‘Academy trusts will need to get a grip on alignment’

Sir David Carter was a multi-academy trust CEO and later the national schools commissioner, the person in charge of running the MAT system for the government. He writes: 

The publication of the Schools White Paper earlier this year was not the first time we have seen the government of the day set out the ambition that all schools should become academies within a strong multi-academy trust.

It was a policy first outlined in 2016 by Nicky Morgan, when she was education secretary. It failed largely, in my view, because it talked more about a structural solution being the answer to weak performance as opposed to focusing on the improvement benefits from being part of a formal collaboration in a trust that is well-led, well-governed and focused on improving classroom standards.

Whether the intention as outlined in the recent White Paper will be any more successful remains to be seen, but should a new government decide to tackle our overly complex school system and make the multi-academy trust the home for every school, there are at least three priorities that need to be addressed.

First, there is great value in developing trusts that educate children from 4 to 19. Primary schools, as a percentage of the sector, have been less inclined to join trusts than their secondary partners. Those that have been convinced have often joined trusts led by secondary specialists.

The priority here is to see the learning journey of children and the role of the teacher as being focused on the educational experience from Reception to post-16, where every teacher plays a unique role in this continuous journey. Where trusts can make a promise to their community that a child can be educated up to the age of 18 in an organisation led and governed by the same people, it becomes possible to present a powerful argument for continuity and progression.

‘Schools will want to see evidence of support to help them improve’

Next, there needs to be a less formulaic argument about the size of trusts. We need to shift the focus away from the number of schools in a trust to the number of  pupils educated within it.

A trust, in my view, as a minimum requirement to fulfil the expectations of its funding agreement, needs an executive leader who is the accounting officer, a qualified finance director and a specialist human resources lead. The operating model needs to fund and support these posts.

Schools will want to see evidence of greater support and capacity to help them improve standards more quickly than they would as a standalone school, and therefore the size debate has to factor in the cost of building capacity to ensure the quality of the education that children are receiving. Where trusts are seeking further growth beyond their current locality, building a hub network will be vital so that the schools furthest away from the “mothership” do not feel isolated or like the poor relations. Being an outlier in a regional or national trust is not a great place to be.

My final thought is that, sooner rather than later, trusts will need to grip the alignment debate. It should become a priority for successful practice in the trust and wider system to become adopted beyond the classrooms in which it was conceived. 

This presents a direct challenge to the autonomy debate but  it needs to happen.

Children have little or no agency in the decision about who teaches them, the curriculum they are taught or what happens if their experience is not as good as that of their peers in other trust schools.

Aligning the core principles that sharpen practice, avoid duplication of effort and provide true meaning for “sharing practice” beyond the narrative of “what we did” to “how we did it” is both the challenge and the opportunity for the system.

‘Financial resilience through economies of scale is crucial’ 

Leora Cruddas, chief executive at the Confederation of School Trusts, the largest membership body for multi-academy trusts, writes:  

Let’s begin with what a school trust actually is: a group of schools working in deep and purposeful collaboration as one entity to improve and maintain high educational standards across the trust.

For me, the question of whether this government (or any future government) will achieve a fully trust-led system is the wrong one. Education leaders should not automatically do something because this or that government tells us to do something. The decision to join or form a group should be made because there are powerful educational reasons to do so.

In his excellent book, Imperfect Leadership, Steve Munby suggests that the wrong question for governors to ask themselves is: “Should my school become an academy?”

He poses a much better question: “How can my school best collaborate with others in a strong and resilient structure to ensure that each child is a powerful learner and that adults have the opportunities to learn and develop as teachers and leaders?”

This exemplifies the power of a group of schools working in deep and purposeful collaboration to improve education and children’s life chances.

The question of trust size may be a bit of a red herring. It is for trustees to make sure that they are educationally and financially sustainable but, with around eight out of 10 trusts still relatively small (five schools or fewer), it is likely that we will see some consolidation in the sector. 

This is because it is important to build resilience in our school system: 

• Structural resilience through groups of schools working together in a single legal entity.
• Educational resilience through the deeper collaboration and stronger conditions and culture of improvement. 
• Financial resilience through greater economies of scale - the ability to withstand further perturbations.
• Workforce resilience - as the employer able to (potentially) create stronger pathways or entry points to the profession, and stronger cultures of early career development and evidence-informed professional development across the group and, indeed, the local economy. 

