MAT0017

Written evidence submitted by Plymouth CAST

John Mannix, CEO of ‘Plymouth CAST’, a 36-school MAT in the South-West.

Introduction

I am making this submission because of a general concern that there has been, and continues to be, much muddled thinking on the subject of academies and particularly multi academy trusts. I am fearful that this will result only in the new system delivering the same successes and failures as the old. If we change structures but retain the previous mind-set, the academies programme will not achieve its potential. This submission is not so much a presentation of evidence but a reflection on, and critique of, current thinking on this matter.

Executive Summary

1. The Concept of A MAT. A ‘MAT’ is not a ‘school’ of a different size. Subconsciously, though, that is the mental model that is being applied. This is undermining the creative possibilities opened up for us by the academies programme.

2. Assessing the Capacity of MATs. If a MAT is not a school, then the usual ways of assessing the effectiveness of a school cannot be applied to MATs. However, this is exactly what is happening. It is leading to some poor policy formulation and some poor practical decision-making.

3. The Wrong Leadership? We lack broader experience of organisations and of management wisdom. The potential of the academies programme is that it could lead to new organisation models. The hope is that this will retain what is best in current practice but also foster innovation to counter some of the more intractable educational issues that successive governments have attempted to tackle. If the people who are mapping out the ‘new territory’ have only been exposed to the existing models, they will only recreate a version of what we’ve already got. This is happening.

4. Governance & Decision-Making in MATs. Large MATs require high levels of devolved autonomy with ‘safety nets’. Organisational arrangements based on the fear of failure will undermine the exciting possibilities of this programme.

5. Geographical Coverage of MATs. The size and geographical area of MATs is largely a red-herring. Organisations can be effective of any size and area - it is a matter of having the appropriate design for the task.

1. The Concept of a MAT

1.1              Predominantly, those who are currently shaping the development of MATs are people who have spent most of their working life in schools. While schools come in all sorts of different shapes, sizes and contexts, they are almost universally variations of a single organisational model. That is, unlike other modes of organisation such as management partnerships, self-managed groupings, matrix organisations, franchising networks, in this country at least, schools are wedded to pyramidal, single-leader, structures. As a result, a multi academy trust is still (albeit subconsciously) being conceived of as a school - just a bigger one with a few additional hierarchical layers. This was acceptable when multi-school arrangements were quite small; commonly, say, 3 or 4 Primaries federated with a Secondary. However, the possibilities for innovation within the new framework will be limited by this way of thinking.

1.2               This thinking is also reflected in, for example, the Pay and Conditions document that suggests that Executive Head pay should be in accordance with the total number of pupils in the combined schools. So, even though the person concerned is not, in fact, the operational Head of any of the schools (particularly in larger amalgamations) we behave as though s/he is. By the time you apply this thinking to large MATs, we end up with the astronomical salaries being paid to some CEOs. Managing a medium to large MAT is not the same role at all as running a school. A MAT company structure is not designed to educate children; it is a service and oversight mechanism designed to enhance the ability of its constituent schools to educate children and to respond when that is not happening. Taken together with some prevailing (and undeveloped) notions of management in education today (see 3.3 below), the ‘MAT as a school’ thinking is tending to emphasise monitoring, control and direction rather than unlocking creativity and innovation.

2. Assessing the Capacity of MATs

2.1              Most of the thinking around large MATs is about testing their effectiveness and acceptability for expansion. However, the thinking that is applied to these questions is critically flawed. The most significant factor currently being used to assess a MAT’s effectiveness is the performance of its constituent schools. While this might seem reasonable on the surface, it misses the point. There are all kinds of reasons that schools might be successful or otherwise. What we need to know about a MAT is not how it happens to be performing currently but whether its mode of operation, infrastructure, systems etc. are such that they will guarantee good performance over time.

2.2              Post hoc does not equal propter hoc. There will be MATs that might appear to be successful simply because they happen to have, say, appointed some exceptional staff. This might disguise the fact that the MAT’s operational structures are quite poor or that the good appointments were a result of chance rather than some unique recruitment strategy the MAT had developed. Put simply, a group of schools might be performing well despite, not because of the MAT structures around them; there is a difference between identifying the ‘symptoms’ and the ‘causes’ of success.

2.3              If more of those in education had broader organisational experience, they might be aware that symptoms of success can often disguise organisational weaknesses for an extended period. Peters and Waterman’s ‘Excellent Companies’ research for example in the 1980s needed to limit its focus to those companies that had outstripped their industries’ performance over 20 years. We must recognise that we have nothing like that sort of time period or sample size to be dogmatic about the features of a high performing MAT. A review of the sort of descriptions that various educationalists have proffered for excellent MATs shows that they are overly focused on symptoms and on the language and structure of excellent schools (cf. my point 1). In the absence of sufficient reliable practical evidence, it is perfectly possible to develop ways of assessing the structural effectiveness of MATs but that approach is notable by its absence.

