A pioneering three-school trust in London plans to join one of England’s biggest MATs in the latest high-profile academy merger.
Big Education Trust is to consult on proposals to join forces with Oasis Community Learning, which runs 56 academies across the country.
The Department for Education is said to be taking an “interest” in the move, with officials identifying the “operational scale and efficiencies” such a merger will bring.
It is the latest high-profile MAT merger that is reshaping the academy sector.
The average trust size has increased from 3.1 schools in 2019, to 5.3 earlier this year, as the number of single-academy trusts also plunges amid squeezed funding.
Three schools ‘too small’
Big Education was launched in 2018 by Peter Hyman, a former adviser to Tony Blair and more recently to Sir Keir Starmer in opposition, and current CEO Liz Robinson.
Its academies include Surrey Square Primary, which hasn’t permanently excluded a pupil in almost two decades, and School 21, a free school torchbearer for progressive values which was co-founded by Hyman and Oli de Botton, who is now the prime minister’s education adviser.
Robinson said the trust “punch[es] above our weight” by “doing lots of projects and [carrying] influence in the system”.
Among other things, it’s involved in Rethinking Assessment and the Big AI Project, which received “over $1 million…over two years” to design “a framework of principles for the effective use” of the tech.
It decided to merge three years ago as “three schools is too small to run a MAT”, Robinson said.
“There’s the same breadth of work to do in a big trust as there is in a small trust, [but] you’re massively resource constrained in a trust of our size.
“It means we’re stretched very thin and work in an unsustainable way, frankly, to do what we do.”
She added it is “quite hard” for small trusts to grow given the amount of due diligence required, meaning some “get a bit stuck”.
‘Like speed dating’
The trust developed a set of principles around “what mattered to us, what we’re looking for and what we’re trying to achieve” in the merger.
It looked at the 100-plus trusts that operate in inner London.
“We had lots of conversations with other trust leaders,” Robinson said. “It’s very hard to avoid the speed dating, swipe-left, swipe-right metaphors in all of this.”
The Oasis connection came after Robinson met the trust’s CEO, Jon Barneby, at an event last year.
While Oasis was “not actively pursuing growth”, Barneby said it was interested in “how we can deepen the work we’re doing in a particular area or in the type of work that we’re doing”.
His “ears pricked up” when he realised the trusts shared the view that “there is more value to education than just exam results. They’re really important, they’re a key aspect, but education does a lot more than that…beyond the headlines.”
Such narratives were “rare to hear”, and it was “not just being talked about, it’s being done as well”.
“Big Education…has built out this holistic, integrated model that’s thinking about the whole child, whole family and the community,” Barneby said.
“In Oasis, we’ve been doing something very similar through our community hub model for a number of years.”
Trust pledges no redundancies
Barneby said the proposed merger, unusually, would lead to no redundancies, noting: “It’s not a deficit situation.”
Big Education’s central team of around 15 people would all join Oasis’s operation.
Robinson would move into a new, as-yet-unnamed role focused on “growing” her organisation’s projects across Oasis.
Barneby hopes this work could “shape some of the system as well. Within this potential partnership is a promise to keep Big Education’s influential projects and programmes thriving within a new combined organisation.
“It would create further opportunities for schools across both Big Education and Oasis to connect, share ideas, and learn from each other – building a stronger network for our joining communities.”
DfE interest in ‘rare’ merger
Schools Week revealed last month that government officials are working on white paper proposals to encourage all schools to join a group.
It is not known how Labour would define a school “group”. However, it is understood the plan would not force schools into new structures.
Barneby noted there “aren’t that many examples of a small, successful trust [like Big Education] merging with a much bigger trust”.
“There’s lots of small trust-small trust and medium-medium [mergers]. I think there’s some interest around that model [from DfE],” he continued.
“Some of the operational scale and efficiencies you can get are quite significant and so that’s another area of value that the department see from having more mergers.”
But Robinson believes one of the factors preventing more of these moves from occurring will be CEOs not wanting to surrender their roles.
There needs to be “flexibility [and] not just MAT CEOs being [viewed as] the top job in the whole system”, she added.
“[With] boards as well it’s kind of like turkeys for Christmas. When we started talking about this, [Big Education’s board] all sort of agreed that they’re not going to be having our nails in the board table and hanging on because they will be dissolved.”
September launch
The MATs are currently consulting on the plans with the aim of completing the merger by next September. They would then work “towards harmonising systems over the next couple of years”.
Staff were told about the proposals today. Both trusts’ boards have agreed to explore the plan, and will make a final decision in December of January.
The proposals would then have to be ratified by the government’s regional directors after consultation.
The move would take Oasis’s tally of schools to 58. Only three others – United Learning, Delta Academies Trust and Reach2 – will be bigger.
But Robinson added: “This is an exciting strategic opportunity for us to secure our future as a centre of excellence in inclusive, expansive educational approaches, and to scale our work.”
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