The sector must work hard to ensure this happens. We must build strong and resilient educational institutions that have the power to weather future turbulence and make sure that each child is a powerful learner, and that adults have the opportunities to learn and develop as teachers and leaders. 

‘Whoever is in power politically, we will be in a MAT-led system soon enough’

Sam Freedman is a senior fellow of the Institute for Government, a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education and a Tes columnist. He writes:  

The working assumption now has to be that Labour will form the next government, probably in 2024. If this happens, it will not try to turn the clock back to 2010: MATs are here to stay in some form but there may be a review of how they work with local government and how they are regulated.

You can imagine more oversight power being given to local authorities or regional mayors, for instance, and expectations that they should follow the national curriculum and hire only qualified teachers.

Labour would also be unlikely to pursue an all-MAT policy with as much vigour as the current government but, nevertheless, the system will continue to shift inexorably towards all schools being in trusts and, at some point, local authorities will cease to be viable maintainers of schools. 

This is already happening with secondaries in parts of the country and will likely eventually happen with primaries, too, although it could take a long time if not enforced.

Likewise, the size of the average trust will continue to creep up with single-academy trusts becoming even more of a rarity. We still don’t really know what the best size and set-up is for a MAT but there are clear financial benefits to scale. Quite large MATs seem to do better when managed as a set of regional hubs but, within that, the level of central control varies widely with no dominant or clearly preferable approach.

My guess is the average size of a MAT will end up at about 30 schools and eventually there will be about 750 trusts around the country. 

Over time, you’d expect to see a level of homogeneity around models as leaders work across multiple MATs and share best practice, but I’d be surprised if there was a strong push for standardisation from government.

There may, over time, be more regulatory requirements, particularly around education and working with the wider community. Finance and governance are already highly regulated. But the current air of uncertainty will continue for some time to come. 

‘We may get a trust-led system out of necessity, not compulsion’ 

Laura McInerney, co-founder of Teacher Tapp, writes:

The current belief is that the government still wants all schools to become academies. In reality, there’s almost no money, no people and no political will to make this happen.

Even if every headteacher voluntarily agreed to become an academy tomorrow, the legal fees would blow a hole in budgets. Schools can barely afford to cover staff wages, let alone lawyers. 

Meanwhile, local authorities and the Department for Education are both scrambling to find savings. Civil servants are also in short supply. Many were moved out to support Brexit or the pandemic, and further headcount reductions are required. So even if the money could be found, there aren’t enough people to administer the changes or oversee the schools.

And, given the global economic situation, academisation is somewhat down the bottom of most MPs’ priority lists.

Labour is also avoiding the issue. If it proposes anything, it’ll probably be a rehash of regional commissioners rather than pushing for more academies. After all, it will have the same money issues if it is elected to government.

All that said, just because schools won’t be forced to become academies, it doesn’t mean some won’t choose to do so. Dire finances may mean it’s the only way for some schools to survive.

‘We don’t know what the best size and set-up is for a MAT’

In the coming years, pupil numbers will shrink owing to plummeting birth rates. Primaries at risk of becoming so small that they are economically unviable will need to convince more parents to select them as a first choice. If there’s a well-liked secondary academy nearby, it may be in a primary school’s interests to join the trust so it can be named as the feeder school, thereby helping to keep its numbers healthy. (Note: trusts don’t have an automatic right to name schools within their trust as a feeder, but the schools adjudicator has upheld decisions to do so on the basis that trusts are trying to provide an  “all-through” education, especially where curriculum is linked.) 

Primaries may also see benefits in joining a trust so that they can share specialist staff - for example, in music and modern languages - and for the economic efficiency of centralised office staff, such as business and IT managers.

What any new multi-academy trusts ought to look like varies depending on the whims of different ministers. Some like geographical coherence; others want trusts to have at least 10 schools; some don’t seem bothered either way. Frankly, the only real trend is that none of these ministers lasts long enough for their opinion to matter.

The reality of the multi-academy trust system is that it’s being shaped on the ground by school leaders, who are choosing how best to serve their communities, given available resources, and the school commissioner teams, who broker and sign off on new academies.

