A major new inquiry looking into the impact of multi-academy trusts on school improvement has been launched today by the main sector body.
The Confederation of School Trusts-led inquiry will be carried out by a panel involving a range of MATs of “different sizes, geographies and operating models”, as well as experts in education evidence from other organisations.
CST’s deputy chief executive Steve Rollett will chair the inquiry and said it would aim to identify which approaches being used by MATs worked and why.
The inquiry aims to answer four questions:
- How can trusts gain assurance about the quality of their work and capacity to improve?
- What are the common goals of trust improvement?
- Which practices do trusts mobilise towards these goals?
- What are the implications of the above for building sector capacity and capability?
Mr Rollett said: “We believe developing the professional capacity to improve trusts and schools is the responsibility of the sector itself, which should be supported but not prescribed by the government.
“School trusts have already made a massive difference to the lives of thousands of children and there is some great work going on across the sector to do even more. This inquiry is about understanding what works and why, and how that can be applied so that everyone benefits.
“If all children did as well as pupils in the best school trusts, key stage 2 performance would be 14 percentage points higher nationally. The inquiry will seek to better understand how we can work together to make that ambition a reality.”
“We don’t believe there is a single model of how to run or improve trusts, but we do think there is more we can collectively know about trust improvement, with insight into concrete practices and approaches.”
He added the inquiry “will not be the last word on how trusts improve” but he hopes it will “make a significant contribution and be of benefit to the sector”.
Inquiry panel participants include: Professor Becky Francis, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation; Rob Coe, director of research and development at Evidence Based Education; and Tom Rees, executive director of the Ambition Institute.
Panel members from school trusts include: Rob Tarn, the chief executive of Northern Education Trust; Warren Carratt, chief executive of Nexus Multi-Academy Trust; and Jennese Alozie, chief executive of the University of Chichester Academies Trust.
The panel will take evidence over the next year and then produce improvement tools and a written report.
Identifying practices that ‘make the most difference’
CST chief executive Leora Cruddas made the case for the organisation to be leading work on school improvement research when she spoke at the Association of School and College Leaders’ conference just over a week ago.
She said: “The clarity of the trust system seems to me part of the reason why it is a more effective system than a maintained system can be.
“I think we need to identify those practices where there is a higher degree of certainty that they contribute to organisational strength, resilience and improvement.
“Right now that is really hard to do. And it is hard to do for some understandable reasons.
“The trust sector is actually not that old. In 2010, there were 203 trusts; there are now over 2,000. In public policy terms that is a massive journey and we have not codified the evidence.
“But it behoves us to do so. We can’t just carry on in an evidence-free zone; we do need increasingly to codify what practices make the most difference in relation to quality and, as I have said, they ultimately improve outcomes for children.
“We also need to be commissioning research. And I think that there’s a real paucity of research in relation to trusts and the work they are doing that makes a difference in the lives of children.”
Ms Cruddas told ASCL that the trust sector needed to be curious about what practices are driving the best outcomes.
She said this would allow England to have the best school system in the world “at getting better”.
The move to set up the inquiry comes after the government faced criticism from researchers last year over its Schools White Paper aim to ensure all schools become part of MATs of 10 schools or more by 2030.
The paper said that trusts “typically start to develop central capacity when they have more than 10 schools” and that this scale allows them to “be more financially stable, maximise the impact of a well-supported workforce and drive school improvement”.
But a senior researcher at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) has said there is “no conclusive evidence” that MATs are more effective than maintained schools or single school trusts at managing their finances and that the DfE’s claims were “difficult to evidence”.
