The moral calculus: taking on schools where the need is greatest

What do you take on when you say ‘yes’ to Croxteth? A closure notice. Two Inadequate judgements in a row. A deficit so deep it threatens every decision. A building that's literally crumbling. On top of all that, a complex shift to becoming co-educational. That was the reality waiting for us.

So, the decision was never going to be a spreadsheet exercise. How could it be? But that is not how we have ever done things. It became a moral reckoning. We sat with it, argued it through. The operational risks were immense, but the moral imperative was clear. For our trust, in that moment, there was only one answer we could live with. This is about the weight of that 'yes'. It's about the scale of the challenge – not just in one Liverpool community, but in a system where that challenge repeats itself.

Our mission is the only compass

For our trust, the calculus is always moral before it is logistical. And that isn’t to be worthy (and many could read it as foolhardy), it is just a really long-learnt-lesson. So familiar to us as to be indecipherable between the way we are and who we are. The schools that need the most help are often (always?) the least attractive propositions. Financial sinkholes, reputational risks, operational nightmares. They aren’t what we want, they are what we can’t walk away from. Taking them on drains our central capacity and stretches our leaders to elastic limits.

We knew Dixons Croxteth Academy would be all of this. We also knew that within its walls were children being let down, and a proud community being underserved. This work rightly invites scrutiny of our methods. What we cannot accept is a questioning of our fundamental intent. To do the right thing for children in communities to which we are deeply connected is our non-negotiable imperative. It was this, and the scale of our trust that (almost) provides a financial and operational safety net, that made us say ‘yes’. As someone from Merseyside, I feel this outsider-to-insider responsibility acutely; we are part of the community, we love the community, we are not a distant operator.

Our trust journey illustrates this. There was a time when we were consistently ranked among the very top trusts in the country for academic results. We are not in that position today. That is the direct consequence of our choice - the conscious, repeated decision to take on the most complex schools where the need is greatest. We traded a position at the top of the league tables for the chance to make a difference where it matters most. It was, and remains, the only right thing to do.  If you want to judge us, you will have to wait years. And it won’t be the data that will be worth the celebration, it will be mission fulfilment.

Understanding the gradient: the national picture

To feel the true weight of saying 'yes' to Dixons Croxteth Academy, you have to understand the gradient of the climb. It wasn’t a hill; it was a cliff face. The national data outlines a brutal, honest picture.

The evidence is unequivocal: schools in the most challenged communities don't just have further to travel, they're scaling a different surface. The path to 'headline' improvement is exponentially steeper. This isn't about any one place or any one community: it's a systemic truth riven with the complexities and idiosyncrasies that make it hard to map learning from one ‘complex’ community to another.  The depth of the complexity may map, the specificity may not. To give one stark example: of the 150 schools with the highest proportion of low-income White British students, just 11 had a positive value-added score at cohort level.

When you step into that context, the operational reality hits you. Hard. The financial risk isn't just higher, it's volatile. It feels like a million things need a million pounds and all of them are urgent and desperate and essential. The capacity required isn't just greater, it's constant and draining. You are trying to stop the roof caving (non-metaphorically) while the culture is on fire (hopefully metaphorically) and all you really want to think about is making highly effective classrooms. It is like a daily recruitment in-tray task where every item could trump the next and, by the time you have read the list, a new set of items had arrived all more compelling an insurmountable than the original. It is both impossible and impossible not to do the work. You're rebuilding the engine while flying the plane.

You see this gradient play out even within the strongest trusts. It's entirely possible for a trust to have one school at the national pinnacle, celebrated on the front page, and another (using the same model, the same leadership principles, the same relentless effort) on a years-long journey (littered with false starts and summits) from the same starting point of deep complexity. That disparity doesn't indict the model. It reveals the terrain. Never misjudge or undervalue the graft happening on the steeper slopes.

The human weight and the trust's role

Saying 'yes' means backing our model and, most importantly, our people. I lie awake worrying about the toll on our principals. The social media vitriol, the deeply pointed criticism, the 24/7 weight of carrying a community's hopes. They are public servants operating under the most intense scrutiny. The pressure is relentless. The accountability they feel is human and personal.

They tell us they would not lead such complex schools if they were standalone. This is where the collaborative strength of an effective trust becomes non-negotiable. It is the collective safety net with shared expertise, financial resilience, and an operational backbone that makes such courageous leadership possible. It provides the scale to absorb risk and the capacity to skew resource to the point of greatest need, like a crumbling building in Dixons Croxteth Academy. This model allows us to skew savings directly to the frontline, supporting more teachers and giving them greater agency. This isn't bureaucracy, it's the essential infrastructure for mission-led work in the places that need it most.

Making the decision is just the start. It commits us to a years-long journey of stabilisation and growth on the steepest gradient the system has to offer. The process is messy, non-linear, and often misunderstood. In the next article, I'll pull back the curtain on what that work actually looks like, the model we follow, the mistakes we've made, and why judging it from the outside is rarely fair or accurate.