This paper reconceptualises school improvement in school trusts, specifically multi-academy trusts, by foregrounding the professional reasoning of trust leaders.
While existing research has tended to analyse trusts as policy instruments or organisational forms, it has paid limited attention to how leaders themselves define, prioritise, and enact improvement across groups of schools.
Drawing on thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with fourteen trust executives, the study develops a practice-based account structured around three domains: aims, objects, and levers of improvement. The analysis shows that trust leaders articulate multidimensional aims that extend beyond accountability metrics, and consistently prioritise three core objects of improvement: culture, teaching and curriculum, and leadership. It further identifies eight categories of levers through which leaders seek to influence practice.
Crucially, the findings demonstrate that these levers are not neutral or universal techniques but valenced mechanisms whose effects vary according to context and enactment. The concept of lever valence captures how the same mechanism may alternately enable or constrain improvement.
The paper argues that trust-led school improvement is best understood not as the application of fixed strategies, but as the ongoing calibration of multiple, interacting levers. In doing so, it offers a new conceptual lens that positions trust leaders as agentic practitioners and challenges instrumental accounts of school improvement in multi-academy trusts.
