Multi academy trust growth strategy: a practical guide for MAT leaders

A multi academy trust growth strategy is a structured plan that sets out how a MAT will expand responsibly over time. It covers the trust's vision and values, criteria for identifying and onboarding new schools, financial sustainability, workforce planning, and governance. A good growth strategy balances ambition with capacity, ensuring quality is maintained as the trust grows.

The DfE has consistently supported MAT growth as its preferred model for school improvement. MATs offer significant advantages over standalone schools, including economies of scale, shared central services, greater buying power, and the ability to deploy expertise across multiple sites.

For many trusts, growth is also a matter of financial viability. Smaller trusts of two or three academies often struggle to sustain the central functions needed to operate effectively. As trusts grow, they can build dedicated teams for finance, HR, compliance, and school improvement — creating a more sustainable structure for all their schools.

That said, growth for its own sake carries risks. Taking on a school that isn’t the right fit — culturally, financially, or geographically — can compromise standards across the whole trust. A growth strategy keeps those decisions grounded in evidence rather than instinct.

1. Start with vision, values and ethos

Before a MAT can grow sustainably, it needs absolute clarity on what it stands for. The NGA’s 'Being Strategic' guide (2025) is clear: values should influence every strategic decision, including decisions about which schools to invite into the trust.

The best MATs don’t just ask 'can we take this school on?' — they ask 'does this school share our values?'. Cultural due diligence — spending time with a school’s leaders, staff, and governors before any formal process begins — is increasingly recognised as just as important as financial due diligence.

Your vision should also be clear to the schools considering joining. Prospective schools need to understand what being part of the trust means in practice: what autonomy they retain, what central support they receive, and how the MAT’s values translate into day-to-day school life.

2. Conduct rigorous due diligence

Due diligence is the foundation of responsible expansion. It should cover financial health, governance quality, pupil outcomes, HR and staffing, estate condition, and compliance obligations. But experienced MAT leaders consistently flag that the operational and people picture — not just the educational one — needs to be examined closely.

Key financial questions include: Is the school’s budget approved and realistic? Have inflation and demographic changes been factored in? Are there transferring liabilities? What is the projected pupil roll over the next five years? Within five years, a school should be contributing positively to the trust — if that timeline looks unrealistic, the decision to proceed deserves serious scrutiny.

Governance quality also matters. A school in difficulty will often have a struggling governing body. Understanding the governance picture early prevents difficult conversations later.

3. Plan for financial sustainability

Growth has a cost, and a credible MAT growth strategy must account for it. Central service capacity, estate costs, HR provision, technology infrastructure, and school improvement resource all need to be funded as the trust grows. The NGA’s framework recommends that every strategic priority has a clear resource plan attached to it.

Integrated Curriculum and Financial Planning (ICFP) has become widely adopted across MATs as a tool for aligning curriculum ambition with financial reality. By modelling staffing structures, teaching hours, and income projections together, ICFP gives trust CFOs a much clearer picture of whether a growth plan is viable.

Monthly management accounts — a requirement for all MATs — should be reviewed alongside growth plans. Financial benchmarking against similar trusts can also highlight where central service costs are out of line, freeing up resource that can be redeployed into growth-related activity.

4. Build your people and workforce strategy

People are the trust’s most significant asset and its biggest cost. A growth strategy that doesn’t have a clear workforce plan is incomplete. Key questions include: Do we have the central HR capacity to support a larger trust? How will we ensure consistent HR policies and procedures across all schools? What does recruitment and retention look like in the communities we’re moving into?

MATs benefit from their single-employer status — the ability to redeploy staff across schools, develop talent across the trust, and create career pathways that a standalone school simply can’t offer. But that benefit only materialises if the HR infrastructure is in place to support it. As a trust grows, the move from informal people management to structured, trust-wide HR becomes essential.

Consistent payroll, absence management, and HR data also become increasingly complex to manage across multiple sites without the right systems in place.

5. Establish clear governance and accountability

Growth can dilute governance quality if it isn’t planned for carefully. A clear scheme of delegation — setting out exactly where decision-making sits between the trust board, the CEO, academy committees, and headteachers — should be reviewed and updated each time the trust grows.

Trust boards need to think about how monitoring and reporting scales. As schools increase in number, the CEO’s termly report becomes more important as the primary source of strategic oversight. Academy committees have a vital role in providing local accountability and intelligence, especially in larger or more geographically dispersed trusts.

Risk management also deserves renewed attention at each stage of growth. Adding a new school introduces new financial, reputational, and operational risks. A well-maintained risk register, reviewed regularly by the trust board, keeps growth-related risks visible and managed.

6. Define your geographical and cultural boundaries

Concentrated, geographically focused trusts consistently report stronger outcomes than those spread across wide areas. When a trust’s schools are close to each other, central teams can provide genuine hands-on support rather than remote oversight. Staff can move between schools more easily, sharing expertise and building relationships. The trust’s culture and values can be felt consistently across its schools.

That doesn’t mean MATs should never expand beyond a single local area. But it does mean that geographical decisions should be conscious and strategic, not reactive. If a trust is considering a school in a significantly different area, it should honestly assess whether its central team has the capacity to support it properly.

Even a well-executed growth strategy can run into difficulty if onboarding isn’t handled carefully. The transition period — from the point a school formally joins the trust to the point it is fully integrated — requires dedicated resource, clear communication, and a consistent process.

Experienced MAT leaders recommend having a standard onboarding process that is repeated and refined each time a new school joins. This includes clear timelines, defined ownership, and an honest assessment of what needs to be fixed quickly versus what can wait.

Key early tasks for the finance team include opening a new bank account, registering with HMRC for payroll, appointing auditors, completing the DfE’s financial management and governance self-assessment, and submitting the first budget forecast return. HR tasks include verifying DBS checks for all staff and governors, and migrating payroll.

Communication is often underestimated. Staff in a joining school will have concerns — about job security, changes to their conditions, and the trust’s intentions. Clear, honest, and consistent messaging from trust leadership makes a significant difference to how quickly a school settles.

As a trust grows, the operational complexity of running multiple schools from a central function increases significantly. Finance teams manage more accounts, more audit requirements, and more complex consolidated reporting. HR teams oversee payroll across more sites.

Leaders need visibility of data from all schools, quickly and accurately.
Technology plays a critical role in making this manageable. MATs that rely on different systems in different schools — or legacy software that doesn’t integrate — find themselves spending more time on data reconciliation and less time on the strategic work that actually drives improvement.

When evaluating software for a growing MAT, key questions include: Is it designed specifically for the UK education sector and its statutory requirements? Does it scale commercially without unexpected costs as you add schools? Does it integrate with other systems, so leaders can see a joined-up picture without logging into multiple platforms?

Access Education’s suite of finance, budgets, ICFP, purchasing, HR, and payroll software is designed specifically for schools and MATs. Access Evo for Education acts as the connecting platform layer — bringing data, tools, and processes into a single secure hub so trust leaders have one connected view across their schools.

A well-structured MAT growth strategy is one of the most powerful tools a trust leader can have. It creates alignment across the organisation, gives prospective schools confidence in what they’re joining, and keeps the trust’s financial and operational foundations strong as it expands.

At Access Education, we work with MATs at every stage of growth — from trusts building their central functions for the first time to established trusts managing complex, multi-site operations. If you’d like to understand how our software can support your trust’s growth plans, get in touch with our team.