‘Questions over geography and size still remain’

Stephen Morales, chief executive of the Institute of School Business Leadership, writes: 

Even with significant support from the sector, the 2030 target for full academisation was a bold ambition. With the disquiet and political uncertainty that’s now in play, this target looks even more vulnerable.

Labour has recently suggested that it would not put into reverse the academy programme, claiming some trusts are working really well. However, it is far more comfortable with a hybrid system for the foreseeable future.

Winning the hearts and minds of maintained primary school leaders and their governing bodies is one of ministers’ biggest challenges. The argument and evidence that joining a MAT will improve pupil outcomes need to be more robust and compelling. Without the legal levers (not yet in place), achieving a fully academised system that includes the 60 per cent plus of primaries yet to convert will be a huge task.

In terms of trust size, the White Paper suggests 10 schools or 7,000 pupils is the sweet spot; however, the data shows that the majority of trusts are still clustered around a smaller number of four to seven. The notion of 10 schools being the sweet spot is not an exact science, but the arguments for greater economies of scale and the benefits of aggregation start to look more compelling for trusts of more than five schools and 4,000 to 5,000 pupils.

In terms of geography, the regional schools commissioners (now regional directors) were uncomfortable with MATs expanding their operations to beyond a one-hour drive, claiming that effective oversight was not possible with geographic spans beyond this.

‘Small schools don’t want to be gobbled up by a huge organisation’

Certainly, the hub-and-spoke approach (ie, clusters of schools around a central leadership system within the wider MAT) has been employed in some trusts and is a way of managing a wide geographic spread. As trusts grow, this may be more commonplace even inside the one-hour geographical range and may be a way of managing many schools by grouping them into clusters.

What sort of standardisation will we get across these MATs? Standardisation, while easier to govern and potentially easier to measure, runs the risk of not sufficiently considering context. And while a more standardised approach to education might be appealing to regulators (the Education and Skills Funding Agency, Ofsted, regional directors, etc), a franchise approach to running our school system is in danger of ignoring the very nuanced needs of our children. 

There could, however, be some merit in a more streamlined and clearer regulatory framework where the compliance expectations for trusts are better understood by all stakeholders.

‘Many schools still need convincing that a MAT-led system is a good idea’

Emma Knights is chief executive of the National Governance Association. She writes: 

As it stands, a full MAT system will only be achieved if “good” and “outstanding” maintained schools and single-academy trusts opt in willingly. Many chairs have told the National Governance Association that their boards are not prioritising this for a host of reasons. Primarily, they are not convinced that structural change will benefit their pupils and they have many more crucial things to be getting on with.

This, of course, could change over the next few years, but the political context of the past month has already altered the tone and urgency of conversations. The number of boards waiting and seeing what a general election might bring is increasing.

Some smaller schools would be more likely to take the step if there was transparency about the end state of the fully MAT system in terms of the size of trusts and geographical spread; they do not want to be gobbled up by a huge organisation they fear has no local knowledge and connections. The DfE needs to put to rest the suspicion that it would suit it if it only had to regulate 200 huge trusts, and states that it positively supports a range of local trusts.

Unless it is clear about that and, even better, it introduces a cap on the maximum size of trusts, far fewer primary schools will begin the process in case the trust it opts for grows like Topsy and is unrecognisable by 2030.

Currently, however, the majority of MATs are still small and need to grow to achieve the DfE’s suggested 10 schools or 7,500 pupils. Our annual data shows that many with only two to five schools did want to grow but either didn’t find local schools to join them or the DfE decided that bigger trusts were stronger and pushed schools their way instead. There will need to be a cultural shift in commissioning, with the DfE positively supporting and developing smaller trusts rather than taking the easier route of relying on those they consider tried and tested. 

Slightly counter to the impression created by the furore surrounding the badly drafted Schools Bill, almost all trustees accept the need for accountability and regulation of what is an exceptionally important public service funded by taxpayers’ money. That does not mean, though, that every trust will be identical - far from it. Trustees and their local governors also know that place is important and that trusts need to connect locally, collaborating with other schools, services and their communities. A trust that clearly demonstrates this in practice is far more likely to encourage other schools and single-academy trusts to join it.