Male, T; (2017) Leadership in multi-academy trusts. In: (Proceedings) International Conference on Educational Leadership and Management.

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Abstract

There has been an accelerating policy shift in England towards a system led improvement process for compulsory education, based on the principle of schools having greater autonomy. This government strategy has seen the rapid and further intended growth of academies which are funded directly, with no statutory responsible for accountability to local government. This radical policy has fundamentally changed the concepts of school governance and leadership within the country, with the preferred structure for supporting individual schools becoming the creation of Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs). In this model groups of schools are to be joined through the establishment of a trust which oversees the management of their prescribed educational provision through a corporate structure. The nature of the national school system, with its concomitant structures of governance, leadership and management, is undergoing radical change which means that the direction and control of compulsory education is now to be enacted by these trusts within a fairly loose accountability structure from central government. This paper reports on the early stages of research into leadership within MATs which explores the issues and challenges they face as they take on the strategic ambitions of central government in this emerging era. The data that informs the findings from this research are being gathered from participants in an open access development programmes being run by the UCL Institute of Education for leadership teams from MATs. The programmes, which commenced in November 2016, involves medium size MATs of between 5 and 15 schools and aimed not only to support the achievement of economies of scale, but also to build a shared culture and improvement model that strengthens every school. There are two groups of MATs involved in the first phase of this programme, one of which is comprised wholly of Church of England trusts. The participants in both programmes are representative, therefore, of the new paradigm of school leadership and governance that is emerging from the anticipated shift to academisation of the majority of the nation’s schools.

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