The government is working on plans to set out the academy trust growth that it wants to see across the whole country, a senior civil servant has said.
Earlier this year, the Department for Education published a series of trust development statements for the country’s 55 Education Investment Areas, setting out where it wanted to see multi-academy trusts merge, grow or form.
This approach is now set to be rolled out to all areas of the country, according to the department’s regional director for the South West, Hannah Woodhouse.
The DfE published statements earlier this year setting out what academy growth the department was seeking in each of the 55 authorities designated as EIAs because of underperformance.
It then said in guidance on how it would commission trusts to take on schools that it would “assess the impact of these statements before rolling out, over time, to other areas outside of EIAs”.
On Thursday, Ms Woodhouse told the Confederation of School Trusts conference that this work was now ongoing.
She added that the department was looking at grouping some authority areas together, particularly in London, where she said it might not make sense to have individual plans for each borough.
She added: “What we are doing now is rolling that out across all 150 local authorities so that we do try to have these principles in every area.
“It might be in some areas we have trust development statements across a number of local authorities - particularly in parts of London [where] it might not make sense to do 150.”
Tensions around mergers
She added that, in some areas, “it might make sense to do [plans] subregionally” and that discussions were being had “as we roll out this approach”.
The trust development statements, published in March, revealed that the DfE is focused on merging and consolidating trusts.
Ms Woodhouse highlighted the tensions that can exist around this during her CST talk with an example from Swindon, which she said has 88 state schools and 28 academy trusts.
She said that the DfE believed there was sufficient MAT capacity in the area but that some of the remaining 21 maintained schools wanted to start their own MATs rather than join existing ones, which “they didn’t like”.
‘That is not a trust’
However, confusion about what constitutes an academy trust also emerged during her presentation at the conference.
While talking about how trusts operate, Ms Woodhouse gave one example of a MAT with 13 schools that operated with separate systems.
She added: “Every school held their own budget, every school had different phonics systems, different data systems, different awarding bodies and it’s a bit like…that is not a trust, that is not what we are trying to do”.
But she was challenged by a MAT representative in the audience who said that his trust’s vision was to empower school leaders to make decisions for the needs of their schools. He said it was the fear of losing this autonomy that was holding some schools back from joining MATs.
