Education Policy Institute Report

The Education Policy Institute (EPI) has produced a report that examines which types of school groups are most successful and why.

The report ‘The features of effective school groups’ draws on findings from both the EPI’s interactive tool measuring academy trust performance and from a major survey of senior leaders.

The EPI suite of metrics measures school performance across pupil attainment, inclusion, workforce and finances to allow the sector to compare the effectiveness of school groups.

The eight key findings from the report:

• MAT leaders identify recruitment as their biggest challenge. Larger MATs had an annual teacher turnover of 19.5 per cent at secondary. Small MATs with fewer than five secondary schools had an annual turnover of 15.9 per cent. Federations also had higher rates of staff turnover, on average. This is compared with an annual rate of 14.4 per cent for local authority schools
• The report shows there is no identifiable general optimal organisational structure for school groups, therefore based on performance alone, the MAT structure should not be preferred to the local authority model, or vice versa
• The EPI report finds that school groups with the highest overall attainment receive a lower proportion of applications from disadvantaged pupils, and have lower rates of absence and suspension
• EPI recommends that the accountability and inspection system be reviewed to better take into account different pupil demographics and circumstances. The researchers say that schools that admit representative proportions of disadvantaged pupils or pupils with special educational needs should not be penalised under any new system
• Primary school groups with a link to a diocese tend to have pupil intakes that are less representative of their local area, the report says. The report states that the admission practices of dioceses drive much of the relationship seen between high-attaining school groups and a lower proportion of disadvantaged pupil applicants
• The report finds that MATs tend to be doing slightly better financially, on average, than other group types. At primary, MATs were twice as likely to have positive in-year balances than other school groups and they were three times as likely to have a positive in-year balance at secondary – though balances were relatively smaller
• On average, small MATs tend to outperform other MATs in terms of both key stage 2 and key stage 4 attainment and attendance and have lower suspensions. However, they do not perform as well as larger MATs at progressing attainment for disadvantaged pupils in secondary, the report finds
• The EPI recommend that the Department for Education should publish metrics for school groups, like its trust quality descriptors– which are used to make decisions over trusts taking on schools – to allow the sector to gain a more informed understanding of group performance and inclusion.