Speaking last month at the Labour Party conference, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said schools to join a trust.
I agree with him - but would perhaps go further still. The compelling proposition must be about more than what a school gains from joining a trust. It must be about what we can achieve together that we cannot achieve alone.
The latest figures suggest that just 12 per cent of maintained schools and single-academy trusts plan to join a multi-academy trust in the near future. Some will interpret this as evidence that the trust movement has lost momentum.
I see it differently. It is an invitation to articulate, with greater clarity and conviction, the educational, institutional and moral purpose of belonging to a school trust.
We must begin by challenging a fundamental assumption: that joining a trust is principally a response to institutional failure.
A new way of thinking about trusts
The academy trust movement has a proud history of taking on schools in some of the most economically disadvantaged communities in England, where educational failure had become entrenched, and creating schools that parents are proud to send their children to.
In doing so, trusts have played an important part in restoring the comprehensive principle: the conviction that every child, regardless of background, deserves access to an excellent education.
But the next chapter of reform cannot be defined solely by the improvement of struggling schools. It must be about the collective advancement of education.
A successful, popular school may have no immediate institutional imperative to join a trust.
But institutional success is not the same as system success. The deeper question is whether that school, its pupils, its teachers and its community could flourish more fully through belonging to something larger than itself.
This is the proposition trusts must make.
1. Belonging must strengthen educational quality
The most compelling trusts are not simply administrative structures. They are educational organisations with the capacity to build and sustain expertise, develop curriculum, improve teaching, invest in professional learning and create the conditions in which teachers and leaders can do their best work.
Trust-led school improvement is not about imposing uniformity. It is about creating the organisational conditions for excellence to be sustained and shared.
2. Belonging must offer security and resilience
The demands on schools are becoming more complex. Special educational needs and disabilities, inclusion, workforce challenges, financial pressures and changing patterns of pupil need cannot always be addressed effectively by individual institutions acting alone.
Trusts offer the possibility of shared expertise, collective capacity and greater institutional resilience. This is not simply an efficiency argument. It is an argument about the responsible stewardship of public resources.
3. Belonging must create opportunity
For teachers, leaders and pupils, a trust can open doors that might otherwise remain closed: professional pathways, specialist expertise, richer educational experiences and the opportunity to contribute beyond the boundaries of one school.
But there is a fourth proposition, perhaps the most important.
4. Belonging must strengthen our civic purpose
Schools do not exist in isolation from the communities they serve. Trusts have the potential to become powerful civic institutions, working across schools and with local authorities, employers, health services and other partners to improve the lives of children and young people. This is where institutional excellence becomes civic flourishing.
None of this means that trusts should expect schools to surrender their identity, history or distinctive character. The strongest trusts understand that belonging is not the opposite of autonomy.
It is the means through which professional agency, shared responsibility and collective strength can be reconciled.
And trusts must earn the confidence of schools. They must demonstrate, through their practice rather than their rhetoric, that they are worthy of trust.
Ultimately, we should resist reducing the next phase of reform to a question of how many schools have joined a MAT. The more important question is whether we are building a school system capable of securing excellence, equity and resilience for every child.
The compelling proposition is not that schools are insufficient on their own. It is that even our strongest schools have something to gain, and something to give, through belonging.
Because the purpose of a school trust is not simply to make individual schools stronger.
It is to make us more powerful together.
Leora Cruddas CBE is chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts
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