Whatever you may feel about it, teaching schools and multi-academy trusts have been cast as the driving force behind school improvement in England. Educational reform is regarded as a crucial deliverable by politicians of all parties, even most recently by those pathological party poopers, the SNP. Consequently, an array of non-educational organisations, businesses, charities and NGOs has steadily camped out in the financially fertile dependency between central government and schools. Navigating your way around, and negotiating with those organisations, has become one of the least understood challenges confronting people running teaching schools and multi-academy trusts today.

To take just one example: the recruitment and headhunting industry is very active in this field, but do those people really understand about education? Is it helpful, for example, that recruiters focus their efforts on identifying individuals with what they believe is a “track record in improving schools”, while having no educational interest or understanding of what that easily traded phrase implies and relies on? How valuable is it to take exactly the same techniques used to identify, interview and select accountants, technologists or sales staff and simply transpose them on to the schools market? How much do the recruiters currently carrying out that work actually know about schools or schooling, never mind the extraordinarily complex and contentious issues underpinning school improvement?

The Public Accounts Committee report on Ofsted in January 2015 noted that:

“Of the schools rated ‘inadequate’ in 2012-13, 36 per cent had previously been rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’... Of schools inspected by Ofsted in 2012-13, 48 per cent of those which had received some kind of formal intervention improved at their next inspection. The remainder stayed the same or deteriorated, with the apparent impact of different interventions varying significantly. Meanwhile, 59 per cent of schools that received no formal intervention also improved.”

Since that report, Ofsted has brought all its inspections in-house, recruited an entire corps of new inspectors and attempted to rationalise the entire inspection process. Yet recruitment agencies persist in focusing on individuals with a track record of, in effect, managing Ofsted, ignorant of how the PAC’s figures exposed the inherent instability and untrustworthiness of the school inspection process. No wonder so many academies and trusts find themselves in something of a cycle when being asked to deliver sustainable change.

There is a world of difference between having the kind of Ofsted process proficiency to put the basic systems and tools in place in a failing or weak school that will render it effective for a period, and possessing the skill and ability to change an effective school into one that can justifiably describe itself as world-class for many years to come. Some of these organisations are even hurriedly putting together training courses for potential MAT chief executives, yet how knowledgeable are they about high-quality schooling, and from which parallel universe this time will they find models to transpose? And recruitment is just one example.

‘Trust leaders are on thin ice’

What alerted me to this situation and prompted me to write this piece was recently coming across another article in the national educational press in which the CEO of a large and widely criticised MAT complained that his trust had not been given sufficient advice and guidance by government on how to grow effectively. Reading that article, I was part amused, part despairing, to see him refer to the specific concept and even parrot the precise phrase I coined over five years ago, when advising a different trust on how to expand without compromising its ability to deliver school improvement.

Any teaching school or trust cast in this difficult role will find itself trying to manage the tension between two key forces, people and geography. No amount of hi-tech communications or marketing practice adopted from business, glitzy portals or rebranding, can replace the person-to-person, professional-to-professional engagement needed to transfer effective experience and expertise in school settings.

In conversation with a successful and astute head of department of an inner-city academy not long ago, I wasn’t at all surprised to find him repudiating any kind of relationship with the trust his school is run by. In his mind, he was employed at this one school and his employer was the school. Yet the trust that legally employs him and runs his school is one of the most successful and widely praised Mats in the country, confident of its branding and its school improvement processes. And why this didn’t surprise me but would appall the people leading the trust concerned is a question relating to that frequently undersold little word, experience.

The kind of knowledge-transfer work government wants to see in schools inevitably takes time and travel. Large-scale businesses worldwide that have invested impressive sums in trying to institute strong knowledge-management cultures have found that overreliance on technology is common but never works and in the end, it’s all about connecting the people who know with the people who need to know.

Multi-academy trust CEOs are not tip-toeing on ice quite as thin as football club managers. However, unless they, and indeed teaching school staff, become better and wiser at understanding and articulating the nature of the challenges they face, in their dealings with the plethora of businesses, charities and NGOs staking a claim on their territory, it won’t be long before it’s squealing and cracking beneath their feet.

Joe Nutt is an educational consultant and author

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