Steve Rollett, Deputy CEO, Confederation of School Trusts
A common critique of school trusts has long centred around the dichotomy of the 'central' and the 'local'. This potentially misleading characterisation of trusts is based on the assertion that there is some distinct and identifiable part of the organisation which is separate to its schools.
Accordingly, trusts which direct resources to this part of the organisation, so the argument goes, are guilty of bureaucratic folly; the building of some central edifice that works towards different aims than those of the schools.
Worse still, we are told this ‘centralisation’ represents the aggregation of power and control in the hands of a few individuals. In terms of strategy, it is, according to the narrative, arbitrary.
It’s time we revisited this lexicon, reimagining it not as an issue of 'central' vs ‘local’, but rather of 'shared' endeavours and mutual enhancement. This is not just semantics – it is fundamental to how we perceive and optimise the operations of school trusts.
Take a moment to envision a school trust as an intricate piece of machinery – each cog connected to the others, seamlessly working in unison towards a common purpose. A 'central' narrative implies a dominant cog, a hierarchal system of control.
However, the reality is often far from this. A centre might be said to exist in the sense that there may be colleagues in the trust who do not work on a school site or whose work reaches beyond a single school. An executive team might be an illustration of this, but it manifests in other ways too. For example, many trusts have a HR team that leads on this area across the group.
In one sense, to identify this as ‘central’ is harmless enough – it captures the sense that this team is not constrained by a single set of school gates. But to imagine their work is separate to that of the schools is where the notion of centrality comes unstuck. This is why we should be sceptical about the complaints of detractors who criticise trusts for directing resources towards shared parts of the organisation.
Of course, trusts must think carefully about how they use their resources, and some trusts may have found a distribution that is more efficient or more effective than others.
In years gone by, schools of similar sizes and budgets have used their funding differently. For example, some had larger senior leadership teams than others. Some secondaries had heads of faculty whereas others had subject leaders. Some had both. What mattered was how well these structures worked in the context they were being deployed. Were they making education better for children?
And for those who express concern that trusts having some sort of shared infrastructure must inevitably come at the cost of teachers in classrooms, it is reassuring to know that there isn’t evidence to support this claim. In fact, the pattern over the last five years has shown that trusts have increased the proportion of their budget which is allocated to teaching.
It is important that trusts continue to evaluate and learn how best to allocate resource, and keeping an eye on the proportion of budget spent on teaching is sensible. This blog does not claim there is no such thing as a shared trust team that is too big, or that there aren’t examples of trusts that appear to have made better decisions than others in this regard. But the criticism of all things ‘central’, which we sometimes see on social media and from education commentators, offers little insight to develop understanding of this issue. So, increasingly, I find myself rejecting the term.
Adopting the language of 'shared' does more than just reflect the operational reality of school trusts. It gives a sense of #belonging to individuals and teams, which is the theme for our upcoming annual conference. It also aligns with the philosophical ethos that underpins these organisations. At their core, school trusts are collaborative ventures, built on a shared commitment to improving the educational outcomes for all children.
To pivot from 'central' to 'shared' is not to diminish the role of the trust but to accurately represent its true function. The trust is not an overarching bureaucratic monolith, exercising dominion over its schools. Rather, it is a relationship of reciprocity that aids and enables collective school improvement.
A shift to 'shared' may be subtle in its semantics, but its implications for how we perceive school trusts is potentially profound. Let us challenge ourselves to move beyond the constraints of 'central', to embrace a narrative that reflects the shared endeavour at the heart of school trusts. This is our collective strength, and those of us within the sector know this to be the case.
