Building a smarter, fairer system for the toughest work

We've talked about the mission that calls us to places like Croxteth, and we've pulled back the curtain on the gritty, human reality of the work itself. This final piece is about what comes next. How the system must change to support those climbing the steepest gradients. It starts from a simple belief: what makes an organisation strong isn't perfection, but its determined, restless struggle to get better.

So, here is our path ahead and what we believe the sector needs to learn from the toughest work. Let me be clear though, if our sector learns nothing, we will continue because we know who we are and what we are about.

Our road ahead: doubling down, and building out

We are clear on our direction. First, we double down on the core engine: the quality of instruction in every classroom, and the deliberate cultivation of student self-determination: their sense of purpose, mastery, and autonomy. This is non-negotiable.

Second, we are making a major, institutional commitment to civic partnership. Building on our award-winning civic work in Bradford and Leeds, we are now formally convening partners in health, social care, police, and community action in Tameside, Wythenshawe, and North Liverpool. This isn't an add-on. It's a five-year commitment to data-informed, integrated decision-making. Why? Because we have learnt that you cannot transform a complex school in isolation. You have to help transform its conditions. This is about building the social infrastructure around our schools, supporting families, building community power, and ultimately, improving the long-term educational and social outcomes that data like cohort value-added can capture.

The case for smarter, braver accountability

But let's be honest: our efforts are constantly hamstrung. They are hamstrung by a system that too often punishes the very work it should be incentivising. We don't need less accountability. We need accountability that is both courageous and intelligent. For us, this feels so common-sensical we cannot believe it needs to be said.

Consider Croxteth. It is the second most improved school in the country for attendance. That represents a monumental effort from the most difficult starting point. We are clear-eyed: it must improve further. Yet, under the current Ofsted framework, which couples behaviour and attendance, a school with transformed behaviour and culture can still be pulled into a deficit category purely because attendance data lags. It creates a perpetual deficit model. It obscures transformative progress on the ground and, in doing so, it actively disincentivises anyone from taking on the toughest challenges.

This has to change. We must develop ways of measuring success that value transformational progress and leading indicators of cultural and organisational health, alongside the ultimate outcomes. An intelligent system is one designed to be slow to judge and quick to seek to understand. This is about putting Ofsted into its proper perspective: it is an important regulatory tool, it is not the sole arbiter of a school's purpose or a community's truth. They are a (sometimes really useful) perspective not the perspective. Our purpose is defined by our mission and our community's needs. The system must evolve to become a smarter evaluator of who is truly making a difference in any context. With the professional curiosity, skills and flexibility of mind to ensure that includes the most complex contexts. We must be able to see and reward the climb, not just the summit.

This gradient of context directly shapes external judgements. It is an observable truth across the system that it is fundamentally easier to achieve a top Ofsted judgement in a stable, less complex school than in one facing the profound challenges of a Croxteth. Leadership in the former context can be celebrated as 'strong' or 'exceptional,' while leadership demonstrating arguably greater skill, resilience, and impact in the latter can be labelled as ‘needs attention’, purely because the summit, under current measures, remains distant. This does not lower expectations; it demands a smarter evaluation of the terrain and the climb. The analogies are endless. Pick the one that would resonate for you: football, academia, politics. The story of the underdog is the most praised in cinematic history. Of course, someone delivering elite performance with limited resource is considered exceptional and extraordinary across sectors and those churning decent performance while swaddled in riches are often considered squanderers. Again, this feels so common sensical.

The mission-driven advantage: it's about resilience

The collaborative power of a trust is so often debated through the narrow, sterile lens of accounting. This misses the entire point. A well-run trust is not a bureaucracy. It is a mission-driven charity with one core, legal purpose: to advance education for public benefit. Any attempt to present it as other is politics.

That singular focus, combined with a developed school improvement model, creates a unique advantage. It builds a deep, deployable capacity that can be focused like a laser on the point of greatest need. It creates a multi-dimensional resilience: financial, operational, educational, and human. And it can be of a scale that standalone schools simply cannot match.

Think of it this way: unlike a local authority with a hundred competing remits, every ounce of a trust's expertise and resource is dedicated to school improvement. This is what enables the ‘deep, tight’ collaboration you can only achieve as one legal entity. It is the entire reason we can say 'yes' to a Croxteth. We have a codified model of transformation and the shared capacity to deploy it at scale. And we have all pre-agreed our understanding of transformation. Our school leaders are not heroic lone operators; they are part of a professional community with a single, unifying mission.

