As I was reading Teacher Tapp's latest fantastic insight piece on whether teachers have a preference for whether they work in a LA or Trust school, I couldn't help but think of the famous line from The Dark Knight. Harvey Dent, Gotham's great hope of a district attorney foreshadows his descent into villainy saying, "You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain." I can't think of a better way to summarise the Multi-Academy Trust sector.
Presented with a variety of options, Teacher Tapp found that "In every scenario, teachers preferred the LA school, but the strength of feeling varied."
The preference for working in a Trust school ranged from 3-16% against an LA school preference of 51-87%. That's a shockingly big difference. If that were two businesses asking customers which they prefer, the Trust business would be bust. You can't survive on such poor sentiment, and while education isn't a commercial endeavour, it shouldn't be ignored that something has gone seriously wrong with the MAT project.
The Grand Wizard's Curtain: LA Education Teams
I've always been a big proponent of Multi-Academy Trusts because they offer free choice to the sector, and free choice is badly needed to improve education at a national level.
It's easy to long for the old days, when everything was local authority (LA) run, but I've seen in-depth just how poorly run many LA education teams are, and how much they stifle innovation. I started my career as a peripatetic music teacher which meant I worked more closely with the LA. Later I joined Apple Education where I led iPad deployments into schools across Northern England. This is 15+ years ago and I saw huge waste and questionable decision making - LAs buying equipment / services at preferential rates before charging schools big markups. Buying equipment that was never delivered to schools. At Apple we had a VIP account, an LA in the East of the country who would buy 300-500 iPads each year to meet budget end (£100,000+ deals). When I visited site the following year, those iPads where stacked high and unopened at the central office having never been sent to schools. This funding came from school education budgets.
I later saw issues at larger scale at Arbor. SIMS had built a near monopoly with 83% market share while Arbor was just a feisty upstart with 300 schools. While SIMS is painted as a bad guy in the market, the role of many LAs as their enabler is largely undocumented. SIMS was very lucrative to LAs because not only could they charge a markup on the license fee to each school, but LAs also funded IT, support, and data teams to manage SIMS deployments, all of which was recharged to schools. In my experience, few schools understood that tens of thousands of pounds was held back each year from their education budget to fund these services.
The argument was that there was no alternative - SIMS was the only game in town and you had to support it. The logic holds so long as there's no other options, but the challenger MIS brands arrived; Arbor, Bromcom, ScholarPack et al. I was growth manager at Arbor at the time when we had just 300 schools yet were fast eating into SIMS market share across the country. It was a chance for LAs to evolve and break the Capita grip, streamline costs, and put money back into their schools. We were naive. We thought we'd be welcomed but it was the opposite. We experienced so much pushback from LAs to stop their schools switching, we had to setup an internal project to resolve it. I still remember schools in which the LA refused to pay invoices or issue POs to Arbor. "You're not allowed to switch MIS" many were told even though this was untrue.
As a former teacher moving into EdTech, I was driven and excited about the opportunities to transform learning in a time when mobile devices, SaaS products, and specialist learning apps were entering the market. But my experience in trying to scale this innovation through LAs showed me that local government teams cannot deliver innovation at scale. Despite how this reads, it's not a criticism. Local government is there to provide stability and continuity which means minimising change wherever possible. While change can deliver improvements, it also brings risk, uncertainty, and downsides. Every company believes their product will change things for the better but data shows the opposite. 70% of change projects fail to deliver the expecting improvements or gains proposed.
Diving into education policy
As technologists, it's easy to oversimplify lack of innovation as a technological problem. Build a better technology and you deliver innovation. Yet this approach fails to recognise that innovation is an outcome, not a deliverable, and for that outcome to be realised you need the right people in the mix and the right structures to allow it to be delivered.
In dealing with LAs I saw that their structures had evolved to a place where the overriding culture was to fight innovation. The people they employed were risk adverse and driven to maintain consistency.
Government had identified this long before I did, and that's why the Academies Programme was born in 2002 - the first MAT (Oasis Learning), came into existance in 2004. And for the first decade it ran as what is best described as a fringe experiment. There wasn't a lot of policy or momentum, but that all changed when Michael Gove became Education Secretary. The Academies Programme was given top billing and a vision was drawn up that every school would academise and join a MAT.
In this time I spent 2 years working with the Department for Education as a Specialist Advisor appointed on my technological and process change expertise. I visited nearly 100 Trusts nationally, a mix of the best and worst.
The policy vision was to replicate the NHS in which hospitals and clinics are managed by the Trust, who are overseen by the CQC. The end goal was to have a maximum of 250 Trusts managing every school.
But then it all went horribly, horribly wrong...
What's gone wrong for MATs
Today I would argue that the Academy, and by extension the MAT programme is one of the worst education policies any major developed economy has ever undertaken.
