Developing a sustainable model for growth is a key strategic priority for many multi-academy trusts. But how can trusts fulfil their growth ambitions while keeping schools functioning well and maintaining strong oversight?

It’s a journey that Cabot Learning Federation (CLF) knows well. Established 15 years ago with three secondary schools - one in South Gloucestershire and two in Bristol - the trust is now one of the largest and most mature in the South West, with 35 schools providing for 17,500 pupils, spanning mainstream primary and secondary schools, an all-through school, a studio school, special schools and alternative provision.

Although the trust wasn’t formally established until 2009, the origins of CLF date back to 2007 when John Cabot Academy and Bristol Brunel Academy came together to collaborate as a soft federation.

Two years later a third school, Bristol Metropolitan Academy, joined the federation and CLF was officially established as a MAT under the leadership of executive principal Sir David Carter, who went on to become the national schools commissioner.

The power of collaboration in MATs

From the outset, the idea that collaboration can accelerate school improvement was baked into the culture of the trust, explains Steve Taylor, who has served as chief executive officer at CLF since 2015, having previously been principal of Bristol Metropolitan Academy and executive principal of CLF.

“We latched on to the notion of collaboration as the opportunity to realise more value than you can realise as a school operating on its own,” he says.

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“The key was to figure out…what mechanisms we might use to bring people together in a place where they might collaborate, and then develop an increasingly sophisticated model of collaboration to deliver school improvement at scale.”

Giving an example of this in action, Taylor explains that when the trust was formed, one of the original three schools, John Cabot Academy, had higher academic attainment than the other two.

However, some of the strengths of those two other schools complemented those of John Cabot - for example, aspects of inclusive provision were well developed at Bristol Brunel while Bristol Metropolitan had a particular strength in performing arts.

“At the very start it was very much about sharing stories of each other’s strong practice but with no real sense, necessarily, of how to make that stuff stick or base it on evidence,” says Taylor.

The need to evolve

In the early days the basic structure of the trust involved one executive principal, three school headteachers and a skeleton administrative staff of four people working out of an old caretaker’s bungalow.

Soon, though, that set-up would have to evolve.

In 2011 two more secondary schools joined the trust: King’s Oak Academy, in South Gloucestershire, and Hans Price Academy, in Weston-super-Mare. A year later four primary schools and another secondary were added, which meant CLF doubled in size over the course of a summer.

It was at this point, Taylor says, that CLF started to hit the limits of what it could achieve within its existing structure and relationships.

“The capacity for understanding primary school improvement was in those [new] schools. It wasn’t something that we already had,” he says. “At that stage we didn’t have existing expertise in the central team from early years through to key stage 1 and key stage 2.”

It became a trust priority to ensure that the primaries were able to learn from and complement one another, while realising the operational benefits of being part of a trust.

Given the geographical spread of schools within CLF, a decision was made to form two clusters based on school proximity: one in East Central Bristol and one in South Gloucestershire.

These clusters both contained a mix of primary and secondary schools and had the same collaborative mindset of finding efficiencies, optimising leadership capacity and identifying improvement priorities.

Creating clusters

To support the development of these clusters, the central CLF team expanded to consist of a CEO (the role Taylor took on in 2015), a chief operating officer and a human resources director, along with functional teams covering areas such as finance, HR and communications. The central team also included phase-specific executive education capacity.

The aim was not to create two distinct clusters served by different individuals but for the two clusters to be supported equally from the central team. There was, however, an awareness that contextual differences between the clusters might mean that different responses were needed for certain challenges.

Meanwhile, each academy was led by a principal and a senior leadership team responsible for implementing the annual improvement plan and organising teaching and learning and student support frameworks.

While the clusters had been created based on proximity, one school, Hans Price Academy, was still geographically separate, being located in North Somerset.

That changed in 2016 with the addition of a primary school in Weston-super-Mare, Haywood Village Academy. This addition allowed the trust to create a North Somerset cluster.

By 2019 the three clusters had evolved into the model that exists today, with the executive leadership team boosted by additional executive principal capacity with primary expertise to work across the clusters.

‘Queens on the chess board’

There was further growth in the summer of 2023 when another 13 schools joined the trust: two more clusters were created, taking the total to five.

This necessitated an expansion of both local and central teams. “In the last eight months alone we’ve grown by 1,000 staff, including more capacity for professional services roles,” says Taylor.

The total number of employees at CLF now stands at more than 3,000, with 130 in its central office.

Providing equal support for all of the clusters from the central team is vital to ensure that collaboration remains at the heart of the trust, says Taylor.

“A lot of people would feel well served if you just said they were each responsible for a cluster - but that would restrict their opportunity to secure high-quality provision across the phases, too,” he says.

CLF’s three education directors, who are part of the 10-strong CLF executive team, work across geographical areas and phases rather than each being assigned to a specific cluster.

“They are like the queen on the chess board - they can move in all directions, and they need to demonstrate an ability to do that to be an education director in our trust,” says Taylor.

The school may know best

This open approach where ideas can move between schools also means recognising that there are times when schools themselves can tackle issues alone, rather than always having to defer to the central team. One such issue is attendance.

“You can have a central attendance lead to set strategy, but they don’t know the families, they can’t get out into the community and engage. So that needs to be local,” says Taylor

“The key relationship is between family and school - let’s not confuse that. I’m not the head of that school, the head is the person you see on the gate.”

Similarly, curriculum development is an area where the relationship between central and local teams is used to optimise the overall process, but schools still retain autonomy.

For example, while subject experts from across the trust curate the curriculum together, there is no single trust-wide curriculum. Each school has its own curriculum, taking into account its individual context, which is refined by its own senior and middle leadership teams.

“What the trust does is create all of the mechanisms around the curation of that process, establishing a consistent framework,” says Taylor. “We don’t employ a curriculum specialist to sit in a room and write it. We create space for people from across the trust to come together.”

Strength at the centre

However, the trust runs key functions from the centre where it is logical: it has one code of conduct for staff, a single HR policy, and it manages procurement, GDPR and capital investment centrally.

“We manage that centrally because we need a high degree of consistency,” says Taylor. “Proximity to the user is not key; it’s the centre where the expertise sits.”

While this model is something that has grown organically over the past 15 years, Taylor says it is constantly being stress-tested to ensure that it remains as effective as possible.

“The headteachers and the executive team come together every fortnight for three hours - and sometimes for a whole day - because that personal connection is where you build culture, and that allows people to make good decisions locally,” he says.

During these meetings smaller groups - known as a “trading floor” - discuss specific issues, breaking out into groups according to phases. This helps to move ideas between clusters.

This model has worked well for CLF but Taylor does not believe that it can simply be lifted and shifted for use by other trusts. All trusts are different, he says, and must do what is best for their “vision, context, and school improvement priorities”.

“It would be a bold statement for anyone to claim they have ‘the answer’ to realising the benefits of increased scale while also remaining alert to geographical differences,” he adds.

Whatever model a trust chooses, Taylor says, it is vital that they constantly evaluate it and refine it to ensure that it remains the best fit for their context.

“In a meeting recently I asked all the senior leaders, assistant principals, vice-principals and senior operational managers: ‘What’s the magic in your cluster and what can we do to build even more collaborative relationships?’ We’re still trying to work out how to do that better.”

Nick Hughes is a freelance journalist

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