That continuity matters. It means Digital Schools knows the schools, knows the Trust, knows the communities. The work gets better over time because the relationship deepens over time.
A partnership built on shared belief
The Venn Academy Trust relationship is the clearest expression of what Digital Schools exists to do at scale. Not individual school websites produced in isolation, but a coherent, consistently excellent digital estate – built school by school, year by year, in genuine partnership with a trust leadership team that shares the belief that every school community deserves the best possible digital representation.
The partnership with Venn Academy Trust marked a significant new chapter for Digital Schools — expanding from individual school projects into long-term strategic work across multiple academies and specialist provisions.
Content. Creativity. Compliance. Across every school in the Trust portfolio. Every time.
That’s what the Digital Schools and Venn Academy Trust partnership has delivered for nearly a decade. And it’s just getting started.
Digital Schools has been the digital partner for Venn Academy Trust since 2016. digitalschools.org.uk