That's not to dismiss that there is fantastic work being done in so many Trusts around the country, and it's especially not to minimise that there are so many visionary, hardworking, and exceptional people working in the sector. It's also not to say I don't firmly still believe in the opportunities that Trusts offer the education sector for driving innovation.
But it badly needs a rethink because it's hard to say it's not just a giant mess. It's 21 years since the first MAT was born and we now have 1,300 Trusts managing 60% of the schools in the country. This is nowhere the vision of all schools overseen by 250 Trusts.
This slow drip of academisation has reduced LA funding to a point where most education teams are now completely hollowed out, only able to offer core HR / finance services. And because only a fraction of MATs have reached the equivalent of a small LA (40+ schools), economies of scale haven't been achieved in anyway that was projected. 80% of Trusts are deemed too small to be sustainable (less than 20 schools) yet there's no way to resolve this. MATs are merging, but the financial and legal complexities of this mean it won't happen at scale.
It would be possible to write a book (a very long, multi-series one) on things you could do better if you could start all over again, but there's a few big themes for me that laid the tracks for where we arrived today.
Lack of governance / regulation
CEOs taking exorbitant pay, mishandling finances, investing in dodgy businesses. There's a very long list of major financial blunders over the decades which have all happened due to the wide open holes in how MATs are regulated. It's no joke to say it was the wild west. When I went in to a failing Trust as the COO, the first thing I found was my predecessor, who knew she was retiring, had given pay bumps to staff close to her, and signed multi-year deals with suppliers without reviewing alternatives. The Trust losing £500k every year and I had little ability to reduce outgoings without breaking contracts / angering unions. Yet my predecessor had broken no regulation or rule. Financial regulation is much tighter today, but it's still far from where it needs to be. Until MATs are under the remit of Ofsted or some equivalent, the standards will never be high enough nationally.
Lack of direction / vision
Many MATs don't know why they're a MAT. This might sound strange but it's very common. The origin story is usually something like: schools individually made the decision to leave the LA, found it difficult to survive on their own, met over schools struggling, clubbed together around a trusted headteacher, formed a MAT, appointed the headteacher as CEO. Each year a few more schools join and before long it's a 15 school MAT. Centralising funding, decision making, and delegated authority then becomes a massive battle that many CEOs aren't up for, and takes years to finalise. If not resolved, you're left with schools who have high levels of automony + an expensive central team layered on top.
Lack of expertise / experience
Central Trust teams aren't schools and here lies a big problem. When they're staffed by people who've spent most of their career in schools, they think and operate as if they're a school. A Trust is a charity by law and this is a useful frame of reference. You expect a good charity to be staffed by a wide range of skills from both the commercial world and charity sector.
Central Trust teams can undertake longer term planning than schools are ever capable of. The most optimistic time horizon any school can work towards is the end of their academic year, because the likelihood is there will be a new education secretary by then. Some big new classroom impacting policy will be launched and schools will need to react. Trusts don't have students or classrooms, and aren't under the remit of Ofsted. It's necessary of course to support their schools in their challenges, but time must be set aside to 'levelling' the Trust up. But owing to the lack of centralisation, many Trusts don't have the ability to implement Trust wide plans. We hit a circular problem.
Government interference
Schools (and teachers) were for too long given the big sell that Trusts are better than LAs. It'll be more efficient - they're not because of lack of scale. They'll save money - big CEO pay packets killed this idea. Trusts are better at raising standards and Ofsted judgments - this has been disproven, and in many cases performance can worsen.
And when patience ran out, forced academisation took it's place. For a project that was formulated to bring more freedom to the sector, removing choice from the single biggest decision a school will ever take was nothing short of a disaster.
Lasting reputational damage
Which all brings us to the present in which, at best, just 16 teachers out of 100 would choose to work in a school run by a Trust if they had the choice. In some cases it's just 3 out of 100. It's going to be hard to change that.
Where do we go next?
I still firmly believe in the opportunities for Trusts to improve education for children across their classrooms and I'm still working to realise that.
As we've entered the age of AI, I believe we'll see a major separation from forward thinking Trusts against those who've simply replicated the LA model they choose to leave so long ago. I really want to see Trusts embrace AI readily, and test out new products faster. A major challenge that they're going to need to overcome is an annual buying mindset - AI is moving so rapidly that it's not possible to "wait until next academic year" because by the time that comes around the technology will be unrecognisable.
One solution for this is incubation testing teams - teachers who can test out new tools for a few weeks without disrupting their teaching scheduling. With this information coordinated and fed back to central team staff who are responsible for innovation - people akin to Chief Technology Officers and Chief Digital Officers, Trusts could adopt new technologies and accelerate innovation significantly.
It might sound like an unrealistic, aspirational goal but to me that's where we need to be aiming for the Trust sector now because it all feels stuck. What we can't afford is another 20 years of the same.
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I'll talking in-depth about how you can generate MAT leads and step out from the noise in my upcoming lead generation masterclass webinar.
Just 3 early bird tickets remaining.
As always, thanks for reading,
Jay
