After years of rapid - and often incoherent - growth in the trust sector, consolidation is not just inevitable but necessary. And mergers will be the process by which much of that consolidation happens.
There are trusts with unworkable geographic footprints, trusts struggling to make the numbers add up financially, trusts that grew too quickly and have struggled to scale support and structures accordingly, and trusts with retiring CEOs for whom no one is willing (or suitable) to step in.
All will be looking at (or will be forced to look at) a merger as an option to solve their challenges.
Trust mergers
There is also the fact that size increasingly matters economically. There was a time when 10 schools - or 8,000 pupils - was deemed a large enough organisation to reap financial benefits of scale. That target then shifted to 20,000 pupils. And with the Department for Education looking for even more efficiencies in schools, that target will be moving decidedly higher.
As such, where trusts in the two to seven schools bracket would previously have felt vulnerable to approach from ambitious eight- to 15-school trusts, the latter may also now be looking over their shoulder at the trusts in the 16- to 30-school bracket. The feeling of “grow or be eaten by a bigger trust” is now being felt by many more CEOs than ever before, and mergers will be seen as the best route out of “danger”.
All this may lead to behaviours that would not be positive for the sector.
The economic stability of MATs
If trust survival, rather than the best outcomes for pupils, is the driver behind seeking to grow through merger, then the move is unlikely to be successful, and will likely reinforce structural challenges in the system, not fix them.
Likewise, hyper-competitiveness between trusts in seeking growth will break down routes to vital collaboration between trusts.
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Thankfully, there are ways we can mitigate these risks and ensure that consolidation makes sense for all involved.
There are currently around 1,350 multi-academy trusts and around 1,000 single-academy trusts. What every single one of them needs to evidence is that they are doing the very best for their pupils and have a clear narrative on why they are best placed to deliver that education.
Growth strategy
If a trust can’t do both of those things, then seeking to merge into a trust that can would be wise.
If a trust can do it and wants to grow through merger, it needs to be able to prove that it can do so in a way that will not only benefit the pupils of the trust it is merging with but will also not be detrimental to those already in the trust.
And as Nick Cross, CEO of King’s Group Academies, wrote for Tes this week, trust leaders need to be able to communicate that to all stakeholders effectively, too.
Ensuring that all of this happens should be the job of the increasingly stretched regional directors, but if the sector is to be seen as professional and mature in its ability to self-regulate, then it should be a job being made easy by trusts proactively doing it already.
Jon Severs is editor at Tes
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