What an inspired idea the “hub” model is for government. You can sound like you’re doing something, each one can be quite impressive and yet you don’t have to invest enough money to pay for services everywhere.

Before music hubs and maths hubs, I’m sure the only time I ever heard about hubs was in the context of transport. Transport hubs sort of make sense. My school, in a remote town at the end of long road to…nowhere else but the town, doesn’t make a sensible choice for investing in transport facilities. It is a sensible idea to have public transport from that small town go into a larger centre, from where there should be other spokes out to other destinations.

The model doesn’t work the same for the new breed of hubs that are meant to serve schools. For a start, the spokes don’t really exist. Rather than being a system of well-oiled cogs, it feels rather more like a pinball machine, where it’s much more a matter of luck which hub you might bump into.

Nevertheless, hubs are clearly the way forward. Last week, the Department for Education announced £26 million of funding to provide 35 English hubs, to mirror their maths equivalents. There’s presumably no presumption that the two will be in the same places, but I daresay there will be some overlap. It’s hard to know how best these might be organised.

Thirty-five is not that many. There are about 150 local authorities in England and it doesn’t seem that long ago that the majority of these had professional hubs that offered support for several subjects. In many counties there would be more than one hub, in an attempt to make them accessible to a wider proportion of schools. They’d often be underpinned by subject experts who were employed by the local authority offering support to schools in their areas of expertise, sharing good practice.

That’s not the model now. Instead of these locally accessible groups of experts, centrally funded and available to support schools, we now have the offer of 35 remote establishments who will be given the role of trying to spread practice across a huge area.

My school is about a 20-minute drive from the nearest town - where there used to be a teachers’ professional centre. The county’s maths hub is now more than an hour away - and this is not a remote part of the world.

There’s no doubt that many of the maths hubs are doing great work. Some extend their reach far beyond the theoretical community they serve and are having a positive impact on schools. I’m sure the same will be true of the new English hubs. But while £26 million sounds like a lot of money, when you think of it as £3 per pupil, it’s clear that English hubs won’t fix the system overnight.

It’s not to say that hubs won’t be a useful addition to the education landscape. There’s no harm in having schools who are reaching out and supporting others.

There’s plenty to be gained from sharing good practice as widely as possible. However, there’s also a risk. If you have to be an “outstanding” school with excellent results, do we end up directing more resources at establishments who are already the most successful?

What might £26 million of targeted spending achieve if it were invested in supporting and resourcing those schools who face the most difficult challenges? Or better still, what might we be able to achieve with fairer funding for every school?

Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets as @MichaelT1979