2.4              Even if we happen to be right when we decide that, say, a 12-school MAT is indeed operationally efficient and its structures, processes and systems are part of the key to its constituent academies being successful, this doesn’t provide us with a basis for deciding that it would be similarly effective if it took on another 12 schools. Again, we’d need a much better understanding of exactly what it is that the MAT is doing that is working - and then question whether the system it operates would be equally effective if it expanded. Some models for operating 12 schools can be expanded to 24, some cannot; being effective at one’s current size is not a guarantee of being successful at a different size (larger or smaller). It is also true that this is nothing to do with the speed of expansion, despite this being popularly touted to explain such failings. If an organisation has the wrong structures for its proposed new size, it doesn’t matter how slowly it outgrows them.

3. The Wrong Leadership?

3.1              The people who most often develop a real wisdom about how to help a school to be effective are not those who have spent 30 years in the same institution but the ones who have spent time (even a much shorter time) in lots of different schools. This helps them to: challenge their own preconceptions; see links and connections that only emerge when compared between different contexts; learn from the multiple experiences of a wide range of examples; connect cause and effect more accurately when they are often separated in space and time. The point is, if for a long period you have only experienced a limited set of situations, symptoms, causes and interventions, you might have become a wonderful practitioner in that particular context but you might be a poor consultant to help others operating in different contexts.

3.2              The people ‘within the system’ at the moment who are shaping the agenda and directing strategy are sadly people who have far too little experience in the field in which they are supposedly experts. That is, while they may have been in and out of lots of schools, their thinking is constrained by the somewhat unique organisational form that is a school. If a coracle maker who over his career has only been exposed to coracles as a form of water transport, it doesn’t matter how many different sizes of coracle he has made in his life. If you commission him to design a much bigger vessel, don’t be surprised if it’s coracle-shaped. If we can accept that a MAT is not a school, then we need to be wary of looking to those whose experience is limited to schools to lead the way in MAT assessment and development. They’re not bad people and they may have been wonderful head teachers or executive heads but they do not know what they do not know.

3.3              It is surely self-evident that those who are experienced in any one particular niche are not necessarily the ideal guides for projects that are seeking innovation. However, it is also worth asking if our current leaders in education are even offering excellence in their supposed niche. What passes for ‘leadership training’ in this country at the moment appears to have many of the characteristics of the American management schools in the 70s and early 80s. When the best business brains tried to work out why traditionally strong American-managed companies were falling behind their Japanese competitors, they eventually had to realise that the commonly accepted excuses could not be the real problem. OPEC, lack of investment, regulation, labour laws etc. could not be the explanation because the Japanese companies were outperforming the Americans in their own backyard. It gradually dawned on them that it was the management schools that had become the problem. They were producing managers who were committed to study, analyse and define problems; steeped in standardisation, efficiency and quantification; highly rational and insistent on objective goals; but who had not developed the holistic attitudes and skills required to make a difference. They could be successful when stable organisational features were already in place but generally couldn’t deal with the flexible, human and often chaotic realities of the day to day life in people-organisations. And all organisations are people-organisations, especially schools. In our education system (Primary & Secondary) there is an over reliance upon, and undeveloped use of, ‘data’. The language of target-setting, holding to account, extrinsic motivation, individualised KPIs etc. are features of both a limited and limiting mind-set. By and large this approach finds it easier to describe symptoms of failure than to understand obstacles to growth and innovative solutions and it promotes a form of management that promotes compliance, not creativity. Some of the current ‘branding’ practices used by some MATs are particularly destructive examples of this way of thinking. Identified as problematic in management studies over many decades but still alive and well within education.

3.4              If the above proposition seems harsh, there are two observations that are worth considering. Why are so many people who were attracted to the notion of education as a profession now trying to leave and why does this country struggle to keep educational pace with international partners? It cannot simply be that we are less committed to our children’s education than other nations nor that people in the UK simply lack initiative or application, when we are world leaders in other fields. It is worth considering, therefore, whether it is the way educational institutions are lead and managed (the regimes and systems that our otherwise committed staff are being asked to work in) that is the root of the problem.

4. Governance & Decision-Making in MATs

4.1              The larger MATs are, the more important it is to ensure that the ‘school/head teacher’ organisational concept is not applied. It leads to excessive investment in remote monitoring and the centralisation of key decision-making undermines a sense of local stewardship, which is critical to effective organisations. It is already problematic that the prevailing management approach in many schools is over-committed to standardisation, leaving less room for the creativity of the classroom practitioners. The fear that one or another might make a poor choice or might not work hard enough results in management approaches which tie everyone to compliance models - a time-proven method of reducing morale in any organisation. (For the record, this is not to say that this is happening everywhere all the time - there are many exceptional cases of the opposite being true. However, it is still far too common and, I would contend, is growing rather than reducing as day to day operation of schools is driven more by the fear of being caught out by Ofsted than by a desire to unlock creativity and innovation.)

