Learnings on centralisation from Emmaus MAC

When we talk about why we all work in education, more often than not, you will hear it’s because people genuinely care about the impact on students. The extra hours worked late at night or the Saturday afternoons marking and catching up on emails; we all go above and beyond with our time to serve the next generation. 

The term ‘servant leadership’ was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in the 1970s, and it has since gained traction as a powerful and ethical approach to leadership. Servant leadership emphasises ethical behaviour, a focus on people, and a commitment to shared success. That’s why it aligns well with our vision at Emmaus, which is: ‘Excellent Catholic education for all in the heart of our communities: nourishing faith, nurturing talent, fostering aspiration’. And similarly, I’m sure it also aligns with your own organisation’s visions, as well as your personal motivators as educators. 

So, if we are all in education because we care about the pupils, then our commitment to improving the lives of all young people and commitment to share success must be easy – right? Our customers, our pupils, are the most important commodity in any school or trust. They deserve to be our key focus and to receive the very best educational experience available to them. Educational leadership is learning to do more with less and committing to that shared success. 

Then we must ask, how are trusts delivering on this servant leadership? For many, it’s through centralisation.

The latest Kreston Report identifies that 61% of trusts are now fully centralised, with the note that ‘This is in line with our expectations given that centralisation is widely considered to aid consistency across schools, should result in synergies and is expected to give opportunities for financial efficiencies within MATs.’

Yet looking outside of the Kreston Report, it doesn’t take long to find a negative view on centralisation, with many school leaders terrified of losing control. 

But what if we bring it back to our guiding vision, our reasons for working in education, our North Star? If Kreston has it right, and centralisation can make trusts the best they can be, then how can we show schools that this is something to embrace? 

For me, centralisation is not about losing control. It’s about gaining it. By having these structures in place, you can aid consistency across schools and provide opportunities for financial efficiencies within trusts, which opens doors for school leaders, rather than closing them. 

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What we do at Emmaus

If you take the Kreston Benchmark definitions, Emmaus would be classified as a combination of centralised model and moving towards full centralisation as we continue to grow. Our Catholic Multi Academy Company began in 2014 and by September 2024, we’ll have grown to 13 primaries and one secondary, spanning four local authorities. We’ll have approximately 4,200 pupils and 600 staff. 

From 2014 – 2020 we operated a decentralised structure. Our schools were confident that they could continue working as they had done prior to becoming a MAC and we didn’t have a large enough team centrally to move the systems and processes from schools into the centre. We were lucky in the sense that these six original schools were already performing strongly. 

As we looked at taking on four extra schools in 2020/21, we started to consider what finance could look like if we centralised and what we could offer with a centralised IT service. That’s when our centralisation journey began to grow. 

Trust was a crucial element in this journey. The schools trusted us to keep them involved and not take over, take control or isolate them and we trusted our team to work together as a family of schools, committed to that shared success. We have working groups sharing best practices and continually update processes and procedures when new ideas are shared. 

By encouraging the behaviours that built that trust and established our relationships energised and motivated our team, it improved morale and employee engagement as we gave stretched office staff back time to enable them to focus on other areas, which in turn led to increased productivity, performance and retention.

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The benefits we’ve already seen

We are seeing more and more guidance, frameworks, and expectations pushed down from the DfE. For instance, the expectation to be working towards ‘meeting digital and technology standards in schools’, which was constantly being updated. The requirement for compliance is huge, accompanied by no financial support from the government. Given that our IT is centralised, we can absorb this pressure centrally and support our schools to ensure they can work towards the standards. 

We define our centralisation journey as having the trust and confidence in the honesty, integrity, and reliability of another person, firmly believing that they will act in accordance with what they say. The principle of working together and sharing best practice to achieve the best educational outcomes that our pupils deserve. Understanding the implications of our decisions, including the impact on departmental and organisational objectives, has helped us to avoid costly mistakes and supported in making decisions that always add value to our trust. 

In the wise words of Nelson Mandela, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” We must support our school leaders by releasing them to spend more time on teaching and learning and less time on administrative tasks. If we can support our teaching staff with efficiencies and introduce great systems, education can be the key focus at our schools.

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Learnings and top tips

I will be the first to admit that our trust’s journey wasn’t perfect, and we had many valuable learnings along the way:

• First and foremost, embrace honest, consistent and open communication to effectively engage your staff. Communicating and cascading information will also help your team to feel included and that they have the knowledge necessary to fulfil their duties. This will reduce the feelings of vulnerability which can arise if they are ‘kept in the dark’. If employees feel that the information you are cascading is accurate and timely, they are more likely to trust what you tell them. Communicate with the purpose of sharing knowledge; never deliberately withhold information as a means of control.

• Be clear about the scope of the decision to centralise. It’s necessary to define exactly what needs to be decided (and what does not need to be decided) at this point in time.

• Take account of uncertainty. It is important to accept that there will almost always be a degree of uncertainty about outcomes. Even if you are fairly confident that you understand the implications of centralisation, the long-term impact may be less clear. Recognising and accepting uncertainty is important even if you cannot resolve it. The actions you take will also be dependent on your own or your organisation’s attitude to risk. Consider the best and worst case scenarios, and what the impact of these would be on your Trust. 

And finally, you may find like us, this is a long game. Getting it right for us meant, and continues to mean, investing the time.