More than a decade ago, Ben Goldacre argued that education needed to get much better at generating and using evidence.
One of his most important observations was that teachers should not simply be passive recipients of research produced elsewhere. The profession itself could help generate the knowledge from which others learn.
Increasingly, the unit through which we are trying to improve education is not an individual school, but an organisation responsible for several schools. Over the past two decades, England has quietly undergone a profound organisational change: we have connected schools into groups.
Our recent longitudinal analysis shows this has been effective, with trusts helping schools to move up the national rankings, especially in disadvantaged communities.
But there is not yet enough evidence about how these successes have been achieved.
How does knowledge move between schools? How do trusts build expertise that individual schools could struggle to sustain? How do they spread effective practice, develop their workforce, balance common approaches with local agility, and create improvement that survives changes of leadership?
And, fundamentally, what can a group of schools achieve because they are together?
This is what I mean by ‘multi-school effectiveness’.
The central proposition is that an effective multi-school organisation should create the conditions in which pupils, professionals and schools can achieve more, more equitably and more sustainably than they would be likely to achieve in isolation.
But putting schools inside the same organisational boundary does not, by itself, make them an effective group. The question is how those connections are made useful: how knowledge, expertise, people and resources are connected in ways that improve education.
There is much more we need to understand. That requires rigorous research.
A reservoir of expertise
England is well placed to lead this. Our school trusts have spent two decades developing approaches to curriculum, professional development, school improvement, leadership, data, organisational design and specialist expertise.
Some will have worked brilliantly. Some will have worked in particular circumstances. Some will turn out not to have worked at all.
All three are potentially useful sources of knowledge.
The problem is that too much of what our sector knows does not yet travel well enough. It sits inside organisations, in internal documents, in people’s heads and in conversations between colleagues who happen to know one another.
That matters because somewhere in our system one organisation may already have learned something important about a problem at scale another is trying to solve.
We have connected our schools. The next opportunity is to connect what we have learned.
The Centre for Multi-School Effectiveness
That is why CST has announced it will establish the Centre for Multi-School Effectiveness, launching in 2027.
This is not a brand-new direction. Our 2023 trust-led school improvement inquiry began this work, and the School Improvement Hub has been turning that learning into practical resources.
The Centre is the next stage: a sector-led research capacity sitting deliberately at the intersection of research and practice – finding and describing practice, investigating how it works, connecting it with data and wider research, testing apparent patterns and making sufficiently secure applied knowledge available to others.
The Centre is not trying to redefine 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 that sort of high-quality evidence exists, we will amplify rather than recreate it.
Our distinctive question is how multi-school groups organise themselves at scale to implement those things well: building the capacity, expertise, routines and organisational conditions that allow good practice to reach more schools and children.
That is the territory of multi-school effectiveness.
And while England’s trusts provide an extraordinary engine room for this work, the idea is potentially broader than trusts. There are other forms of multi-school organisation in England and internationally, where schools are organised into groups in ways that sometimes resemble our trusts and sometimes look very different. There may be important opportunities for learning across these different models.
A Centre for everyone
We’re grateful to the 21 trusts who have helped us to develop our plans for the Centre. To be clear, we’re not suggesting these Programme Partners are the “best trusts”. They are the trusts that, through work that developed organically over the summer, helped us generate, test and develop the proposition and have committed to help establish it.
But the Centre is for everyone working in a school group – or multi-school organisation, to give it its formal name. Every trust is a member of the Centre.
The practice we will explore will come from across the sector. And the knowledge generated through the Centre is intended to benefit all children whose education depends on a multi-school organisation.
Connecting what we know
We have an extraordinary reservoir of expertise distributed across England’s school trusts, and the opportunity to collaborate beyond them too.
If we can connect it, test it and turn more of it into shared, readily applied knowledge, we can help more multi-school organisations become even more effective – and more children benefit as a result.
We connected our schools.
Now let’s connect what we’ve learned.
- Steve Rollett is Deputy Chief Executive of the Confederation of School Trusts
