Lucy Heller: Government needs to run the system, not try to run schools

Lucy Heller does not usually do media interviews.

Over her 22 years at Ark Schools - the 39-school multi-academy trust and charity with its fingerprints on a plethora of notable education organisations - there has been plenty she has wanted to talk about, but she’s tended to air her views in private: to ministers, to advisers and civil servants, to policy groups, to trusted peers, and to the hedge-fund backers of her organisation.

It’s proven an effective strategy for wielding influence.

“Few have done more to develop our education system in the last two decades [than Lucy],” argues Sam Freedman, who was an adviser to former education secretary Michael Gove and helped form the trust system we know today.

Indeed, a currently serving trust CEO describes her as the “matriarch” of the sector, and ministers and her peers have regularly called on her for advice. A change in government two years ago didn’t change that.

The rise of the trust system

But last month Tes revealed that Heller was stepping down as CEO of the Ark organisation, a role she was appointed to in 2012 following eight years as CEO of just the schools part of the charity (the two parts were essentially combined under her leadership at that point). Her role is now to be split, with a new leader in place for each of Ark’s school and charity arms.

So, freed from her position, is she now finally ready to air her views on the sector, and the role of trusts within it, more publicly?

Heller is certainly ready to be candid about the early days of the trust system. Ark was one of the early academy sponsors, with the renamed Burlington Danes Academy in West London its first school in September 2006. It slowly added more London schools in the following few years, but it was under the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition that growth for the fledgling trusts really accelerated.

The Gove-Gibb era

Post-2010, Ark expanded into Birmingham, added schools in Hastings and Portsmouth, and extended the provision of some of its primaries into all-throughs, growing from eight to 33 schools in just five years.

Ark was not alone. Many other trusts were growing even more rapidly, with one former CEO - REAch2’s Sir Steve Lancashire - describing the period to Tes as “building the plane as we flew it”, with trusts accumulating schools by competing in “beauty parades” for the governors of schools they wanted to take over.

Sir Dan Moynihan, CEO of 55-school trust The Harris Federation, recalls the period as one in which “the concept of chains of state schools, never mind those comprising previously failing schools, was brand new and uncharted territory, and in those early days we were all flying blind and making it up as we went along”.

The ‘Wild West’ of MAT growth

Heller says Ark tried to steer a cautious path during the period.

“I don’t think an end point was ever in the minds of that post-2010 government when they pushed the trust system,” she argues. “They were perhaps unduly optimistic that the system would be able to sort itself out in a coherent way, without the right direction or the right system for determining who could run trusts and who was allowed to grow their trust. It became quite ‘Wild West’ as a result.

“Our trustees had the discussion at the beginning that we would rather have 10 really great schools than 50 average schools. That focuses you: it slowed our growth, but we felt that was for the right reasons.”

The competition between trusts was fierce, not just for growth but for results - both provided the power to influence policy. Moynihan credits his relationship with Heller as ensuring that both forged better paths for pupils, and for the sector as a whole, during that period and beyond.

“We got on really well [personally], but behind the scenes Ark and Harris have always been fiercely competitive, and there is no doubt that has driven us both on to better performance,” he says. “I am grateful to Lucy for her friendship and for the competition. Her achievements are enormous, not just at Ark but across the system.”

School improvement focus

One of the main reasons why trusts expanded so rapidly during this time was that ministers believed MATs should be the vehicle for school improvement. Heller believes that narrative was - and still is - wrong.

“I think trusts, local authorities, Ofsted and the Department for Education need to be clear that we don’t, any of us, directly improve schools,” she says. “It’s what happens in schools that makes the difference.

“We all make a difference (we hope) by creating the systems and structures that make it possible to improve a school...when it works, trusts get the right people and systems in place for the school to improve. But what really matters in the end is what is happening, day to day, in the school. And that relies on the people in it.”

Heller believes there is a larger issue around role definition that goes beyond school improvement. She says we have reached a point now where the DfE, trusts and local authorities need “to pause, step back and think hard about our role in the sector”.

“What is it that we are designed to do, what is it we have the power to do, and where do each of us best fit in the system to have the most impact?” she asks.

School structures

Both former Conservative schools minister Nick Gibb and the current ministerial line-up at the DfE have been criticised for failing to understand the importance of structures in facilitating school excellence, while also being too obsessed with dictating the finer details of classroom practice that should be the remit of the headteacher.

Heller agrees with the general point that governments need to avoid temptation and stay in the lane they can be most effective in.

“There has always been a tension between the narrative politicians have leaned into about headteachers being at the centre of the system and central government’s desire to manage the detail of school life,” she says. “It is a very hard balance to strike - it would be good if government spent less time thinking about how schools should be run day to day and more about how they manage the system as a whole.”

