[1] The group of schools in a multi-academy trust work together under a shared academy funding agreement.
A sponsor set up a charitable trust and individual contracts were signed with the Department for Education (DfE).
They appoint the executive head teacher, and run the back-office services such as building, human resources and allocation of special fund.
The board of directors originally were responsible to the Secretary of State for Education, through the National Schools Commissioner.
[11] In September 2017, the Wakefield City Academies Trust announced it was winding down and ceasing to trade as it hadn't the capacity to manage its 21 schools and asked the government to make an alternative arrangement.
They sponsored and published research challenging aspects of policy; the programme is called Chain Effects.
[14] Bernardinelli et al (2018) found no positive impact from MAT status overall, but that pupils in small and mid-sized MATs tend to perform better, on average, than their peers in comparable maintained schools in both phases and, in the primary phase, than comparable standalone academies.
This includes Greany and Higham's (2018) study of academisation and the Government's wider 'school-led self-improving system' reforms, which showed that MATs were contributing to fragmentation and reduced democratic oversight of schools.
In 2024, the Education Policy Institute found that English MATs had significantly higher annual turnover of secondary classroom teachers (19.5%) than local authorities schools (14.4%).
[16] A summary of the league table for 2017 is:[16] Trusts are exempt from all Teacher Pay and Conditions agreements.
The worst offender is Schoolsworks Academy Trust, West Sussex where the median hourly pay gap in favour of men is 62% – meaning that a woman is paid 38 pence for every £1 earned by a man.
The Wakefield City Academies Trust, which managed 21 schools before its collapse, had a median hourly gender pay gap of 52%.