My initial worry about Labour’s proposal to set up improvement teams under Regional Directors was that it risked stripping teacher and leader quality away from the chalkface. And, more worryingly, it seemed to lean into a view of school improvement rooted in the old “hero head” paradigm. This is at odds with a system that increasingly understands that improvement capacity exists organisationally.

But if we step back for a moment and reframe what is behind Labour’s proposal, it’s clear that it is grappling with an important question that does need addressing: how do we spread improvement expertise into the harder-to-reach pockets of the system?

More than half of children are educated in trusts, and as these trusts grow they will increasingly benefit from the additional school improvement capacity that growth brings. But a substantial number of schools are not in trusts, and government does have to consider how it will support children in these schools. 

Local authority school improvement

Local authority-maintained schools that are judged to be “inadequate” by Ofsted are currently sponsored into a trust. But what about schools judged as “requires improvement”, or even those that are judged “good” (which most schools are) but have improvement priorities nonetheless because, well, all schools want to continue to be better? 

If they are fortunate enough to be part of a local authority that still holds effective school improvement capacity they might benefit from that offer, but we know too many schools are not in this position. And the same gap stands for some single-academy trusts, too. 

So, if Labour’s plan is really about spreading expertise into these pockets of the system, it might be a welcome move - if they can think carefully about the delivery mechanism.

I hear relatively few people advocating for greater central control of education. Ironically, however, establishing regional improvement teams that would sit outside of schools as part of the Department for Education’s Regions Group is a step towards greater centralisation, not less. 

School improvement expertise resides in schools and trusts, not in the Civil Service, and there is no reason to extract it from where it is doing its work. The challenge for government is not to build school improvement monoliths but rather aqueducts of expertise between institutions so it can flow to otherwise isolated islands. 

This requires government to recalibrate incentives and resources in the system so that schools can more easily tap into the capacity and wisdom that exists. 

‘Limited’ support

It may be right that Regions Group is responsible for joining the dots, for example by commissioning school improvement support from an effective trust to support a local school, but this does not require DfE-run “super teacher hit squads”, as the Mirror called it. To be fair, this is not what Labour’s mission statement actually says. 

The briefing document makes clear that “these teams, coordinated by civil servants, will offer schools support, drawing on the expertise of teachers and leaders across the education system”.

We need to be clear that whatever the delivery mechanism, this sort of school improvement support is by its nature limited. There are no levers to make sure that suggested changes are actually adopted.

This is where trusts are different and why they perform such an important role in the system; the single governance structure means that necessary changes, such as changing the curriculum or new approaches to behaviour management, can be implemented rapidly and with fidelity, and with additional capacity provided.

It’s vital, therefore, that Labour continues to back the work of trusts in improving schools and that any new policies don’t denude this important facet of the system, one that has driven changes in areas with long-standing educational underperformance. 

But if Labour is inclined to explore how else this expertise and capacity can be leveraged to spread it to all corners of the system, without stripping away teachers from the chalkface, this could be a positive move and one that school trusts can play a fulsome part in.

I’ll close, though, with this: school improvement can’t go beyond the quality of staff in our schools. Which means that any plans, however well designed, will not succeed if recruitment and retention remain in crisis. 

Any government serious about school improvement knows that until this is tackled, everything else is just window dressing.

Steve Rollett is the deputy chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts