To despise MATs (Multi Academy Trusts)

[Violashifts]

At the end of the day they are businesses. I don't think they benefit education.

What was wrong with a local authority looking after all schools in their area? Now you can't share with the school along the road but can with one in another town as they are in the same trust. So travel 30 miles instead of 2.

Sure they may save on HR, can share results and data etc but they waste more on improvement officers, marketing videos. A crew coming in filming chosen shots and then adding it to music. Not cheap. Don't even get me started on CEO pays as in the article below. How can they justify 40k pay rises an
or 250k salaries. Heads should be able to run a school. It is not needed.

Meanwhile at the chalkface the number of teachers, TAs and even lunch time supervisors are reduced and new equipment isn't afforded.
How is this helping the students?
How is this helping the recruitment crisis?
How is this helping the woeful SEN
provision?

Am I wrong?

I think its a big scandal waiting to happen.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/revealed-the-academy-ceo-pay-premium/

[Title edited by MNHQ at OP's request]

If the MAT ensures the behaviour policy is applied through all schools it can work.
I've worked at three MATs and in only one has the behaviour policy been applied throughout .
So I would cover lessons in school B knowing the behaviour policies would work .
High schools are too big. 1400+ pupils split across several sites.
Pupils travel from one school to another in the town or even county, to study courses that aren't provided at their school so they miss lessons at their home school.

They’re all replicating the same stuff at a cost to the taxpayer too. So all MATs employ expensive HR depts, school improvement, accounts etc. whereas the LAs could have done the same for many more schools with much more efficiency.

It has always been a racket and it’s rife with corruption. I can’t believe anyone thought it would be anything but a race to the bottom when all they count is the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Some of the MATs are so large and so dogmatic they ignore local and specific school needs. I don’t know about them all but the very large ones I am aware of just want staff to confirm in a regimented way with little regard for individual students or staff.

No I am a teacher. Quotes are from the schools week article. 🤦‍♀️

No need for the 🤦‍♀️ your 2nd post didn't have quotation marks so it appeared as your voice, not an extract from an article. Surely a teacher would know to put speech marks around a quotation if you were lifting directly from text?

i think it does depend on the MAT tbh. I’ve worked in two and both were very positive experiences!

State maintained schools aren’t exactly rolling in money either and the LA take a slice of their money.

In the accounts of MATS (the same as other company accounts, MATS are governed by both Charity and Company law) the schedule of high paid employees usually now includes a number of headteachers depending on what pay scale they are on.

It’s appalling. They all like to complain about how hard it is to recruit TAs (and use this to justify breaking the law re: SEN support, as “we don’t have the staff”) but seem to ignore the fact that they pay zero hours contracts and pay minimum wage.

Whereas you have 3 or 4 heads/deputy heads for small primary’s that only ever needed one head before becoming academies!

And don’t get me started on the career heads and their huge private offices, whilst moaning that it’s too hard to provide a sensory room and “we don’t have the space”. It’s disgusting.

And this is just within individual schools, before you even start on the actual trust “leadership teams”.

They are such a scam. All the schools I know were forced into academisation under Gove. Then they had to join with other schools to be able to do the things the LEA used to do for them. Now we have heads of MATs in charge of mad behaviour policies, uniform policies, curricula, and we cannot hold them accountable. They do not hold surgeries, they are not elected, they cannot be ousted by parent pressure. When the LEA was responsible for local education, we could have our say at the ballot box. No more. Privatising state education was as terrible an idea as privatising water, telecoms, the fucking postal service - and still the shit keeps coming.

My children's school is listed on that report. What I will say from a parent's perspective, the school was completely shit and satisfactory on inspection. The new head came in and turned the whole thing around, not just grades but behaviour too and that included staff behaviour It then became an academy. Another school they took on had completely shit GCSE pass rates I think below 40% and turned it into another outstanding academy.

From my point of view, the school is now in the top 5% of the country on Progress 8 and my children were lucky enough to get in after the academy conversion and everything ironed out. All children including low ability are encouraged to do well and do improve their grades. As my children have been through their GCSEs there is nothing more the school could have done to ensure success. This included a post covid Saturday morning teaching for some year 11s, after school support and revision. Pre and post covid change of form so that you were put with a teacher whose subject you needed the most help in turning form time into teaching time in year 11.

Parents in to school to learn how to help their child not just for revision and exams in year 11 but also year 7 so you understand how to support your child with their homework.This included sheets to take home to be pinned up with useful information not only for core subjects but others you could choose too. The best was stamping out any low level disruption in classes, dealing with bullying promptly with an iron fist and communication was brilliant.

Their sixth form is the same, motivate the children, push them to get to where they want to get to, teaching staff available to ask questions from, specialised streams for uni or work/apprenticeships and support for that.

I wouldn't know about other MATs but this one really does try hard to make the children succeed.

