The recently updated places a clearer expectation on trusts to work collaboratively.
It asks boards to take a trust-wide approach to inclusion, deploy expertise and resources effectively across their schools and work with local authorities and other partners. Those responsibilities matter. Yet the word “collaboration†remains open to interpretation.
Most trusts can point to regular meetings, networks, shared training and occasional events. These may all be useful, but their existence does not tell us whether collaboration is improving schools or pupils’ experiences.
A trust can have a busy calendar and still operate as a collection of schools working largely in isolation.
In my work with trusts, I have found it helpful to distinguish four ways in which schools can collaborate: share, coordinate, co-deliver and commission.
They are not stages in a maturity model, and one is not automatically better than another. The value of each depends on the problem that the trust is trying to solve.
Different ways MATs can collaborate
1. Share
Sharing is the simplest form of collaboration, but it is often undervalued. One school may have a strong attendance process, another particular expertise in early reading and a third a successful relationship with a community organisation. Making that knowledge visible prevents each school from starting again.
Effective sharing is more purposeful than simply uploading documents to a common drive. It identifies a need, connects colleagues with relevant expertise and gives them time to understand why an approach works.
The receiving school then decides how to apply the approach in its own context. Useful measures might include whether the shared practice has been adopted, adapted or improved, rather than how many resources have been circulated.
2. Coordinate
Coordination is appropriate when pupils or staff benefit from greater consistency. A trust might agree a common way to identify pupils at risk of missing out, align transition information or use comparable measures to monitor attendance, behaviour or participation.
This does not require every school to deliver in the same way. The point is to create enough common language and information for leaders to see patterns across the trust and act on them.
Coordination becomes particularly important when variation is accidental or when different systems obscure inequalities between groups of pupils.
3. Co-deliver
Some opportunities become stronger when schools design and deliver them together. Staff from different schools might jointly run a professional development programme, moderate work or lead a sustained pupil leadership initiative.
Schools may be able to offer subjects, clubs or experiences that would be difficult for one school to sustain alone.
Co-delivery requires more than putting several schools in the same room. Leaders need to agree the intended benefit, who will contribute, how the work fits with each school’s priorities and how they will judge its effect.
Without that discipline, a joint event can create considerable activity without producing lasting value.
4. Commission
A trust can also use its collective scale to secure something that individual schools could not obtain as effectively. This might involve specialist support, staff development, transport, an arts or sports partnership or a service from another organisation.
Joint purchasing may reduce cost, but price should not be the only consideration. Commissioning gives a trust the chance to specify quality, improve access and build a longer-term relationship with a provider.
It is most useful when leaders are clear about the need and can evaluate whether the provision reaches the pupils or staff it was intended to support.
Choosing the right approach
The four modes help trusts to move from a general commitment to collaboration towards deliberate choices. A curriculum resource may only need to be shared. Safeguarding information may require coordination.
Leadership development may be best co-delivered. Specialist therapeutic support may need to be commissioned.
Trust leaders should therefore start with the problem, not the mechanism. What are we trying to improve? What can schools learn from one another? Where would consistency help? What could be achieved together that no school could achieve as well alone?
Trusts should also be alert to the cost. Collaboration uses time, attention and sometimes money. It should reduce duplication or increase capacity, not simply add another layer of meetings. If staff cannot explain what changed because of a network or project, leaders should be willing to redesign or stop it.
The strongest evidence of collaboration is not a full diary. It is the movement of expertise and resources to where they can make the greatest difference.
These four modes provide a practical way to make that movement visible and purposeful.
Professor Michael Green is head of quality improvement planning at Buckinghamshire New University. He posts on X as
