New Year, new policy. Last week secretary of state Bridget Phillipson confirmed that multi-academy trusts will be inspected. Inspections could begin in the 2027-2028 academic year.

But how “out there” is the idea of trust-level inspection? Having recently completed an 18-month study of 14 countries’ accountability systems, for the Centre for Education Systems, I can say that it’s unusual but not unique.

How does school accountability work around the world?

Accountability links different players in the education system together: teachers, headteachers, schools, inspectorates and ministries.

The most obvious way to do that is through a step-by-step “chain of command”, with each player having to account for how well they’ve done their job. Teachers report to their head; a local superintendent keeps track of how an area’s schools are doing; and the ministry keeps tabs on its superintendents. If anyone’s not doing their bit, extra help can be brought in. Or someone can be fired.

Singapore is the archetype of that approach - and it can work pretty well in a country half the size of Greater London, with only 6 million people.

Larger countries like Japan have to work at a larger scale, so they make more use of local government. That’s what England used to do with its local authorities.

If power isn’t handed down to local government, it can be delegated to regional divisions, which is what happens in France.

But chains of command are not the only way accountability can work, as our Nuffield Foundation-funded study shows. Sometimes it’s groups of schools that have to account for their performance, and that’s where last week’s announcement comes in.

Is the MAT system unique to the UK?

Although MATs are quite an unusual structure by global standards, other countries have their own forms of multi-school operators or proprietors.

In Ireland, school patrons own and manage groups of schools. They have legal responsibility to run their schools in accordance with a specific ethos or characteristic spirit. However, their upwards accountability is limited, a bit like religious dioceses in England.

In Ontario, Canada, schools are run by boards. These can vary in size. The Toronto District School Board has more than 500 schools. Others have as few as one. Boards often align with specific language and religious communities - for example, by providing French Catholic education.

Ontario’s school boards are very powerful, but citizens have a hand in holding the reins by directly electing board members. Slots are also sometimes specifically reserved for indigenous community representatives.

The Netherlands, meanwhile, has approximately 1,300 school boards and in 2017 the inspectorate transferred much of its attention from individual schools to boards. This integrated boards into a hierarchical approach that’s more typical of chains of command.

Systems with school operators (like MATs) are typically “polycentric”, because accountability is shared across multiple centres of power, including partially independent bodies outside of the ministry. Participants are linked together through “diagonal” relationships - as the diagram below shows.

So how do these diagonal relationships typically work? And where does Phillipson’s plan sit compared with other countries?

Firstly, MAT-level accountability itself isn’t really a novelty in England, since funding agreements with trusts can be terminated. Until Labour abolished the Education and Skills Funding Agency last March, this “contractual” approach to accountability involved yet another participant, which can be roughly categorised as a “regulatory authority”. Now the Department for Education plays that role itself, often via its local representative, the regional director.

Countries like France use somewhat similar contractual approaches to manage a relatively small number of state-funded private schools. But contractual accountability is extremely unusual within state education systems.

A second source of accountability for trusts is that they often develop a particular reputation. In areas where there is a lot of school choice (particularly in densely populated cities), this leads to “market”- or choice-based accountability.

What will MAT inspections deliver?

The announcement of MAT inspections doesn’t change any of that. Phillipson’s plan simply formalises a more hierarchical approach to accountability.

I say “formalises” because, in practice, regional directors often already worked this way, and batch inspections of a trust’s schools somewhat fudged the issue.

The DfE’s announcement is also part of an underlying shift towards a more hands-on approach, which also underpins the introduction of Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams. It’s an approach that contrasts with “new public management” approaches to public services, where the state contracts for outcomes and steps back from day-to-day delivery.

Whether or not you think this is a shift for the better will likely depend on where you sit on the political spectrum.

The real question for the government’s upcoming White Paper is “what will group-level inspection look like, and how will it help?”. Unlike a think tank, our job at CES is not to make recommendations ourselves. However, in my previous work for the IPPR I set out a distinct role for trust inspection.

I argued that “trust-level [inspection] reports should provide the regulator with an independent assessment of the effectiveness of support a trust provides. Regional directors should combine this information with their local insight to make decisions about the most appropriate route to improvement”.

In other words, rather than duplicating school inspections, group-level inspections should focus on how school operators are helping their network - and the wider ecosystem - to improve.

More than anything, CES’ detailed comparative analysis of 14 education systems shows that the full “web” of accountability in an education system needs to be mapped out to identify where pressure sits, how it stacks up and how different mechanisms support or undermine each other.

England already has one of the most complex and messy accountability systems in the world, and there is a risk that MAT inspections could add another layer of accountability without freeing up any space.

Simpler isn’t always better, but with a new school inspection system only just coming into force, trust inspection can’t just be a bolt-on developed in isolation.

Loic Menzies is chief research officer for the Centre for Education Systems and senior research associate at Jesus College Intellectual Forum, Cambridge University

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