There is a particular kind of meeting that has become familiar to many of us in the multi-academy trust world. It is usually held in a room that is trying to be both serious and reassuring: a long table, a screen at one end, a coffee machine that looks more capable than it is. The agenda is full, the tone is brisk, and the shared assumption is that everyone present has already spent the morning putting out small fires.
You can identify these meetings by the way the same sentences keep reappearing, even when the faces change. We need to recruit. We cannot recruit. We need to reduce central costs. We cannot reduce central costs without losing the very capacity we are told to have. We need to improve our data. We cannot improve our data because the people who can improve our data are already employed somewhere else, or have gone to the private sector, or have quietly decided they do not want to live this way anymore.
As budgets tighten, the cost of central services becomes less like a background condition and more like a moral problem. Every pound spent duplicating work that could have been shared is a pound not spent on children. And all the while, the public expectation rises: not just that we are effective, but that we are coherent, accountable, and demonstrably good value.
It is at this point that the sector begins to face a choice that is not really a choice at all.
Consolidation is coming. Either we design it, or it arrives through external force: through interventions, through sudden transfers, through emergency governance, through the gradual tightening of expectations. There are sectors in which fragmentation is tolerable. Education is not one of them. When a trust fails, it is not an abstract event. It is children and families and communities paying the price for organisational fragility.
The difficulty is that consolidation, in education, can easily sound like conquest. It can feel predatory. Even the word itself has a metallic taste. That is why it matters to be precise about what we mean.
We are not talking about building an empire. We are talking about building a system that wastes less, shares more, and becomes harder to break.
When you look closely at the situation, three routes begin to emerge. They are not theoretical, and they are not mutually exclusive. They are simply the three ways a maturing system tends to reduce duplication and increase resilience.
Route one: the merger
The first route is the one everyone understands. Two trusts become one.
A merger is blunt, in the best sense. It is a single board, a single executive structure, one set of standards, one central team, one strategic direction. When mergers work, they work because they bring clarity. There is no ambiguity about who owns a decision. There is no double-running of systems. The efficiencies are real and often immediate: procurement power, shared expertise, consolidated back-office functions, a stronger ability to recruit and retain specialist roles that smaller organisations cannot justify.
It can also be bruising.
In practice, mergers are not only about synergy. They are about identity. They involve people relinquishing something: a board dissolving, a CEO role changing, a local civic narrative being absorbed into a bigger one. Culture, which everyone claims is intangible, suddenly becomes very tangible indeed. In the best mergers, the cultural work is done with patience and sophistication. In the worst, it is treated as an inconvenience, and the organisation pays for it later.
Mergers will continue, and in some cases they are plainly the right answer. But it is also obvious why they cannot be the only answer. For many trusts, the barriers are not philosophical but practical. A merger may be too disruptive, too slow, too politically delicate, or simply misaligned with geography and history.
So, the sector needs a second route, one that delivers the benefits of scale without forcing a union of identities.
Route two: consolidate what can be shared, keep what must be local
Imagine, instead of merging trusts, we merge the work.
Most trusts spend a significant proportion of their income on central services. They fund these services through top-slice, and they are often forced to increase that top-slice as the compliance burden rises and the labour market tightens. Yet many of these services are not meaningfully improved by being duplicated. Finance is finance. HR is HR. Compliance is compliance. Data architecture, IT systems, procurement frameworks, safeguarding training, policy creation, payroll, risk management, governance support: there is no educational virtue in doing these things three hundred different ways, three hundred different times.
This is the logic of a jointly owned central services company, which I will call MATco.
Under this model, trusts remain autonomous, but they co-own a single organisation that provides shared services at scale. The trusts do not outsource to a private provider. They build their own sector-owned provider, and they govern it. It exists to serve them.
The advantages are not merely financial, though the financial advantage is significant. The real advantage is capability. A shared company can attract and retain specialist staff. It can standardise digital systems. It can professionalise processes. It can create a coherent operating model that raises the baseline quality for everyone involved. It can reduce the incentive for each trust to reinvent the wheel, and it can allow CEOs to spend less time on operational duplication and more time on educational leadership.
It also avoids the emotional violence of merger. Trusts keep their names. They keep their civic rootedness. Their boards remain intact. Their local character remains visible and meaningful. What changes is not who they are, but how much they waste.
And, crucially, MATco can become a platform for the sector to build serious shared intellectual capital: curriculum design, CPD institutes, quality assurance frameworks, and perhaps even traded services that can compete with the big commercial providers while reinvesting surplus back into the public good.
If route one is consolidation through structural unity, route two is consolidation through disciplined collaboration.
But there is a third route that goes further, and which is common in many other sectors: a group structure.
Route three: a family of trusts, under one umbrella
A group structure begins with a recognition that there is a difference between identity and infrastructure.
Under this model, an umbrella organisation, which I will call ParentCo, sits above several trusts. Each trust remains legally distinct, with its own board and its own character. Yet ParentCo employs the shared professional team and sets group-wide expectations for quality, systems, and standards. ParentCo can appoint a proportion of trustees across the group, ensuring coherence without eliminating local governance.
This is deeper consolidation than MATco. In route two, the service provider is jointly owned by trusts. In route three, the umbrella coordinates the trusts in a more formal, strategic way. It becomes possible to move faster, align more tightly, and build genuine national capability. The group can create unified digital, HR, and financial architectures. It can develop curriculum and professional development at a scale that few individual trusts can sustain. It can deploy expertise quickly where it is most needed.
It also carries a predictable risk: that people hear it and think, loss of autonomy.
While that risk is real, it is also often misunderstood. Autonomy is not the same as isolation. Many trusts currently have “autonomy” in the sense that they are left alone to solve complex problems without sufficient capacity. That is not autonomy. That is abandonment. A group structure, done properly, can preserve what matters locally while protecting schools from fragility and from the exhausting duplication that drains focus.
It can also be attractive to a government that wants resilience without endless intervention. If the sector builds credible group structures, it becomes harder for any individual organisation to fail catastrophically, because the group has capacity to absorb shock.
So which route is “the answer”?
None of them, on their own.
The mistake would be to treat consolidation as a single destination with one approved pathway. The more plausible future is a mixed ecology.
Some trusts will merge because it is clean and decisive. Some will build MATco-style shared services as the least disruptive way to gain scale quickly. Some will form group structures because they want deeper coherence and national capability while keeping distinct identities alive.
The question is not which route wins. The question is whether the sector has the courage to treat consolidation as a professional duty rather than a reputational threat.
Because the present model, in which every trust builds every function alone, is starting to look less like diversity and more like waste. It fragments expertise. It inflates costs. It exhausts leaders. And it leaves the system fragile in precisely the moment when the system is being asked to be robust.
A mature trust sector should be able to say, calmly and without melodrama, that the next phase is about doing less twice.
That is what consolidation is, at root: fewer duplicated central teams, fewer parallel systems, more shared capability, more resilience, and more of the sector’s energy going where it belongs, into the daily work of improving children’s lives.
If we do not design that future, it will be designed for us. And the version designed for us will not be as thoughtful, as humane, or as aligned with the moral purpose that brought most of us into this work in the first place.
This blog is part of a series addressing the importance of building strength and resilience in the system. The series will consider how we intentionally design a system that has the strength and scale to deliver for children. The trust system has always responded to the external environment with purpose and innovation. This blog series starts a conversation about the future shape of the school system in England.
We welcome perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
