With the resources and influence of local authorities in decline, academy chains have emerged - with government backing - as the new powers in England’s schools system.

But now a third force is evolving. Local school leaders are seeking to forge new formal partnerships across their areas, creating their own “middle tier” to fill the vacuum left by the retreat of local councils.

The groupings are growing in number and are increasingly being seen as a reaction to risk-averse multi-academy trusts (MATs), which are reluctant to take on difficult or “untouchable” schools. By contrast, these new groups often adopt a “no school left behind” approach.

Alastair Falk, an education consultant who has helped convene a new group of about 20 such school partnerships, said: “The risk and danger around the MAT landscape is that you have different empires emerging, and the question is how do they relate to each other, and what do you do with schools that are left behind.

There has to be more than the market governing our decisions

“What these organisations are trying to do is retain a sense of locality, and a sense of obligation to all schools in that locality.”

He said that these new partnerships were “happening in lots of different areas”, and added: “I do think this is a new wave, because what else is there out there? There are regional schools commissioners, who are also reasonably new, but it’s definitely around that middle tier, and it’s about school-led systems.”

The inclusive school partnerships currently being formed are diverse, reflecting the different priorities of different areas. But moral purpose emerged as a common theme during discussions between the partnerships in Mr Falk’s group, which held a “Beyond MATs” forum last month.

Former Labour education secretary Baroness Morris, who chaired the meeting, said that the groupings were an answer to the question: “Who holds the ring for education as a public good in a geographical area?”

She argued that the national system understood what children across the country had in common, but not the differences.

New local school partnerships could help with important questions such as, “If we want to take responsibility for children we do not teach, how do we do it?”, Baroness Morris said.

“There has to be more than the market governing the decisions we take, and there’s that feeling that we are losing touch with that feeling of this place, as a place,” she added.

Sharing of resources

The group of 20 partnerships has formed an as-yet-unnamed umbrella body that aims to share experiences from across the country in order to save others from “reinventing the wheel” when they start forging new partnerships in their areas.

Of the existing organisations, the most established include the Birmingham Education Partnership (BEP), a group of 300 schools, and Herts for Learning, a not-for-profit company with 521 shareholder schools.

I think there will be a sharing of resources - business managers, curriculum experts, leadership experts

Many people at the forum said the need to set up and develop new groupings had become more urgent ahead of the £600 million cut to the Education Services Grant next August, and the reductions in councils’ work with schools that would follow.

Meanwhile, Nigel Hookway, the executive director of the Essex Primary Headteachers’ Association, said that such geographical partnerships could help to address some of the financial difficulties schools were facing.

He said only “a few” schools in the county were not engaging, telling TES: “I think there will be a sharing of resources - business managers, curriculum experts, leadership experts.”

Tim Boyes, chief executive of BEP, said that the new partnerships had a “moral purpose” for their whole geographical area and could act as honest brokers for schools whose difficulties were too great for MATs to risk sponsoring them.“Sometimes it requires a team effort, rather than a heroic sponsor turning a school around in a very short space of time,” he added.