“Every Child Achieving and Thriving”: The future of collaboration between trusts

Government plans for all schools to become academies are back on the agenda. The Government wants to see all state schools be part of high-quality multi-academy trusts. The aim is to put collaboration at ‘the heart of the system’. 

Whilst there is no timeframe to achieve this, the Department for Education (DfE) Every Child Achieving and Thriving white paper sets out a number of measures to encourage the conversion of maintained schools to academies and the expansion of single and smaller multi-academy trusts.

Local Authority established trusts 

Local authorities (LAs) will have the power to set up their own trusts. The new LA-established trusts attempt to recognise the role LAs play in safeguarding and supporting the welfare of children in the area. 

The White Paper states that these LA-established trusts will ‘deepen collaborative partnerships’ in the sector. It confirms that there will be safeguards in place to manage conflicts of interest and that any LA involvement in running an academy trust will be restricted. 

Trust standards

The White Paper states that trusts should be rooted in communities and work together to share expertise and support others to improve. This collaboration will be embedded into the new Trust Standards. The aim is to ‘drive up quality’ by setting ‘clear and demanding standards' that hold trusts accountable and recognise when quality is high. The White Paper confirms that intervention will take place when necessary. 

The new trust standards will be a complete overhaul of the school trust quality descriptors. These new standards will focus on ‘sharing experience, spreading innovation and lifting outcomes across communities'. Trust inspections that will be introduced via the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill will aim to contribute to a fairer and more transparent system that will help drive quality. These inspections will focus on quality rather than compliance, and the trust's efficiency will be assessed. 

There are also plans (under the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill) for underperforming schools to transfer from low-performing trusts to high-performing trusts. This will be an attempt to increase performance across the system. 

Mission North East 

The White Paper proposes the launch of two ‘missions’, Mission North East and Mission Coastal. The aim of these programmes is to ‘transform outcomes for young people locally and provide the blueprint for change nationally’. In the North East, the focus will be on improving outcomes for young working-class people by bringing together schools facing similar challenges and developing a strategy for improvement. 

These ‘missions’ will be rooted in collaboration, and the whole community will take a shared responsibility for change. A ‘test, learn and grow’ approach will assess what works and scale that in practice. 

To learn more about the White Paper or any other area of education law, please contact Joanne Davison by email at [email protected] or by telephone on 0191 211 7958.