Education: Multi Academy Trusts

Lord Lingfield Excerpts

Wednesday 6th April 2022 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Lingfield]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the growth of Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) in the school system, and the ways in which strong MATs can demonstrate their impact on the education of young people.

[Lord Lingfield (Con)]

My Lords, I am so grateful to all noble Lords who have put down their names to speak on this important aspect of our state education service. I remind your Lordships of my education interests as listed in the register.

If your Lordships would indulge me, I shall take a few minutes to look back and outline the policies that led to multi-academy trusts as we know them today and to put on record my occasional involvement in them. In the mid-1980s, I wrote a policy paper for the then Education Secretary, Sir Keith Joseph, entitled Give Schools Their Own Cheque Book. He was excited by these ideas and asked the then Schools Minister, Bob Dunn, to look into them. Luckily, when Sir Keith left office, they were taken up by his successor, now the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking. He saw that what was called local management of schools, giving most schools much more control of their own funding for everything except salaries, was added to the Education Reform Act 1988.

Just as importantly, schools were given the opportunity by that Act, as I had recommended, to opt out of local government control by a ballot of their parents. These were called grant-maintained schools, which were separate, autonomous, incorporated bodies, centrally funded per capita by the funding agency for schools. I was appointed by the Government to lead an organisation that encouraged and assisted schools wishing to opt out, and supported them once they had done so. I pay tribute to the many pioneering head teachers who sought that freedom and made excellent use of it to improve the standards in their schools.

The underlying philosophy was, of course, that autonomy would release schools to be far more responsive to the needs of students, their parents and local employers, and that the important education decisions would be taken by the professionals on the spot, guided by independent governors, and not by a town hall or Whitehall. I shall return to that principle a little later. I remember one head saying to me, “At last I have the authority to match my responsibilities.” Indeed, those schools had a freedom of action unknown outside the independent sector for many decades.

By every then available notification or measurement, those schools demonstrated great improvements. By the time that the incoming Labour Government’s 1998 Act had abolished grant-maintained status, over one-fifth of secondary schools were in the new sector, and some hundreds of primaries. These were returned wholly or partly to the control of local authorities. However, the idea of autonomy for state schools had been born, and I am glad to say that it was kept alive by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, when he produced a policy of independent city academies early on in the Labour Government. These at first were required to have commercial sponsors prepared to contribute up to £2 million to capital costs. That condition was later dropped and, in 2002, the word “city” was omitted from their title. The programme went rather more slowly than we had hoped, but there were 203 of these original academies by 2010.

The incoming coalition Secretary of State was my right honourable friend Michael Gove. He had been impressed during opposition by the Swedish project to allow parents and trusts to create free schools, and this was to be one of the reforms of the new coalition Government. There are some 550 such free schools today.

However, he will tell you that he and David Cameron were persuaded by me that a further policy was needed—one based on the grant-maintained schools of the 1990s—so the ensuing Academies Act 2010 allowed schools’ governing bodies to propose that they be converted to academy status. These so-called converter academies, created as exempt charities, were given a great deal of independence, particularly in the setting of staff salaries and divergences from the national curriculum. All schools which had been graded by Ofsted as outstanding were invited to apply and, by January 2011, 407 schools were accorded the new status.

From the beginning, it had always been recognised that, whereas many schools would wish to remain separate, individual establishments, others would be more comfortable in groups. Some of these groups would be informal and take advantage of, for instance, bulk purchase arrangements for goods and services, such as ground maintenance, and others would be formally gathered under the same legal trustees. These latter would become the multi-academy trusts as we now know them, which are the subject of today’s debate.

Eleven years later, there is now a total of 1,460 multi- academy trusts managing two schools or more. Of these trusts, 41% have five schools or fewer; 18% have between six and 11; 6% have between 12 and 25; and about 2% have more than 25 schools. Last year, 37% of primary schools and 78% of secondary schools had academy status, and the numbers are slowly rising.

Last week’s White Paper looks forward to:

“A fully trust led system with a single regulatory approach”.


Although the regulatory approach is not explained in detail, there is specific commitment to avoid converting schools as stand-alone academies and the expectation that most trusts will be on a trajectory to serve a minimum of 7,500 pupils, or at least 10 schools, by 2030.

Multi-academy trusts are therefore here to stay, and most of them are doing extraordinarily well, but the trend is towards larger ones. At the moment, some have 50 schools or more. This trend is worrying, because the most recent statistics, from 2019, demonstrate how those trusts are doing. To measure primary schools, a percentage of pupils reaching an agreed acceptable standard in literacy and numeracy was used. For instance, the Staffordshire Schools Multi Academy Trust had 90% of pupils meeting those standards. What stands out clearly is that all the trusts in the top 10 primary achievers comprised four or fewer schools and the largest primary multi-academy trusts did uniformly badly, the highest scoring of these ranking at number 32.

