As thousands of maintained schools, single-academy trusts (SATs) and multi-academy trusts (MATs) ponder the drive towards all schools being within a “strong trust”, the big question for many governing boards and leaders continues to be one of autonomy.

How far will the trust dictate what happens in an individual school?

In the earlier years of academies, there was unhelpful language around “earned autonomy”. The message was that the better you get, the less interference you will get from the central trust team. 

This idea completely undermines the academy movement by implying that trusts are only useful for failing schools during the turnaround phase, and become less useful to successful schools. This is utter tosh - and yet, that idea of earned autonomy persists.

What should autonomy look like?

The founding generation of CEOs who built the sector talked a lot about autonomy. 

As an example, Sir Michael Wilkins at Outwood Grange was the architect of the 80/20 model, where 80 per cent of what a school in the trust did was set centrally. The idea was that the centralised aspects allowed economies of scale, blueprinted a successful model into sponsored schools and ensured a rapid turnaround. 

There are, of course, benefits to this model. But is this what autonomy should look like for individual schools in a MAT system?

I am interested in how we find the balance between standardisation and alignment. It’s something I have been looking at as part of research I am conducting through my studies at the University of Cambridge.

As part of these studies, I encountered the leadership paradox described by Waldman & Bowen (2016), which applies to the crux of the trust autonomy issue in two ways. 

A tricky balance

First is the paradox of agency vs communion. A school headteacher has individual power, and yet they are part of a wider power structure - ie, that of the MAT. As such, as a CEO, you need to maintain control while simultaneously letting it go. That’s difficult to achieve.

Get it wrong and you let the “anyways” sneak into headship thinking - and then things begin to unravel.

For example: whose staff are they, anyway, if the trust is the single employer, yet I am the headteacher? Whose budget is it, anyway, if the CEO is accounting officer yet headteachers are accountable for budgets? Whose building is it, anyway, if the trust has the lease but I want to make changes as a headteacher or local governing body? Who is responsible for governance, anyway, if we have a trust board and a local governing body? This will all sound familiar to many.

The second paradox is recognisable to all, irrespective of whether you are a part of a trust or not. This is the paradox of present vs future. Stressing both continuity and change can be a challenge in any school context.

In high-performing trusts, there is the right balance between big-picture, future challenges - such as social mobility, supporting careers, and tackling mental health and disability - and ensuring existing pupils have good schools to attend and achieve good outcomes.

In weaker trusts, however, current school results can be prioritised above the greater good and future benefits of inclusion. Offrolling and gaming become common behaviours. Autonomy goes missing.

Finding the sweet spot

Leaders need to find the sweet spot at which the balance of power across a trust is most productive. Waldman & Bowen’s research warns us that we should not fixate on one side over the other in the above examples, and that switching from side to side causes confusion, as does getting stuck in the middle. 

Instead, we must recognise the spectrum of possibilities and find the point of least compromise for both sides.

What does that look like? Further research by Zhang et al (2015) helps here. This research advocates success through finding the “right” combination of self and others, distance and closeness, uniformity and individualisation, control and autonomy, and having requirements and flexibility. The emphasis here is “and” - “or” is nowhere to be seen.

We need to find what “right” looks like, of course. It may be that it differs in different contexts. But find it we must, as it is key to being able to dispel the notion that autonomy is lost if a school joins a trust.

A final thought on this: John West-Burnham, professor of educational leadership at St. Mary’s University College, once described trusts to me using the “porcupine principle”.

If porcupines hibernate at too far a distance from each other, they perish in the cold; if they are too close, their spikes kill each other as they unfurl in the spring. Finding that sweet spot of synergy means they all thrive.

Tom Campbell is the interim CEO of E-ACT