The MAT ‘journey’ first started with The Education Reform Act (1988) with the move toward a more individual approach to education. This was developed with the Academies Act (2010) for schools to convert into academies or build entirely new academies proposed by local authorities. By 2019, there were 1,170 MATs in England, with almost 3.8 million pupils attending academies.
Academies put emphasis on schools, governors and parents to take more control, and thus become more competitive and drive up school standards.
The main reasons for schools to join a Multi-Academy Trust are to become more efficient, effectively sharing resources and increasing collaboration. It is important that schools who join a MAT maintain their identity, but there is also a degree of autonomy, alignment and consistency to assist the MAT in its role of overseeing the performance of the schools. Successful MATs address certain key questions. These include:-
- Does your MAT know it's schools strengths and areas of development?
- Does your MAT have a fair model for developing staff and managing performance?
- Does your MAT have a clear system for identifying not only the best leaders and teaching staff, but also future leaders, and which schools have strengths in specific phases or subjects?
- Are the MAT central team and lead practitioners strategically being used to support other schools, model good practice and coach peers?
- How well does the MAT tackle school performance?
At SchooliP we understand the importance that a MAT places on developing systems that provide easy visibility of what is happening within their schools. We have worked, in partnership with our MAT community, to create an easy to use dashboard that allows the central team to analyse and compare true live performance data.
The pursuit of school improvement requires robust systems and processes with a clear reporting mechanism for trustees, board members, executives and schools. The functions within SchooliP, which include appraisal, monitoring, the SDP and SEF, generate a wealth of individual and collective data. Individual schools can be monitored at the board level by using our MAT overview feature.
How does SchooliP support the Multi-Academy Trust?
The MAT SDP Dashboard
We have worked in partnership with our MAT community to create an easy-to-use SDP dashboard that allows MATs to easily and instantly compare live, in real-time, The School Development Plans across their academies. Our approach to our SDP dashboard assists MATs in creating rigorous, robust, and accurate improvement planning.
From the MAT dashboard, the central team is able to easily access an academy's SDP, to ‘deep dive’ and gain a greater understanding of progress against priorities, objectives, and activities and the related evidence. Click on any measure to ‘drill down’ from an aggregated trust-level view all the way to the academy-specific level that can be easily filtered to create custom reports to be shared with stakeholders.
MATs have strategic plans that are able to seamlessly sit within the academy plans and provide clear evidence that all of the MAT priorities are being addressed by the academy. The central team is able to regularly review the strategic plans, alongside the schools' SDPs, to ensure that the strategic plan is fit for purpose.
Our SDP functionality assists academies on their improvement journey: refining and amending their priorities, objectives, and activities; focusing on specific teaching and learning issues, building capacity and engaging in networking with other schools in the MAT and beyond.
The MAT SEF Dashboard
At SchooliP we understand the importance that MATs place on systems that provide easy visibility of what is happening within their academies. We have worked in partnership with our MAT community to create an easy to use SEF dashboard that allows MATs to easily and instantly compare live, in real-time, self-evaluation performance across academies. Our approach to self-evaluation assists MATs in creating rigorous, robust and accurate self-evaluation processes.
From the MAT dashboard, the central team are able to easily access each academy's SEF, to ‘deep dive’ and gain a greater understanding of judgements and related evidence across the entire MAT.
A user can click on any measure to ‘drill down’ from an aggregated trust-level view all the way to the academy specific level. Data can be easily filtered to create custom reports to be shared with stakeholders.
MATs have strategic plans that are able to seamlessly sit within the academy plans and provide clear evidence that all of the MAT priorities are being addressed by the academy. The central team is able to regularly review the strategic plans, alongside the school SEFs, to ensure that the strategic plan is fit for purpose.
The MAT is successful as a result of the academies' performance and the academies are successful because of the quality of the MAT. It is only when there is accurate self-evaluation that a precise plan for continual improvement can be developed.
Our SEF functionality assists academies on their improvement journey: refining and amending their priorities, objectives and activities; focusing on specific teaching and learning issues, building capacity and engaging in networking with other schools in the MAT and beyond.
