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The North West is now arguably the highest-profile region outside of London, home to the new prime minister, the new education secretary and No 10 North.

But despite shaping the government’s vision for devolution and a “r��ɾ������Բ�” of the education system, the region has a trust landscape that is younger and more fragmented than elsewhere.

Only 40 per cent of North West’s 3,000 schools are academies - the lowest level of academisation of any region in England. And while three-quarters of secondary schools have academised, this is true of only a third of primaries.

The Department for Education itself describes the North West as having “strong but uneven improvement infrastructure” in its .

“What we’ve got in the North West is a young trust system where trusts are still developing, trusts are still growing,” says David Clayton, chief executive of 11-school Endeavour Learning Trust.

How many MATs are in the North West?

It is also a relatively splintered system: out of 278 trusts with a presence in the North West, 119 have only one school in the region, and two-thirds have five or fewer.

These trusts educate more than half of the 900,000 pupils in the North West, which spans 24 local authorities and 10 dioceses.

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This fragmentation partly reflects the diversity of the region, which goes well beyond Greater Manchester into industrial towns, coastal communities as well as rural Lancashire, Cheshire and Cumbria.

Across this huge patch, academisation is uneven, ranging from 86 per cent of schools in Blackpool to just 21 per cent in neighbouring Lancashire.

As one trust leader put it: “The North West system is a combination of several mini ecosystems”.

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This helps to explain why collaboration can be difficult even when there is considerable goodwill between leaders, says Clayton.

There is a tendency for some trusts, therefore, to look inward - building central teams, improving their own schools and trying to reach a sustainable size - rather than thinking about their contribution to the wider system.

Leaders can still feel pressure to be “on the front foot and be the strongest trust” in order to grow, Clayton says. “It’s hard to get rid of that sense of competition.”

Marc Doyle, chief executive of five-school QUEST Trust, experiences the same tension as a smaller trust looking to grow.

“We want to influence more lives. We know we’ve proven we can do it, and we want to do it with more schools. But I’ve got no levers to do it other than relationships.”

At times, he says, “I feel like a salesman, and that’s not what I came into this job for”.

Relationships improving in North West

The leaders’ comments come as new education secretary Lucy Powell told ����Vlog she wants the school system to be less “dog-eat-dog” and more supportive.

Almost every leader ����Vlog spoke to says the relationships among trusts, maintained schools and councils are improving in the North West.

Andrea Atkinson, senior regional director at E-ACT Multi Academy Trust, says trust CEOs now regularly meet local authority leaders in some areas - but this has only emerged in the past two years.

“Long gone are the days when it was just secondary headteachers meeting,” she says.

Doyle points to locality consortiums in Wigan and the Bolton Learning Partnership, which brings the secondary schools together regardless of their structures.

“We’ve got a Catholic primary school across the road from one of ours. They’re the same children, the same families, the same issues,” he says.

“It’s absolutely incumbent on us that we collaborate.”

Schools cannot tackle ‘generational poverty’ alone

Relationships - not just between trusts, but with other services - are also hugely important in an area where nearly 1,600 schools across the region have an above-average number of pupils eligible for free school meals, and 11 of the North West’s 24 local authorities are among the 25 most deprived nationally.

The rate of looked-after children is also more than a third above the national average.

Luke Sparkes, chief executive of Dixons Academies Trust, describes “generational poverty driven by underinvestment, and a broken social contract that no longer sees a clear link between hard work and a good life”.

Schools cannot tackle this alone, he argues, adding that trusts need to work closely with the NHS, the Department for Work and Pensions and voluntary organisations rather than treating attainment as an isolated school problem.

Unequal access to specialist units

The special educational needs and disabilities system provides an even clearer example of why strong architecture is needed.

Some 57 per cent of pupils with an education, health and care plan are educated in mainstream settings across the North West - close to the national average of 57.9 per cent - but the proportion varies by up to 25 percentage points between the region’s local authorities.

There is also unequal access to specialist units within mainstream schools, according to the DfE’s .

Some areas have developed extensive resource provision, while others are now racing to catch up, Clayton says.

“Where you’ve got those pockets where SEND provision is less well developed, clearly that puts more pressure on mainstream schools,” he adds.

For trusts operating across multiple local authorities, this means schools within the same multi-academy trust experience very different local SEND systems.

E-ACT has looked for solutions by pooling resources, such as educational psychologists and counsellors, across its regional structure. Atkinson says MATs could go further in sharing effective SEND practice rather than developing everything independently.

Faith trusts dominate the big five

The region’s 10 dioceses are another reason the North West’s MAT system looks different.

Two-fifths of the region’s schools have a religious character, and 66 per cent of these are local-authority maintained.

At the same time, faith-based trusts dominate the upper end of the region’s MAT landscape, with the five largest trusts all Catholic or Anglican.

Catholic trusts have been consolidating particularly quickly, with the diocese aiming to academise all its schools by the end of the decade.

Emmaus Catholic MAT is the largest in the region, and CEO Daniel Copley says it is on a trajectory towards 67 schools - 57 primaries and 10 secondaries - under a diocesan strategy running to 2030.

Unlike many MATs, Catholic trusts can’t choose which schools they take on. “We don’t have a say in which schools come to us. We can’t pick and choose,” Copley says. “This allows the trust to focus on improving outcomes, rather than growth,” he adds.

Doyle, who runs a Church of England trust, says the Anglican picture is less consolidated and argues that a clearer strategy from the Church and the government would help schools decide what comes next.

What happens next?

The question of what happens next for the MAT system in the North West is complex.

The region has one advantage in arriving later, as it can learn from trust development elsewhere, Clayton says.

“The opportunity is clear because levels of academisation are lower. The North West is probably going through the process all the regions have been through two or three years ago,” he says.

On the flip side, earlier waves of academy growth across England benefited from government grants to build trust capacity and fund conversions, which have now been scrapped.

Without this, the development of the MAT system will be a “particular challenge”, Clayton argues.

The lack of a clear central steer is also not helping: many maintained schools are waiting to understand the government’s eventual destination before jumping, Doyle asserts.

“I think there’s a bit of inertia at the moment,” he says. “They’ll be asking, ‘What is the plan?’”, adding: “Until they know what’s expected, they’re not going to do anything.”

But Andy Burnham’s arrival in Downing Street gives another part of the region’s system particular relevance.

North West connection challenge

Burnham pioneered the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate during his time as mayor, and has now pushed this vision forward to the rest of the country, pledging to create more technical routes for students from Year 9.

Doyle, whose trust runs a university technical college in Bolton, says Greater Manchester’s existing work on technical pathways and employer engagement means it is already “a little bit ahead” of the new government’s direction.

But the system in the North West cannot be defined by Greater Manchester alone.

From Catholic consolidation to rural maintained schools and coastal deprivation, its defining feature may be the variety of its “mini ecosystems”. The challenge now is to connect them.

The next stage of the North West’s MAT system will therefore be less about how many schools can academise and more about whether growing trusts can move from building individual success to building a coherent system.