The Centre for Multi School Effectiveness establishes sector-led research capacity focused on how we make schools better by working together.
The Centre will be close to practice and methodologically robust. It will find and describe practice, investigate how it works, connect it with data and wider research, test apparent patterns and make sufficiently secure knowledge useful to others. Its first major programme will be to build an evidence base of applied practices – an attempt to understand the problems when leading education at scale, the solutions that have been found, and evidence of impact wherever possible.
It’s not about trying to redefine what quality looks like in the classroom. There is already a good evidence base for that, including causal evidence, from the likes of the Education Endowment Foundation. And where there is already high-quality evidence from the EEF and others we will use the Centre to amplify it.
But the Centre exists to understand how multi-school groups like trusts organise themselves at scale to be able to implement those things well. This is what we mean by multi-school effectiveness.
England’s school trusts are the engine room for this work, but the field is wider than trusts: the Centre will be able to contribute to, and learn from, other forms of multi-school organisation in England and internationally.
