Genuine standards should set out long-term principles, not time-limited checklists
Through the 2026 Schools White Paper, Every child achieving and thriving, the government has committed to develop a new set of trust standards, which will inform the framework Ofsted uses to inspect school trusts. This is a significant and welcome moment. Done well, trust standards could give the sector an enduring, shared articulation of what a good trust is for. Done poorly, they risk becoming something quite different: a list of any given government’s priorities, restyled as “standards” and wired into commissioning and inspection.
This paper argues that the difference between a standard and a descriptor is not semantic. It is fundamental, and it has been worked out carefully in other professions and in regulatory theory. Our central messages are:
- A genuine standard is a high-level, enduring statement of what good looks like, expressed as principle rather than prescription. It is stable across governments, owned with the profession, and changed rarely and deliberately. The Teachers’ standards, the General Medical Council’s Good medical practice and the Nolan Principles all share this character.
- A descriptor is a granular, time-bound specification of less enduring priorities. Descriptors have their place – but when priority-driven descriptors are labelled “standards” and attached to commissioning and inspection, they import instability and politicisation into the heart of the system.
Regulatory scholarship on principles-based versus rules-based regulation maps almost exactly onto this distinction, and warns of a predictable failure mode: over-prescription drives “creative compliance” and tick-box behaviour, and erodes professional judgement.
The four themes already trailed for the trust standards (inclusion, standards, value for money and community collaboration) are reasonable priorities. But priorities are not standards. The test of a standard is whether it would still read as right in fifteen years’ time, under a different government.
We therefore set out six design principles for genuine trust standards, and invite the Department for Education to build them in from the outset.
CST supports the development of trust standards. Our argument is constructive: we want them to succeed, and to endure. This paper explains how.
