Let’s start with the good news. We know what a good school looks like, and we know how to turn a struggling school into a successful one. School improvement expertise exists in abundance, and we can see it in action across the country.
More good news: innovation is raising the bar. Some remarkable schools are pushing the boundaries of excellence. They are giving researchers new practices to evaluate, and that research helps to lift standards for everyone.
But there’s a problem. Further improvement is difficult when the system itself is a fragmented mess. Some schools are run by local authorities and others are in academy trusts, governed by individual funding agreements. They follow different rules, different processes and different accountability measures.
That means every time a new policy is introduced – whether on behaviour, curriculum, SEND, or funding – it must be filtered through multiple legal frameworks. The result? Confusion, inconsistency and slow progress.
Unfortunately, like other attempts before it, the current schools bill won’t fix it. If the goal is to improve education across the board, it would help if every school was operating under the same structure.
The Hoodinerney Model
Which brings me to the Hoodinerney Model. A relic of 2014, created by Laura McInerney and me, it is still, I believe, the best bet for school improvement.
The Hoodinerney model is simple: every school runs on a funding agreement overseen by a school trust. That’s it. Instead of two completely different legal systems – LA and academy – the Hoodinerney Model removes the division. Everyone has a funding agreement; everyone is in a trust.
Some will argue this is the wrong answer because “it’s standards, not structures” that matter. That sounds nice, but it doesn’t hold up. Structures define who is responsible, what rules they follow, and how they’re held accountable.
If we want every school to improve, we need every school to be in the same structure. The best one available is a funding agreement overseen by a school trust.
If implemented, the model would do a few simple things:
Create one clear legal model for all schools
No more patchwork of different rules.
Group schools into strong, accountable families
Every school would be part of a trust, with shared leadership and geographic clustering (without being restricted by local authority boundaries).
Give local democracy an important role
Elected bodies would represent community interests equally as they’d have the same stake in every school.
Clarify the roles of the Department for Education and Ofsted
The DfE commissions schools; Ofsted inspects them.
Improve transparency and reduce conflicts of interest
Everyone follows the same rulebook.
Seven benefits
In previous posts, Laura and I have argued that this model makes sense for policymaking: one system is better than trying to filter policy through two.
Here, I want to focus on why the Hoodinerney Model is the best bet for school improvement – why it’s a better bet for delivering high and rising standards, particularly when compared to the advisory-style models that dominated before the academies programme and are now on the RISE* (wink) again.
First, it keeps expertise where it belongs: in schools, doing the work of improvement. It’s important to avoid expertise being siphoned off into slow-moving bureaucracies instead of staying in the hands of those leading change. The trust is the school improver. The ‘school improvement team’ is the trust.
Second, it ensures that those designing the improvement plan are also responsible for executing it. Advising is easy. Delivering change is the hard part. Leaders in challenging schools deserve support from people standing shoulder to shoulder with them, not offering advice from the sidelines.
Third, it provides the certainty and time needed for sustained improvement. Turning around the most challenging schools takes three to five years of relentless focus—day in, day out. A few visits over a year won’t cut it.
Fourth, practice makes perfect. Improving schools is difficult. Improving the most challenging schools is even harder. But when a Trust takes on this task repeatedly, it refines its approach and builds a team of leaders with direct turnaround experience – people who can be deployed to support the next struggling school.
Fifth, team beats individual. School improvement isn’t just about teaching—it requires expertise in curriculum, behaviour, finance, HR and operations. No single adviser can provide all of that. But a well-run Trust can.
Sixth, this model has a business end. Schools that aren’t good enough need to change. Change is hard, especially when leaders are personally invested in their existing approach. External advisors can recommend change, but they don’t have the authority to make it happen. A Trust can.
Seventh, there’s a built-in safety net. If a school isn’t improving, it can move to another trust. Local authorities can’t do this; their borders make it impossible. But when every school is on a funding agreement overseen by a trust, schools can move between families as needed.
Addressing the criticisms
Some people push back on this model, so let’s address the main objections.
First, the cost and time of conversion. Moving every school into this model isn’t an overnight fix, and it comes with a price tag – I agree (though if we’d started in 2014 we’d be nearly done by now!). But we should at least set one system as the end goal so we can keep moving in the right direction.
Second, what happens to struggling schools while they wait for a trust? I agree that some immediate support is needed—whether you call it RISE teams, National Leaders of Education, or the Trust Capacity Fund.
But the real issue is why it takes so long to place schools in the right trust. The official target for conversion is six months. The data available suggests that it is currently taking 18.
This badly missed DfE target is absent from the current debate and it shouldn’t be. The best way to improve struggling schools isn’t to prop them up with short-term interventions but to fix the system that leaves them in limbo for years.
Third, some trusts aren’t doing a good enough job. That’s true. But it’s easier to improve 500 trusts than 24,000 individual schools. Trusts should be inspected, their leaders held accountable, and schools moved between trusts when improvement isn’t working.
And finally, yes, of course some advisory models work. Softer collaborative structures sometimes make a difference. But they are the minority. They generally lack the seven features above, which makes them less likely to drive the deep, lasting improvement we need.
Four immediate actions
For all these reasons, if we are serious about school improvement, we can’t ignore structures. We need to:
- Fully implement the Hoodinerney Model, making every school run on a funding agreement by the end of the next Parliament, including legislation for a common regulatory framework.
- Transfer the powers set out in the model to local authorities and city regions who move ahead of the deadline once all their conversions are complete.
- Inspect school trusts and hold executive leaders accountable for their performance on improving the schools in their family.
- Hit the six-month DfE conversion target, slim down RISE teams for emergency support, and reinvest savings in trust capacity.
This isn’t about ideology. It’s about practicality. One system is easier to manage than two. It makes accountability clearer and ensures every school operates under the same rules and expectations.
We know what works in school improvement. For it to happen everywhere, we need every school on a funding agreement overseen by a trust.
So let’s get on with that, because we can’t afford to still be making this case in another decade’s time.
Your thoughts