The English school system now sits in what Sam Freedman has, in a different context, called “no man’s land”: too academised to reverse, too incoherent to leave, too politically inconvenient for any party to finish. This leaves us with what might look like a binary choice: a technocratic completion of the reform journey or a place-based restoration. What is missing is the constitutional form that reconciles these positions: the school trust as a cooperative, civic institution.
Institutions and places
Leora Cruddas has, over eight years of speeches and essays, done the intellectual work of arguing that school trusts are public institutions with a civic role - mission-led, ethically anchored, our “best bet” for the resilience of the system, and needing a “stable core and disruptive edge” that acts on the system rather than merely in it. Both the Confederation of School Trusts and The Centre for Young Lives have argued, with equal seriousness, that the solutions to the complex problems we face are probably place-based. The Centre for Young Lives observes that England has “a successful theory of school improvement but no theory of place improvement,” and that the challenges now facing children; persistent absence, SEND, youth mental health, NEET rates, are place-based and cannot be solved by schools acting alone.
The trust, done well, is the strongest organisational form the system has produced in a generation. The place, done well, is the only unit at which the wider issues in childhood can be addressed. It would be a mistake to polarise these issues: a trust-led system can be a part of delivering a place-based settlement. These are claims that must be woven together.
The cooperative civic trust
The synthesis is not a new structure. It is a constitutional upgrade. A cooperative civic trust is a school trust whose public benefit obligation is written down and agreed with its communities; and whose leadership treats inclusion, school attendance, and destinations of the most vulnerable, as the test of success.
This requires trusts to behave, publicly and verifiably, as the civic institutions the CST has long said they are. Our focus should be on getting better, not bigger. This should become an operating principle rather than an aspiration. The critique from the left that trust governance is remote from the communities it serves stops being deflected and starts being answered.
Three tests the sector should accept
The credibility of any cooperative claim will turn on three things a government, and a public, can check.
- The inclusion test: Trusts must improve advance education by improving headline outcomes whilst also embracing inclusion.
- The place test: The unit of professional accountability is the place or places a trust serves. Growth decisions should be justified on the capacity to deepen work in the places and communities the trust serves.
- The voice test: Parent and staff voice belong in governance arrangements with clear lines of reporting to the Board. We should accept that whilst we have highly rigorous and regulated governance in trusts, we need to revitalise that link to local democracy, local voice and representation to recast and reclaim the social contract
What this asks of government
Five moves would let this government complete the reform without repeating it, using a language of its own tradition.
- End the two-tier settlement. A single tier of publicly accountable school trusts, as CST has argued, ends duplication that neither side of the sector can defend.
- Create a public benefit obligation for every trust: a plain-English statement of civic purpose, reported against annually as part of the publication of annual accounts.
- Establish place-based partnerships - councils, trusts, colleges, health, employers - with shared responsibility for the outcomes no school can deliver alone, along the lines the Centre for Young Lives has set out.
- Reform accountability so trusts are judged on the whole child in the whole place, including inclusion and destinations data.
- Require meaningful parent and staff voice in trust governance.
None of this asks the Treasury for money it does not have. All of it builds on institutions that exist. It is completion, not upheaval.
The wider argument
There is a version of the next decade in which the sector reads the policy moment and moves first. It embraces completion of the reform journey and place-based settlement. And it says, publicly, that the trust of the next decade is a civic institution: rooted in a place and accountable to the people who share that place.
The argument for a cooperative civic trust is, finally, an argument for a system that rejects a market approach and embraces a truly civic one; built in common, anchored in the bond of trust we hold with children.
- Dan Morrow is Trust Leader at Cornwall Education Learning Trust
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.
Photo: Nick Fewings / Unsplash
