MAT Support

Schools Plus provides a range of services for schools working together whether as an informal cluster, a semi-formal co-operative type arrangement or in a formal group such as a multi academy trust. Many are the natural extension of services we offer to individual schools and some are specifically created to support group structures and operation.

The school-lead system has been with us for over a decade with the first NLE’s working closely with us. Successive governments of different persuasions have recognised that schools benefit from seeing how other schools are run and learning from their experience.

Like everyone else we have tried to make sense of the new system and continue to evolve our services to meet the needs of schools and the groups they now work in. The services we currently provide for clusters and groups of schools, including MATs and SATs fall into 4 areas:

1. School Improvement

Our online systems provides resources for groups of schools to work together to:

The system provides a group level view so that best practice can be identified and shared, consistency of approach and development can be managed and so that an evaluation of the group level impact can be assessed by Trustees and/or Senior Leaders.

2. Data Analysis & Interpretation

In addition to our school level performance data reports we also provide 3 performance reports for MATs and Clusters:

3. Advisory Services

Our advisers can help support school groups in a range of ways and so it is worth asking if you have a very specific requirement. Most of our work falls into 3 areas:

4. Surveys

Our range of pupil, parent and staff surveys have been extended to help assess the impact of being part of a group, the relationships between schools and how effective leadership, school improvement and back office services are across the group.

Very much bespoke to individual group’s needs these surveys can be delivered on-line or by paper and can be repeated annually or every other year to demonstrate progress.

We believe that school to school support is the way forward but that capacity is needed to help make this approach work. Through our services we seek to add some of this capacity for groups of schools we work with.