For secondary schools, the measurement was of the percentage of students achieving the English baccalaureate at grade 5/C or above. Seven out of the top 10 secondary trusts had five or fewer schools, and the remaining had six, eight and 10, respectively. Throughout, the larger multi-academy trusts did poorly compared to the smaller trusts, and by far the majority of high-performing trusts had fewer than 10 schools. The conclusion from this is inescapable: if we want pupils to do well, they ought to be in either stand-alone outstanding schools or in the smaller multi-academy trusts.

The Government ought therefore to consider reviewing their aims in the White Paper better to reflect the actualities of high achievement in the trusts and make about 10 schools the highest number, as opposed to the target number, to be looked after by a single trust. Large trusts having above this number ought to be gradually dissolved and separated into the hands of smaller trusts, where they would flourish.

There are also in the system at the moment a large number of outstanding stand-alone academies, as well as stand-alone voluntary schools. Among these, for instance, are the 163 grammar schools. It would be completely unacceptable for many of these schools to be coerced into multi-academy trusts. For many of them, their centuries-old rules and regulations would not allow it. My advice to the Government is to leave them well alone if they are achieving well alone.

Why are the small multi-academy trusts and many of the stand-alone academies doing well? I suggest it is because they use their autonomy wisely to be responsive to student and parental needs—parents are well represented on their governing bodies—and because they better understand the needs of local people and local employers. Large trusts are likely to be less encouraging of initiatives by individual schools and more likely to envelop their schools in bureaucracy. My visits to large trust schools suggest that their heads are rather too willing to refer important decisions upwards to the trust bosses, instead of taking them themselves. Some of these large trusts encompass schools many miles apart, yet they tend towards a one-size-fits-all approach to management.

Advocates of larger trusts mention that schools in them can achieve economies of scale, share many resources, centralise functions and ensure robust financial management. In fact, a small trust can achieve all these and more, and, as these statistics show, improve classroom standards as well. Some of the big trusts have recently come under criticism for paying their chief executives very large salaries. Indeed, some 30 trust chiefs earn more than £200,000 per annum—£40,000 more than the Prime Minister’s salary—including seven at between £250,000 and £500,000. If, as the performance figures suggest, larger trusts are not doing as well as the smaller trusts, it is difficult to defend these very high earnings paid from public money.

A policy of larger and larger multi-academy trusts and the disappearance of stand-alone academy schools would inevitably lead to two unwelcome consequences. First, there is the risk that standards will drop rather than improve for those schools as their trust gets larger. Secondly, there is likely to be less responsiveness to local needs. Many authorities ran their schools inefficiently, but at least they could claim a local democratic mandate. Localised multi-academy trusts tend to be responsive, because they have local business men and women and parents on their governing bodies.

Clearly, if standards are to rise throughout the school service, we need as much flexibility as we can achieve within it. We need a large number of autonomous, stand-alone outstanding schools and trusts of two, three or four schools—all trusts having fewer than about 10. We need to give schools already in large trusts the right, if they can prove their worth, to opt out of those trusts and go it alone. The more variety there is in the system, the more highly achieving it will be. The White Paper looks forward to

“a dynamic system of strong trusts … to improve schools”.

I agree with this entirely. A strong trust, however, need not be a large one. All the indications are that it should not be. Large trusts were seen as essential when the policy began—I remember it well—but now they could be standing in the way of progress. As I said, I believe they should be divided into smaller units where necessary.

No one could be more supportive of the concept of academies than me, and I have not changed my view that the best schools are led by first-class heads and dedicated local governors, untrammelled by unnecessary bureaucracy, regulation and interference from government at all levels, and are given as much autonomy within the system as possible.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lingfield (Con)]

My Lords, I thank everyone for taking part in this extraordinarily useful debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Blower, is absolutely right that, of course, before local management of schools came in, there were some very good experiments in the Inner London Education Authority and in Solihull—I agree with her entirely.

My noble friend Lady Berridge was absolutely correct that we have to bear in mind the people in what she called the back office of schools, who are neglected too often, I am afraid. Her remarks about school buildings were very apposite.

I entirely agree with my noble friend Lady Fleet. I am the chairman of the English Schools’ Orchestra, and I know that she knows the huge importance of music and its effects, which are much wider than just the musical curriculum, on the whole of the education system.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, made some extraordinarily useful remarks. I would not want to see the worst aspects of local education authorities—there were some—recreated in a large MAT. I know that the noble Lord agrees with that. I hope that the Minister bears that in mind. The noble Lord said that they should be “free to innovate”, which of course all of us approve of, as far as the curriculum is concerned.

The noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, made some very important points and repeated mine—I was very grateful to him for doing so—concerning schools’ ability to leave multi-academy trusts if, of course, they could prove to the Secretary of State perhaps, or some other group of people who had the expertise to decide, that they could go it alone and improve the quality of their service to their pupils by doing so.

I am grateful to my noble friend for all the care that she has taken in her reply. She has given us much to think about and discuss, and I repeat my thanks to noble Lords for giving up their time this evening, on almost the last day of term. I wish everyone a very happy Recess.

Motion agreed.