Katy Theobald
Ambition School Leadership
Katy Theobald is the Associate Director for Research and Evaluation at Ambition School Leadership, a charity that provides development for state school leaders. Katy is responsible for Ambition’s research programme which focuses on understanding and addressing the needs of leaders in challenging contexts. Katy has a master's in Educational Research from the University of Cambridge and is the co-author of Education and Learning: an evidence-based approach (Wiley-Blackwell). She is a fellow of the RSA and is a primary school governor.
Multi-academy trusts (MATs) are a growing part of the education landscape, but there is little formal research investigating how MATs operate or how this relates to performance. This mixed methods study helped address this gap by asking:
- What are the characteristics of higher and lower performing MATs?
- How do these characteristics develop as MATs grow?
- What are the facilitating factors for effective MAT growth?
In this roundtable, I will present a brief summary of findings before posing a challenge to the room: What do we mean by ‘effective’ MATS? How can we better identify and understand them?
This project followed three phases. First, the Education Policy Institute (EPI) conducted a quantitative analysis of data from 402 MATs, regressing five performance metrics against school and pupil characteristics including school isolation and rate of trust growth, to seek correlates of performance. EPI also completed a cluster analysis of MAT characteristics. Next, in-depth case studies were conducted with eleven high-performing MATs, focusing on their growth and the development of their operating models. Finally, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 34 MAT CEOs and surveyed 346 staff from the central and academy leadership teams of 22 MATs, asking them about the MAT’s strategy, operations and growth. The surveys were analysed using a cluster analysis and a comparison of median responses; the interviews were subject to a thematic analysis. EPI’s performance metrics were linked to the interview data at the end of the analysis, enabling a qualitative comparison of high and low performing MATs.
The research has added substantially to prior knowledge: defining three types of MAT strategy and giving insights into the strategic and pragmatic factors influencing the decision-making of CEOs. However, it also highlighted challenges for understanding MAT effectiveness. First, we need better measures. Scaling up school-level variables and using snapshot measures to evaluate MAT effectiveness does not allow for the complexity of a growing organisation. It also risks reinforcing the distortive effects of performance measures at a system level. Second, EPI’s cluster analysis identified five groups of MATs with different school and pupil characteristics. We need to know whether we can evaluate the performance of these groups using the same metrics, and whether the same operational approaches serve them equally well.
This roundtable will be an opportunity to engage with and critique the research findings, and to discuss the evolution of methods that is needed to effectively understand these complex organisations.
