On the one hand, there is growing evidence that schools can benefit from being part of a trust. On the other, recent Teacher Tapp findings suggest that many teachers would still prefer to work in a local authority-maintained school.
Taken together, those findings raise an important question. If MATs are helping schools improve, why does the model appear to hold so little appeal for many of the people working closest to pupils?
A recent Confederation of School Trusts study adds another layer to this debate. Looking at DfE performance data for around 12,400 schools between 2007 and 2025, CST found that academies moved up national attainment rankings more than local authority-maintained schools over the period studied.
Its analysis estimated that, if all schools had been in trusts, around 16,000 more secondary pupils each year would have achieved grade 4 or above in their English and maths GCSEs, while around 5,400 more primary pupils would have reached the expected standard in reading, writing and maths.
There are (naturally) important caveats:
That matters because the evidence does not tell us that academisation automatically improves outcomes. There is still considerable variation between trusts and between schools within them. But it does support the idea that being part of a strong trust can create the conditions for improvement.
Teacher Tapp asked teachers to imagine choosing between two otherwise identical schools (one maintained by the local authority and one belonging to an academy trust) and overall, 71% said they would choose the LA school, while just 10% opted for the trust school.
Even among teachers already working in trusts, the preference remained. 61% said they would choose the LA school, compared with 14% choosing the trust.
Might the size of a trust make a difference? Well, teachers were shown scenarios involving:
The preference for LA schools persisted throughout. Among teachers already working in LA schools, trust size made very little difference to their choice. Among teachers already working in trusts, there was more variation between a single-school trust and a 15-school trust, but beyond that, the pattern did not change significantly.
Teacher Tapp was careful not to overstate this finding, particularly because more questions would be needed to understand whether there is a tipping point among smaller trusts. Even so, the broad picture suggests that this is not simply about teachers being put off by the idea of working in a very large MAT.
So, it seems there's something deeper going on.
What Trust Leaders Are Seeing
This is especially interesting alongside some of the conversations we have been having recently with trust leaders.
In our conversation with Owen Jenkins and Samuel Thompson from Broad Horizons Education Trust, we talked about what scale can make possible. A trust can build specialist capacity that an individual school might struggle to sustain, share expertise across several schools, strengthen central services and reduce duplication.
But we also talked about the complexity that comes with growth. There are constant decisions to make about what should sit centrally and what should remain with individual schools, where consistency helps and where it risks becoming unnecessary uniformity.
That balance matters because schools and their are approaches are not carbon copies of each other: they each serve different communities, have different histories and face different challenges. The value of being part of a trust comes partly from what can be shared, but also from knowing what should remain local.
Our conversation with Ceri Jones, CEO of Inspires Multi-Academy Trust, repeatedly returned to culture, inclusion and community. Ceri spoke about taking on a struggling trust and why culture was one of the first areas he focused on, and much of the conversation centred on reaching some of the children and communities that education can find hardest to engage.
Those conversations hardly fit the stereotype of MATs as remote organisations concerned mainly with structures and standardisation. They were about people, leadership, capacity and outcomes for pupils.
And yet the Teacher Tapp findings suggest that, for many teachers, the model still carries a very different set of associations.
One possible explanation is that trust leaders and classroom teachers experience their organisations from very different vantage points.
At trust level, some of the benefits of scale are easy to see. A central finance team can strengthen financial planning, shared procurement can create efficiencies, specialist SEND or safeguarding expertise can support several schools, and trust-wide data can help identify patterns that would be harder to spot in isolation.
For a classroom teacher, the experience is much more immediate. They experience the policies they are asked to follow, the amount of information they have to record, the curriculum expectations placed on them, the freedom their school has to make decisions, and how close or distant decision-makers feel.
A process can make complete sense across 20 schools and still feel like another layer of bureaucracy in one classroom. A common policy may improve consistency across the organisation while also reducing a teacher’s sense of autonomy… and that may well be where (at least part of) the disconnect lies.
Trusts often talk about the benefits of scale, resilience and shared expertise. Teachers may be judging the same organisation through workload, autonomy, culture and the quality of day-to-day leadership.
Both perspectives are valid, but they tell us very different things.
Then there is also probably a question of identity that’s worth unpacking…
Teachers often feel a strong connection to their particular school, its pupils, its colleagues and the community they serve. That relationship (speaking from experience) can be highly local and deeply personal.
For some staff, belonging to a larger organisation may therefore, as mentioned above, feel more distant, even when the trust itself is trying to protect individual school identity.
Many MATs work hard to avoid becoming overly centralised, and some create strong professional communities that give teachers access to expertise, development and career opportunities they might not otherwise have. Sarah Barton, Juniper Education's CEO, reflected on this very point in her September blog.
But Perception still matters. The perceived value of a trust depends partly on how such collaboration is experienced in the schools that together make up that academy trust.
If trust leaders associate MATs with collaboration, shared expertise and greater capacity, while teachers associate them with standardisation, bureaucracy or decisions being made further away, there is a gap that needs understanding.
Some of that may be about communication, but some of it may also reflect genuine differences in how trusts are run.
The CST study and the Teacher Tapp findings look at different things, which is what makes them useful to consider together.
One asks whether schools appear to improve after joining trusts. The other gives us an insight into whether teachers actually want to work in them.
Educational outcomes have to remain central to any judgement about whether a school system is working. But the experience of the workforce matters too, particularly in a sector where recruitment and retention remain major challenges.
The CST findings also reinforce something that has been apparent in previous research: there is (unsurprisingly?) considerable variation between trusts. That suggests the most useful question may not be whether MATs work in the abstract, but what the strongest trusts are doing differently.
Our conversations with Owen Jenkins, Samuel Thompson and Ceri Jones suggest that these are already live questions for thoughtful trust leaders. The attainment evidence indicates that getting the model right can make a meaningful difference for pupils, while the Teacher Tapp findings suggest there is still a substantial gap between what trusts can deliver and how many teachers perceive their experience of working within them.
If MATs are going to play an increasingly important role in the school system, closing that gap matters.
Success cannot only be measured by whether schools improve after joining a trust. It also has to include whether the people working in those schools feel the benefits of being part of one.