Trusts really do make a positive difference, CST research shows

An independently verified analysis shows that over the past two decades the movement of schools into trusts has delivered the kind of improvement the policy was intended to achieve, with thousands of children achieving better outcomes than they would have done without the reform.

Previous research has struggled to provide a longitudinal evaluation of trusts’ impact because of shifting sands in key stage 4 grading and performance measures, and changes to tests in KS2.

Our analysis takes a different approach, looking at every school in England over almost two decades and examining where they fell in the national distribution for the measures of the time. By tracking changes we can see how far schools have improved or declined relative to their peers.

With just over half of schools in England now in a trust, it’s a good time to explore whether schools have moved up or down the national distribution since they became academies.

The academy angle

The analysis finds that academy schools have moved almost 6 percentile points up the national attainment distribution, while other state-funded schools have stood still or declined slightly in the distribution.

To be clear, this isn’t a criticism of local authorities or local authority schools. Nor does it mean that real standards have declined in those schools. There are good people doing good work in all parts of our education system.

What the analysis does show, however, is that academies have - on average - made more progress up the national attainment distribution than schools that are not academies over the past two decades. This suggests there is a capacity for improvement that organising schools into trusts has brought, which we can see in the evidence.

It is worth remembering how we got here.

How we got here

The Labour government of the early 2000s recognised, rightly, that some schools had experienced generations of underperformance, often in disadvantaged communities with the most to lose. Too often these schools and their responsible bodies had struggled to bring about the necessary change.

As a former minister from that time once put it to me, academies were fundamentally a bet on governance.

The proposition was that changing who governed a school could change its capacity to improve: bringing expert governance and people who understood how to improve struggling schools - and had done it before - closer to where they were needed.

The story has evolved considerably since. Academies, which now account for more than half of England’s schools, increasingly came together in multi-academy trusts.

Our analysis finds that schools that joined a trust improved more than comparable schools that, in terms of governance arrangements, operated alone.

The power of devolution

Today the average school trust has around nine schools: a substantially more agile and focused organisational unit than the local authorities of circa 2005, which maintained around 150 schools on average.

Even the largest trusts combine a close focus on school improvement with forms of internal accountability and organisational responsiveness that are difficult to replicate in other types of responsible body.

One might argue that the effect of moving schools into trusts has been to devolve leadership to those best placed to make the necessary decisions to drive improvement.

There are reasons to be confident that this is a genuine effect associated with joining a trust, rather than simply a “selection effect” caused by the particular schools that became academies, or “regression to the mean” - poorly performing schools subsequently improving anyway.

Using non-academy, state-funded schools over the same years to construct a counterfactual, the analysis attributes four of the almost 6 percentile points to trust membership.

Tighten the comparison, matching schools with similar pupil intakes and prior performance trajectories, and the difference is 6 percentile points.

Benefits to disadvantaged communities

The greatest impact has been in the most disadvantaged communities. Much of this reflects the improvement of schools sponsored into trusts after being judged “inadequate”. These schools were overwhelmingly in disadvantaged areas and improved by 15.8 ranking places compared with similar schools that had not yet been sponsored.

What does that mean for children? The scale of improvement that accounts for this shift is equivalent to around 500,000 students achieving 1-2 GCSE grades higher in a GCSE subject each year, or 16,000 more achieving 4 or better in English and maths.

At primary, the equivalent is an additional 5,400 pupils reaching the expected standard in reading, writing and maths each year. Remember, the biggest gains are for schools with higher proportions of disadvantaged pupils.

The analysis has undergone validation by an expert academic Professor Daniel Muijs of Queen’s University Belfast.

We also commissioned an independent analysis from ImpactEd that explores similar territory, looking particularly at sponsor schools but using a different methodology. The findings point in a similar direction. Taken together, these findings point to a capacity for improvement within the trust model.

This government is rightly concerned with spreading opportunity more equitably. The evidence of the past two decades is revealing: trusts have delivered improvement, with particularly substantial gains in disadvantaged communities.

This lends support to this year’s schools White Paper direction to see all schools, over time, join a trust. It also suggests that the direction of devolution should ensure that leaders, close to the ground and working together in tight families of schools, continue to be empowered to make the changes children need.

Steve Rollett is deputy CEO of the Confederation of Schools Trusts