Why don’t you just move school if not happy about it?

What happens if all the schools in your area are owned by one or two academy trusts with the same bonkers approaches? Should the whole family sell up and try and move to a different county?

People do like to generalise about MATs. The one my school is in is fine, tbh. Lots of benefits of sharing resources and expertise. The LA who used to offer that stuff wasn't any better. Mostly we just crack on as school, and we're allowed to do things differently to other schools in the MAT.

So, a lot of schools come with assets. Valuable land especially, purchased using taxpayers money.

Does the academy system mean that assets owned by the people have (yet again) been given away to private businesses? Totally unacceptable if so.

@ImAChangeling many MATs hold land on long leasehold from LA

it seems to me that whilst some are well run (one of my SILs is a teacher) the policy as a whole was misguided. Not all LAs are great, certainly, but this took one problem and replaced it with a different one.

Absolutely. Leather sofas etc.

I am sure some are great to work in but all if this money at the top doesn't help the students.

It would be interesting to know what the TAs and standard teachers think of this place. How much money is wasted at the top? Have they just learned how to play the progress 8 game?

I am glad its worked out for you and it maybe it has worked but it would be interesting to see how this was done?

As a parent I want my children to be happy, secure, socially responsible and well rounded people. I want them to learn and value kindness, inclusion, communication; I want them to discover the joy of learning and be allowed to develop and make mistakes at their own pace. I want them to feel safe at school.
The highest possible grades are near the bottom of the list, and I’m sceptical that that always leads to better/well paid jobs - it depends what you want to do. I certainly couldn’t do my well paid job without the resilience and ‘soft skills’ I gained through studying in a supportive environment.

I work with lots of great, inspiring, supportive colleagues and it has a huge impact of my quality of life - it’s not enough to “live for the weekend” - I want the same for my children so no, I don’t think care at home can compensate for being miserable at school!

Academies first came in under Labour and had the aim of helping failing schools.
The Tories latched onto them as a way of pushing their anti LA policies, and imposing their ideological business model on what is a public service.
Instead of reforming LEAs we have finished up with a wholly inappropriate quasi business model.
Gove loved it all of course.
Having been a school governor for 10 tears I watched this debacle unfold with growing alarm.
What started as a way of helping failing schools is now the complete opposite. MATs cherry pick successful schools to suck into their orbit. They require less effort and investment.
Schools that wish to remain independent of the academisation steamroller have to deal with dwindling and non existent LEA support and often feel railroaded into joining a MAT.
Whilst a governor at a small rural primary I was involved in researching MATs to decide the best way forward. I was hortified by what I found... slick corporate guys in suits with glossy brochures and smarmy sales talk ... central decision making and loss of autonomy for schools ... rafts of unnecessary employees hopping on the gravy train.
It all makes my heart sink.

MATs have to take on failing schools.

It probably depends on what area of the country you are in on how flashy MATs are. In areas where there are a number of small rural Primary schools being in a Trust is probably necessary for your survival with pupil numbers falling and being able to share resources.

@Mischance I bet there were quite a few unnecessary employees and wasted resources in LEA too.

No system is perfect.

@Violashifts I don't know any staff personally but have had phone calls with them because they ring home when your child is doing brilliantly as well as if they misbehave which neither of mine did. Plus parents' evenings, rewards evenings and all the other open evenings they laid on to engage students and parents in learning ie Geography and History stuff, getting parents to do the work too.

Speaking to staff was always positive. Even at Ds2's parents' evening Ds1's teacher flagged us to come to him to tell us Ds1's year 11 mock mark as he had just marked his paper and what to do to improve his grade. We had lots of specific feedback from teachers even down to year 11 maths papers matrix where they break down each question as to whether you got it right, some right or completely wrong all colour coded and a link to an explanation of the topic and more questions on that topic to see if you can now do it. It was child specific too. As I said they really did put everything into children succeeding, dividing the history class into those on higher grade profiles and those on lower so they could improve all the children's grades. Differentiation was great. Ds1's history teacher even came to find him in another lesson to show him he had aced the 18 marker at last.

They may have learned to play the Progress 8 game, I wouldn't know how that is done, but their success is across the board from Total Attainment and 5+ in English and Maths. Their Ofsted report on teachers, the curriculum and teaching is almost sycophantic. However, they have had a while to nail this and have gone on to do this in other schools.

How they did it? I have actually read an article by the head and know locally that he went in and said let's have a school to be proud of, one that people will do anything to get into. The school was "satisfactory" at the time. He came down hard on uniform, set standards on behaviour and attitude to learning, came down hard on bullying because he wanted children to feel safe and come to school. I know attendance is still high. Pastoral is praised by Ofsted but I had some dealings with them too and thought they were brilliant.

Indeed so. And instead of reforming LEAs the route if highly expensive academisation was chosen. A big mistake.