There’s a quiet revolution happening in England’s education system, and it’s been happening for some time. It’s not led by headline reforms or central mandates, but by school trusts choosing to work together in increasingly intelligent and purposeful ways. It is about collaboration.
And collaboration between trusts is not happening because they’re directed to collaborate or incentivised to by external accountability.
It’s because they understand that the scale and complexity of school improvement requires shared thinking, shared learning and mutual support. And it’s because trusts are civic organisations that exist to improve education for the public benefit - for all children, not only the children within their own school gates.
Trust collaboration isn’t new. But the way trusts are doing it now - codifying practice, building shared definitions of quality, connecting expertise across the sector - is maturing. It is sharper, more deliberate and more ambitious.
Collaboration between trusts
Over the past year the Confederation of School Trusts has been working with ImpactED to collect real-world evidence from across the sector, using our conceptual model of trust-led improvement as a framework. We’ve had submissions from trusts responsible for more than 1,200 schools.
What we’ve seen is clear: this is not a sector waiting for permission to collaborate but getting on with it. Trusts are codifying their definitions of quality, creating cross-trust subject and professional networks and designing improvement cycles that bring coherence for teachers and leaders and support them in their work.
Some of this collaboration happens within trusts, but much of it extends beyond organisational boundaries. Increasingly, we see trusts learning from one another - through peer review partnerships, shared CPD days and the open exchange of tools and resources.
The synthesis report we’re publishing today is testament to this collaborative spirit. It draws together insights from across the country and would simply not have been possible without the authentic desire of trusts to share and learn with each other.
This is the basis of a wider body of sector knowledge being curated and shared through the .
The Hub now features seven detailed case studies, capturing how trusts with compelling track records of improvement are designing and delivering improvement at scale. Alongside these are expert papers from Steplab and Evidence Based Education exploring the relationship between theory and practice.
We’re grateful to the many trusts that have shared their insights over the past 12 months through blogs, podcasts, webinars, conference presentations and more. None of this has been top-down. It’s sector-led, peer-developed and openly shared.
Insights into school improvement
The practices we’re seeing are both diverse and coherent. In some trusts curriculum frameworks are fully aligned; in others there’s more flexibility, but with common principles that act as a spine.
What unites these trusts is clarity: about what improvement means, what quality looks like and how expertise is curated and built. For example:
- At WISE Academies trust-wide secondments give teachers and support staff the chance to lead initiatives beyond their own schools.
- At Lighthouse Schools Partnership schools are matched with statistical neighbours to ensure relevant, context-aware collaboration.
- At Windsor Academy Trust annual “school summits” bring leaders together to study teaching trends and highlight bright spots for shared learning.
Such practices are increasingly moving between trusts and schools. We saw evidence of this in our 2024 annual survey, which showed that trusts are providing a wide range of support across the education sector, with 90 per cent working with schools outside their own trust - including 72 per cent working with maintained schools.
Growing wisdom and deepening practice
It’s also why today more than 250 trust leaders are coming together at - not because they’ve been asked to, but because they believe that collective insight strengthens practice. That’s what a self-improving system looks like.
Of course, challenges remain.
Improvement is complex, context-sensitive work. Trusts are making careful decisions about what to align and where to allow for context-driven variation. They are investing in leadership, developing internal research capacity and refining their models through lived experience. There is no recipe - but there is growing wisdom.
And as that wisdom has grown, so, too, has the infrastructure for sharing it. The work we’re leading at the Hub is just one part of this, but there are numerous sector-led networks that bring together trusts on a range of issues, from estates to CPD.
Government is right to wax lyrical about the benefits of collaboration, and it is right for the sector to challenge itself to see where it can be even better.
But the welcome news is that trusts are already doing it - and they are doing it well. The task now is to keep deepening the practice, surfacing the learning and supporting each other to take it further.
Because trust-led improvement isn’t something on the horizon. It’s already here. And it’s being built together.
Steve Rollett is deputy chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts
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