How it works: the enablers, misunderstood

This mission-focused model is powered by strategic choices that are frequently mischaracterised in public debate as profiteering or wasteful bureaucracy. And, of course, there have been nightmarish examples that have fed this narrative. But the true, lived reality is different. These are not costs siphoned off, but essential investments that enable our mission. They form the operational backbone that makes taking on a challenge like Croxteth (and seeing it through!) even possible.

Operational integration for educational focus. We fully centralise operations: finance, estates, HR, school admin, catering. Not to build a bureaucracy, but to dismantle it for our principals. We take significant non-teaching burdens off their desks. The goal is to liberate them to be education and community leaders, not facilities or HR managers. The central recharge cost is not a ‘top-slice’; it is the price of deploying specialist expertise so that each school does not have to find (and fund!) it themselves. It is important to note that this recharge figure is not directly comparable between trusts. Ours is higher than some precisely because we centralise all operational functions, from strategic leadership support to frontline colleagues. Centralising a service alone can add 2-3% to a recharge rate. The cost hasn't vanished; it has simply moved onto our central ledger. This is an accounting reality. The critical point is that, through economies of scale and expertise, the net cost to the system is reduced while the service level and strategic focus for schools are improved. It is, in net terms, a saving.

Financial prudence for long-term stability. The critique of ‘large reserves’ often overlooks scale and purpose. What seems a high headline figure represents, across a trust, a pooled contingency that is frequently lower per school than if each were standalone. These funds are for resilience and essential investment (like the millions we are spending to secure Croxteth’s crumbling building). The DfE's financial policy notes reserves below 5% of income may indicate vulnerability. Using them to subsidise day-to-day costs or delay necessary restructuring when income is squeezed doesn't solve a crisis, it breaches their purpose, merely postpones the inevitable, and would rightly attract condemnation for failing to safeguard the trust's future. This is the paradox: operating within a prudent policy framework yet facing criticism for holding the funds needed to meet the long-term challenges we are mandated to plan for.

Strategic leadership, redistributed. In a standalone school, the head must be both strategic chief executive and lead teacher. In an effective trust, that high-level strategic function is consolidated and shared. This is often misunderstood. These trust-wide leaders are not a bureaucratic surplus. They are our most experienced practitioners, deployed agilely to where the challenge is greatest. The location, focus and term of deployment can each be agile. This is the power of scale: spreading the influence of exceptional, scarce talent. There isn't a limitless pool of people who can (or want!) to lead the most complex turnarounds. Our principals in these schools are often relatively new to headship. They need and deserve this intensive, expert stewardship. This redistribution doesn't dilute expertise, it multiplies it. It creates an efficiency that allows the focus of multiple leaders to be channelled in a more powerful way, ensuring our principals can focus intensely, daily, on pedagogy and culture. The real inequality lies not in trusts having this capacity, but in a system that labels it an 'unfair advantage' rather than recognising it as the essential infrastructure for improvement in the toughest context. If the sector was leading with curiosity, it would be doing all it could to replicate it.

The principle, not the politics

This all converges on a simple, powerful principle: a group of schools in deep, formal collaboration can achieve more than any one school standing alone. They can share a proven improvement model, pool risk, and focus capacity with a precision that softer partnerships cannot match.

The best trusts demonstrate what works. Some do this well, some do not. The same is true of all structures (maintained schools, local authorities). We must move beyond political suspicion and tribal defence of structures.

This work of moving beyond tribalism isn't just external. There is work to do inside the trust sector, too. Healthy professional challenge is one thing. But when competition curdles into sneering, ridicule, or putting down other trusts, especially those working in different, complex contexts, it fractures the very system we are all meant to be stewarding. There is no lasting victory if the school down the road is failing, often at the expense of your own transient success.

This points to a wider, corrosive issue in our educational discourse: a polarised debate that exaggerates differences. The truth is, the best schools (traditional or progressive, academy or maintained) are far more similar in their core mission, their daily grind, and their care for children than the public debate would ever allow. We magnify philosophical distinctions to win arguments, while the shared reality of the work gets lost.

We have to build on what is demonstrably, empirically effective, and do so with a spirit of collective stewardship.

A final point of principle

Our door is open. In practice, not just in gesture. To anyone who starts from the question ‘what works?’ rather than ‘who owns it?’.

Because the only defensible response to our system is to rebuild it where the gradient is vertical. How else do we respond to the fact that in the 150 schools with the highest proportion of low-income White British students, just 11 achieved a positive value-added score for the cohort?

That number is the argument. It makes the case for everything we’ve said: for smarter accountability, for mission-driven collaboration, for skewing resource and recognition to where it’s needed most.

This is the collective struggle. It requires a collective fight.