Policy change in education

With, by some calculations, more than 100 changes coming schools’ way in the next 18 months, that’s likely a popular viewpoint. But do trusts still have a level of stigma attached to them that would make agreeing with Heller difficult in some quarters?

There are certainly members of the Labour Party who still feel animosity towards trusts, which is why education secretary Bridget Phillipson had to tread so carefully on structural reforms in her first 18 months at the DfE.

And yet the White Paper states that all schools should be part of a trust. Is this a sign that the opposition is now not strong enough for such a policy to be a political or polling risk to Phillipson?

“I think the Covid period changed the perception of trusts - you could see how they were supporting schools, the benefits of scale and the emphasis on working in community,” Heller says. “That’s not to say all trusts are doing things perfectly - they’re not - but it was a moment when a certain stereotyping of trusts became harder to land.”

Trust consolidation

She adds that trusts are showing more maturity now about what works and what does not, which also helps the sector’s reputation.

“Trusts can provide the scaffold that supports leaders to transform schools: operations that work smoothly, great curricula they can rely on, and assistance from other schools or the central team as needed,” Heller explains. “That’s not to say there isn’t variation across trusts, but I believe overall they’ve raised standards.”

The debate about the impact of trusts is a fierce one: the evidence base is highly nuanced. Conclusions are harder to draw because of the differences in trust size, geography and how they are run; the fact they are the intervention tool for underperforming schools; and the context that trusts are now the dominant structure of education.

Mergers and acquisitions

That first issue of variation between trusts stems partly from the lack of clear direction in that early 2010-2015 period and a failure to rectify this since. Heller believes the trust sector has realised it needs to take the reins on creating that coherence, which has led it to a recognition that it has to get over its innate competitiveness. However, she also thinks her peers in trusts need to push on even further on these matters.

“Trusts are getting much better at working together,” she argues. “And with the falling pupil rolls, the need for more geographical coherence and to share resources - cooperation is going to be critical. It’s starting to happen - we’ve been involved in some really good discussions with other trusts - but we all need to do this more.”

Heller leaves Ark just as it is about to add a northern outpost of nine schools, through a “merger” with Pontefract Academies Trust, which would increase Ark’s total number of schools to 48. Several other larger trusts are in the process of mergers - or seeking them - too, so the sector will likely look very different in 18 months’ time, with many more trusts of more than 20 schools than there are currently.

In an article for Tes last year, Mark McCourt, the CEO of Academy Transformation Trust, argued that the end point of MAT consolidation should be around 400 trusts, which would mean “trusts would be large enough to be educationally and financially resilient, yet small enough to sustain meaningful regional coherence”.

Post-Covid problems

Heller welcomes structural debates, but says we need to think hard about the “who’” and “why” of trust expansion.

“How do we have sensible discussions about ‘who are the trusts we want to see grow?’” she asks. “Are we thinking about trusts in a strategic way rather than just responsively?”

She concedes, though, that structures may not be at the top of many people’s minds at the moment. She says the challenges schools are facing are the hardest she has seen while running Ark.

Attendance, behaviour, engagement with school, parental complaints and other challenges seem to many to be impenetrable to intervention. Heller is clear that schools are dealing with the symptoms of a wider issue, rather than being a fundamental part of the cause.

“The world right now feels very hard for a lot of people,” she argues. “At some level, there was an implicit expectation that some sort of reward would come after the sacrifices of Covid. We worked hard, we got through it, we pitched in. Instead, it’s closer to the experience of the Second World War - after the war what followed was a period of austerity.”

Heller is not leaving because she’s lost the enthusiasm for the sector amid these challenges. She says she still finds the sector “all-engrossing and completely absorbing after 22 years”. She’ll miss it, and female leaders, in particular, say they will miss her: the world of the big MATs has historically been dominated by men, and Heller carved a space as a role model for female CEOs.

The next generation of leaders

More broadly, though, she is credited by many as being a key player - be it structurally through organisations like Future Leaders, or privately with support and mentoring - in helping to raise the next generation of leaders who will follow her.

“Lucy’s own generosity with her time and wisdom has quietly shaped a generation of education leaders,” says Becks Boomer-Clark, CEO at 59-school Lift Schools. “Because of her, Ark has remained at the forefront of the academies movement for two decades; never allowing achievement to become complacency and always asking what could be better for young people. That same spirit of generosity has seen Ark incubate ideas, organisations and leaders whose influence extends across the sector.”

Will Heller continue to have an influence on education in a future role? She is tight-lipped about what is in store for her next. However, she admits that her passion is still very much for changing the lives of young people, and for a sector that has dominated a significant proportion of her working life.

“I still absolutely love education,” she says. “I still find it surprising, and I still learn new things every day.”