Why Classroom Solutions are Failing Foul of MATs

This week is a slightly shorter piece as I prepare for the Selling to MAT Webinar taking place next week. There are still a few places left so don’t miss out!

Today I wanted to review a key excerpt from the Multi-Academy Trust CEO leadership development content framework which recently came out in March and is beginning to come into affect…

Trust CEOs are being recommended to take a greater focus on the curriculums within their schools.

• 👉 Note: The uptake of education policy / guidance always lags at least an academic year as schools are unable to make changes while school is underway. Changes are glacial but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a big shift underway.

Over the past 5 years I’ve personally seen a growing appetite from Trust central teams for narrowing the breadth of curriculum products in use across their schools.

This is now being seen in the data. The ever excellent work from CJK Associates found that 37% of Trust leaders are actively leading a project on education changes.

🤓 Primer: The 3 Waves of Trust Centralisation

If you haven’t worked with Trusts extensively, they can be a bit tricky to understand at first glance. Although Central Teams sit at the ‘top’ of their schools in terms of hierachy, individual school headteachers retain high levels of freedom and authority over their schools.

There are a few ‘authoritarian’ Trusts who pass rules from the top down, but generally these Trusts tend to specialise in turnaround schools - those underperforming educationally, financially, or who have a poor Ofsted rating. A firmer hand is sometimes useful in those circumstances.

On the whole, Trusts make changes that are reflective of what their schools want, or what the best practice and guidance is suggesting.

Here are the ‘Waves of Centralisation.’ Wave 1 & 2 are by no means complete but have been underway for much longer.

• Wave 1: Finance Systems - Underway for past 10 years

• Wave 2: MIS systems - Last 5 years this heated up

• Wave 3: Curriculum Coverage 👈 This is just starting

Back to the topic at hand: Curriculum Coverage!

The CEO Content Framework is a long read, so I want to summarise 2 sections things I believe are important if you’re in the curriculum product space:

🕵️‍♂️ Quality of Education Section

3 key points:

1. Teachers' actions, knowledge, and beliefs should significantly impact student achievement.

2. High-quality teaching benefits all students, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

3. Effective assessment is critical for understanding students' needs and progress.

👉 Why is this important?

To date, Trust Central teams are not under the remit of Ofsted. A proposal was tabled for this to happen some years ago, but Covid pushed it completely down the priorities.

However, Ofsted aside, there is a growing consensus that Trusts should be held responsible for the ‘education value-add’ (DfE terminology, not mine), that they add to their schools.

Year after year, the guidance has become more specific on what ‘value-add’ is and this latest guidance follows in this tradition.

In my time as COO within a Trust, value-add was ensuring our schools were in a good financial position and not failing Ofsted reviews. Fast forward to March 2023, and we’re seeing clearer guidance on educational outcomes.

To drive the quality of education, you need to be comparing apples with apples when it comes to curriculum content. The wider your curriculum, the harder it is to benchmark and set standards across classrooms.

One of the founding ‘principles’ of introducing MATs back in 2009, was that Trust’s could create their own mini education ecosystems. This is yet to be realised as there has been too much variance in content, curriculum, teaching styles, products in use, and even assessment methodologies from school to school, even within the same Trust. With limited resources, Trusts have struggled to build functions or services at a central level that can effectively impact all of their schools.

Going forward, I expect to see more Trusts look to narrow their curriculum offerings in order to start creating a more granular set of quality standards and have comparable assessment standards from school to school.

🕵️‍♂️ Curriculum Section

2 key points:

1. Trusts should define a coherent curriculum that aligns with broader educational goals.

2. Regular review of subject content is necessary, especially in literature, humanities, and arts.

👉 Why is this important?

Less reading between the lines in this section.

The DfE is advising that Trusts should have a coherent curriculum and review subject content regularly. If you’re familiar with ‘education speak,’ this is code for standardise your curriculum.

Whether you believe this is right or wrong is not the question here. It’s how many Trusts are going to take this up, and how quickly they’re going to start implementing it.

I expect large Trusts (15+ schools) to start looking at reducing the variance in the curriculums they teach pretty rapidly. For better or worse, I expect to see a narrowing of curriculum products in use, or at the least, preferred resource lists start to come out.

🤔 Doesn’t Sound So Serious to Me…

The advancement of the MAT sector is best thought of as a slow moving glacier. At first glance it doesn’t appear that anything is changing, but a year or 2 down the line and the landscape has completely shifted.

Back in 2020, I was building EdTech Impact and the largest 3 Trusts were asking for a version of the platform so they could track the educational efficacy of curriculum products. Trust leaders have had an appetite to prune their curriculum products for some time.

What they’ve been lacking is the cause to do so. Reducing any schools choice / freedom will be unpopular with the school, but so too are many decisions a Trust makes. The new recommendations coming from the DfE are instructing Trusts, specifically the CEOs, to involve themselves in the curriculum planning across their schools. That’s a marked shift from earlier recommendations.

Over the last few months I’ve spoken to a number of UK EdTech Founders who are feeling that too. The largest Trusts are creating ‘preferred supplier’ lists, restricting their schools to choose from only 3 EdTech provides across their core subjects.

After years of steady growth, a number of EdTech providers are experiencing record high churn rates as they find they didn’t make the cut.

Trusts continue to shape the UK landscape, and it’s important to factor that into your future planning.

What can you do about this?

Speak with your Trusts. 50% of all UK schools are part of a Trust, so this could affect a large portion of your customer base.

If you don’t have good connections with the Trusts your schools are a part of, I’d make that a priority.

Once you’ve got good relationships, the central team is a great source of information, and will help you predict the evolution of the sector.

An aspect of the sector that many people aren’t aware of is that Trusts are invited to meet regionally with the Education & Skills Funding Agency (ESFA), something that schools are not. It is the ESFA which handles education funding, so even though you’ve likely never heard of them, these are a major player in the sector.

My experience from a Trust level of attending these meetings was interesting, because both Ofsted and the DfE spoke at them, and shared quite detailed roadmaps of where they expected the sector to evolve towards. The information shared was never made public but there are many internal metrics and goals that Trusts are working towards.

Trust teams gets a good preview of what’s coming down the line in terms of funding changes or regulatory changes helping them plan for stability by showing them the road ahead.

Having close relationships with your Trusts should also enable you to learn about where the sector is going, and to prepare for that journey.

As always, thanks for reading. If you haven’t already, feel free to add me on LinkedIn.

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Best, Jay