Helping St Thomas Aquinas educate the next generation about sustainability

Neil Lockyer, CEO

St Thomas Aquinas Catholic Multi Academy Trust wants to attract and retain the best staff and set a good example for children and young people about sustainability. They've made great progress on this by getting more of their staff driving electric.

St Thomas Aquinas is a Multi-Academy Trust of 21 Catholic schools across Leicester and Leicestershire. They have 1,200 staff supporting over 8,500 young people aged 4 - 18 across the Trust.

There are big staff shortages across education at the moment, and St Thomas Aquinas wanted to provide an added benefit to attract great talent into the Trust.

Neil Lockyer, CEO, said: “It’s no secret that there’s a recruitment issue in education at the moment.

The question that we're often faced with is ‘what can we offer our staff by way of appreciation for the incredibly hard work they do? And what can we offer potential new staff when they're considering applying for a job in the trust?’

So in addition to the excellent continuing professional development and career opportunities we offer, we've introduced Employee Assistance Schemes, cashback benefits for medical and other benefits. The electric car salary sacrifice scheme really stood out to us as a potential perk for staff.”

Our salary sacrifice scheme is a brilliant benefit to support the recruitment and retention of staff, and it’s totally free for employers to join.

There’s a big focus on making sure that staff live and breathe the values of the Trust to set a good example for the next generation of children in its care.

“The thing I really liked about the electric car salary sacrifice scheme was that it sat so comfortably with the values of the Trust on the environmental side of things. We're doing a huge amount of work across all of the schools on what we called our ‘Eco Road Map’, and we've got all the young people really heavily invested in local action and project work and raising awareness.

It just seemed to be an obvious thing to be offering our staff much more sustainable motoring through the electric car salary sacrifice scheme. Having electric cars in the car park gives a clear statement to the young people about sustainability and the choices they might make in the future. It backs up what we’re talking about in lessons and assemblies.”

There’s a lot of evidence that shows the damaging impact of emissions around schools in urban areas related to school drop-offs and pickups. St Thomas Aquinas is making a statement to parents and children by increasing the number of staff driving electric cars through the salary sacrifice scheme.

“Salary sacrifice is a great way to evidence how we’re reducing our emissions. Children will often have conversations with teachers when they see new EVs popping up in the car park, so it’s part of that subtle behaviour change we want to encourage.

They’re an incredibly active generation when it comes to tackling the climate crisis, so we're pushing at an open door. We're not having to persuade them that something needs to be done. They’re going home and persuading Mum and Dad, and Granny and Grandad that something needs to be done.”

Joining our salary sacrifice scheme is a great way to reduce your company’s carbon footprint. Each employee that takes an electric car through our scheme can save upwards of 1.5 tonnes of CO2 a year. Find out how salary sacrifice can work for your team.