4.2              So again, if we allow that mind-set to dictate organisational expectations in MATs, we will cripple their ability to nurture improvement by making them overly fearful of summary judgement in the case of any perceived weakness. If the MAT Board and senior staff are aware that their job is not to run schools but to provide the enabling conditions to allow schools to flourish, then the MAT model can work. Thus high levels of local autonomy have to be the default setting within a MAT. When these organisations are working well, the notion of holding to account can almost be turned on its head. That is, rather than the CEO holding to account the local Principals, the Local Governing Bodies should hold the Board to account: what is the Board doing to ensure that committed local governance and management is supported to deliver excellent education in each school?

4.3              High levels of local autonomy encourage a sense of ownership and responsibility but a safety net has to be in place. There will be times/schools where a lack of knowledge, skill, resources, strategy etc. will make the school vulnerable. Thus, effective MATs will develop highly sensitive arrangements for monitoring the health of each school all the time. These do not need to be distractions (stopping work to write reports on the work) but can be designed to flow from the general day to day interactions within each school, between the MAT schools and between the network schools and the school support roles deployed by the Board. There is no information that the Board might need about a school that would not itself be valuable to each Local Governing Body. The great advantage that MAT structures can bring is to significantly increase the capacity of every school and the network as a whole to answer the question, ‘How are we doing?’ This means that schools that are performing well and improving receive accurate feedback on the impact of their own innovations; but it also means that both the school and the network/Board are getting feedback if a school is struggling in some regard. The flexibility within MATs (that are well structured) allows them to react quickly to this information and ensure the deployment of additional expertise to help such a school understand why it is not being successful and, as a result, what remedial action is likely to be effective. Furthermore, the network expertise allows resources to be directed to the school (from within the other MAT schools or beyond) so that a school’s improvement is not delayed simply because it currently lacks some particular expertise within its own staffing complement.

4.4              Ultimately, though, there is always the possibility that a school’s governance or management still lacks either the will or the wherewithal to make the required improvements even with the network support. It is thus essential that the MAT Board retains in its Scheme of Delegation the right to withdraw any or all of the powers of the Local Governing Body if it is not having the required impact. This should be a rare occurrence in a mature MAT, even when it has very vulnerable schools. Ideally the Board’s interaction should be to strengthen the LGB rather than override it. In that way, when the required intervention has been successful, the LGB is better equipped for the future rather than undermined. In a large MAT, when local authority is suspended in any way, the school should not be ‘run’ by the Board. The Board has not been formed as a ‘superior LGB’; its role and its skills are different and it is, in larger MATs, too remote. Its role is not to take over the vulnerable school but to identify either additional governance support or, in the worst cases, ensure that some form of Interim Local Board is in place to oversee development.

4.5              If this mode of operation has a philosophical underpinning it is this. An effective MAT expects a strong sense of local ownership, commitment and creativity and organises accordingly. Too many schools and too many MATs appear to be operating from the opposite philosophy; expecting non-compliance or insufficient commitment and organising accordingly. Long experience has taught that both approaches are self-fulfilling prophecies. The organisation that expects success and organises accordingly must nonetheless have sensitive feedback and support triggers. High autonomy brings commitment; high trust supports creativity and innovation but autonomy also brings possible vulnerability; and to protect the vulnerable without constraining the successful is the key to success.

5. Geographical Coverage of MATs

Just like the issue of size (2.4 above) geographical coverage has been the subject of misunderstanding. One cannot start with the question, ‘over what area should a MAT function?’ nor, ‘how large should a MAT be?’ There are effective organisations that work over small local areas and there are successful organisations that work across the globe. There are successful franchises with 20 local outlets and others with hundreds of business units. Neither the number nor the geography is the issue; it is about having the right organisational structures for the particular challenge. Some small MATs work with very little central infrastructure and rely heavily on close collaboration and skills-sharing across their combined employees. Flexibility comes from the geographical closeness and the ease of travel between the bases and this is also required for good communication, as the size does not give them the resources to create central support teams. If the same approach tries to operate 25 schools in the same small area or tries to run 5 schools over a much larger area, it will fail. It wasn’t designed for that and it can’t cope. Our own Trust, Plymouth CAST, was always designed for its 36 constituent schools - it didn’t grow to that size, it came into existence at that size. The schools are spread between Penzance and Bournemouth. School to school support cannot mean a Head in Poole calls a Head in Falmouth and asks if their Literacy lead could, ‘pop over this afternoon’. Instead, the schools operate through 3 hubs (‘Academy Areas’) of 12 schools and each has a dedicated Area Adviser, HR and Finance Support. This facilitates communication, identification of best practice, support and advice but the Area Advisers have to network far more widely - and much of the support that our schools receive is from other schools, networks and MATs. This model of organisation could be expanded quite simply by the addition of further Academy Areas and the same level of centrally-deployed, local support. There would be further economies of scale as, even if the trust were twice the size, there would only be a small marginal increase on the system demands of centralised financial accounting and e.g. payroll arrangements. Overall, once one has the right organisational model in place, growth is not a distraction (spreading the resources more thinly) but an enhancement; as further economies mean that the proportion of resource for the central infrastructure decreases and that for the constituent schools increases.

April 2016