Last year, standing on this stage, I talked about choices. About the choices government makes, the choices you make as leaders, and about a simple idea: we don’t always need to wait for someone else to make the future better.
There will always be things we need from government. But this sector has agency too. We have expertise, capacity and, collectively, enormous power to improve the education children receive.
But having agency isn’t enough. We also have to get better at connecting what we know: connecting schools, people, evidence and practice; connecting the knowledge generated in one organisation with the problems being tackled in another.
More than a decade ago, Ben Goldacre argued that practitioners shouldn’t simply consume research; they should help create the knowledge from which others can learn.
I think there is a version of that challenge facing school trusts now.
Over the last twenty years, schools in England have come together into groups capable of moving knowledge, building expertise and creating improvement capacity across several schools.
Rather than rehearse the arguments about academies, I wanted to ask a simple empirical question: what actually happened to schools after they joined trusts?
That became our recent research paper: Advancing Education.
I’m not going to spend the next ten minutes walking you through the findings and methodology. You will be relieved to hear.
We made a film instead.
I want to acknowledge Professor Daniel Muijs, who independently reviewed and validated our methodology and analysis. Daniel had hoped to be here today but unfortunately is not able to be. I’m enormously grateful for the rigour he brought to the research.
I also want to acknowledge ImpactEd, whose separate study, focused mainly on sponsor schools, echoed many of our findings.
I think those findings matter. And the sector should take some confidence from them.
But this isn’t a victory lap.
None of us are here because we want to win arguments about school structures. We’re here because we want to do a good job for children, and our premise is that bringing schools into a group – a trust - can help.
Which leads to much bigger questions.
Why? What creates the additional capacity? Why are some groups of schools, sometimes in particular contexts, so effective? And can we understand those things well enough that others can learn from them?
These aren’t really questions about academies per se. They are questions about something bigger: multi-school effectiveness.
The idea is simple. Multi-school effectiveness is about what an organisation responsible for more than one school can achieve because those schools are together.
Can it create the conditions in which pupils, professionals and schools achieve more, more equitably and more sustainably than they would be likely to achieve in isolation?
This is similar to Sir David Carter’s notion of the Trust Dividend.
That’s the test. Not simply whether a trust contains good schools, but whether being part of the trust creates additional value.
And we shouldn’t assume that happens automatically. Putting schools inside the same organisational boundary doesn’t, by itself, make them a more effective group. Connection has to be created. Effectiveness has to be fostered.
England has become one of the most interesting places in the world to study this. You have built multi-school organisations at a scale and maturity that gives us an extraordinary opportunity to learn from each other – and to help others too.
The engine room for that work is sitting in this room.
Last year on this stage I argued that we don’t always have to wait for someone else. Sometimes, if we think something matters, we can choose to build it.
So that’s what we’re going to do.
Today, I am delighted to announce the creation of the Centre for Multi-School Effectiveness.
The Centre will be a part of CST, building on our existing work on trust-led school improvement.
But I want to be clear about what we intend it to be.
It isn’t a new think tank. And it isn’t going to sit somewhere producing interesting papers that everybody means to read but never does.
The Centre will be an applied sector-led research capacity: connecting the knowledge being generated inside multi-school organisations; surfacing it, testing it, challenging it and sharing it.
It’s not about redefining what quality looks like in the classroom. There is already strong evidence-building infrastructure for that, including rigorous causal evidence from the Education Endowment Foundation. Where high-quality evidence exists, we will amplify rather than recreate it.
Our distinctive question is how multi-school organisations organise themselves at scale to implement good practice well: how they build the capacity, expertise, routines and organisational conditions that allow it to reach more schools and children.
At the moment, too much of what our sector knows doesn’t travel. It sits inside organisations, documents, people’s heads and conversations between colleagues who happen to know one another.
The connections are there. But they are too often accidental. We want to make them systematic – so that together we can build the best knowledge about multi-school effectiveness.
We’re grateful to 21 trusts who have helped us develop the plans for the Centre.
These Programme Partners emerged through the development of the idea itself.
Our plans grew out of conversations with members – trusts of different shapes and sizes, grappling with many of the same questions and telling us the same thing: we need better sector-led evidence about what makes multi-school organisations effective.
Part of that came from growing collaboration across the system – a sense that we should get better at learning from one another.
And part came from a changing policy environment. If developments such as trust standards and trust inspection are to land well, they need a stronger evidence base about multi-school organisations.
Over the summer, those conversations became a proposition. These trusts helped us test it, shape it and made a commitment to help us establish the Centre.
So this isn’t a list of the “best trusts”. That’s not what Programme Partner means. They are simply the group particularly involved in getting us to this point.
The Centre itself is for all of you. Every trust is a member of the Centre.
We want the whole sector to engage with the research and its findings. And an independent advisory board will help ensure the research meets high standards and commands credibility.
We’re announcing it today, but it won’t launch fully until Spring 2027, so please watch this space.
Of course, this work isn’t new territory for us.
In 2023 we launched our inquiry into trust-led school improvement, leading to our triple-helix conceptual model. We then spent three years building case studies through the School Improvement Hub, in partnership with ImpactEd.
From today, we’re bringing those resources into the Centre, initially through a new page on CST’s website.
The Centre is the next evolution of that work: a sector-led research capability seeking to understand and share the best we can know about how to run effective groups of schools for children and communities.
The practice, expertise and experience we need exists right across this sector, in your organisations.
Ultimately, the Centre will only succeed if all of you help us build that knowledge together.
So, last year I stood here and told you we shouldn’t always wait for someone else to make the future better.
Colleagues, this is us not waiting.
Thank you.
