Earlier this year, the direction of travel from government seemed clear. The push to full academisation was back on, with an aim for all schools to be part of multi-academy trusts by 2030. Fast forward to the autumn and policy ambitions that last to the end of the week, let alone the end of the decade, seem to have fallen out of favour. The Schools Bill, and its tidying up of the fragmented school system, is now off the legislative agenda. This may be a result of the recent turbulence at the heart of Westminster, but the Bill’s future was already in doubt given its poor reception in the House of Lords.
But the political upheaval does not change the fact that nearly half of all schools, including the vast majority of secondary schools, are now academies. There are now over one thousand trusts of two schools or more across the country. So, there remains an ongoing need to understand how trusts are operating and performing.
It’s been said so much over the past 12 years that it’s now firmly a cliché, but academisation itself is not a silver bullet for improving standards. However, a better understanding of which multi-academy trusts (MATs) are most effective, and what it is those MATs do that sets them apart, will help improve decision making across all schools.
Many school leaders have reportedly entered this academic year wondering how their budgets were going to stretch to meet the rising costs of energy, the effects of inflation, and an unfunded teacher pay award. But of course, these are no longer issues that are necessarily managed in individual schools.
The first wave of our Decisions in Education in England Panel (DEEP) survey found that in three quarters of MATs, contracts with energy suppliers were managed entirely centrally, as were decisions around teacher pay and conditions in six in ten MATs.
Decisions around the use of the pupil premium and the sports premium by contrast were far more likely to be managed by individual schools.
MATs tended to be taking broadly the same approach
What was interesting about these areas of spend was the consensus between MATs. While there may have been differences in the precise degree of centralisation and delegation, MATs tended to be taking broadly the same approach. In other areas there was far less consistency, in particular in how catch-up funding was being managed. While a third of MATs in our sample indicated that allocation of catch-up funding is entirely devolved to schools, 15 per cent indicated that this decision-making is entirely centralised.
And an area that these differences could become particularly important in the months ahead is in expenditure on support staff. We’ve previously highlighted the rapid rise in the number of teaching assistants going back to the turn of the millennium. Given that they make up a significant proportion of school expenditure, their role is once again being considered as schools face budget pressures. However, our survey finds considerable differences in how decisions around spending on support staff are reached. They were found to be fully devolved to schools in 10 per cent of MATs surveyed, while completely managed centrally in 22 per cent.
Identifying these areas of consensus and variation is valuable as it enables trust leaders and decision-makers to understand how much their practice varies from others. But uncovering these patterns is also the first step towards further analysis linking different practices to outcomes, to identify how to best combat some of the challenges facing the school system.
The primary goal of this research is to provide insights which are genuinely helpful for trust CEOs and leaders of other school groups to improving their schools. As such, we are opening a second round of the DEEP Survey this week, to gather similar data relating to decision-making, pupil inclusion and outcomes. You can read about what taking part involves and register your interest here.
By building on our data and expanding the number of respondents, we aim to build a rich database of MAT practices and policies that we can link to administrative data, in order to uncover rigorous evidence of how the best MATs achieve their outcomes both for their pupils and for their workforce.
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