The research comes from the Confederation of School Trusts, the peak body for school trusts in England, ImpactEd Group, a leading education consultancy, and FFT Education Datalab, an independent research organisation specialising in school performance data.

Together, this body of research strengthens the case that Australian governments should trial the multi-school organisation (MSO) model to improve schools at scale.

Over half (55%) of English students are educated in government schools that are part of a MAT, following 20 years of growth of the model under successive Labour and Conservative governments. MATs operate as strong families of schools, combining close knowledge of individual schools with the leadership, expertise and organisational capacity that come from working at scale. A MAT is a single charitable organisation running a group of government schools under a single board and chief executive, with shared budgets, staff, back-office and improvement teams.

In its 2024 report, Spreading Success: Why Australia should trial multi-school organisations, the Grattan Institute examined the MAT model in depth and recommended that Australia trial its own version — MSOs — adapted for our context.

The first report from the Confederation of School Trusts examines two decades of data to establish the impact of academies (independent state-funded schools) and MATs relative to schools that remained with local authorities.

The study found that schools that became standalone academies or joined a MAT rose by an average of 5.6 percentile points in the national attainment ranking from their prior baseline. The gains are larger for schools sponsored into MATs after previously being judged to be failing (known as sponsored academies) and for schools serving the most disadvantaged communities. Local authority schools remained static in the national attainment ranking.

The improvement seen in academies is equivalent to 5,400 more primary-aged children a year reaching the expected standard in reading, writing and maths, and 16,000 more secondary students hitting key benchmarks in English and maths in their end-of-high-school exams.

Importantly, the study found that membership of MATs, rather than academy status alone, correlates with the biggest improvements in performance. Schools that became standalone academies saw a 1.2 percentile point rise in the rankings, while those that joined a MAT saw a 6.2 percentile point rise. For sponsored academies, the impact is even more striking: a 15.8 percentile point rise in ranking.

The second report from ImpactEd analyses two decades of school performance data and Ofsted inspection grades to examine the impact of joining a MAT on the performance of sponsored academies.

Between 2016–17 and 2024–25, the share of sponsored academy primary schools now meeting the expected standard in reading, writing and maths doubled from 21% to 42%.

The share of these schools now reaching the top half of all primaries rose from 25% to 44%.

The share of sponsored academy secondary schools where fewer than half of students were hitting benchmarks in English and maths at age 16 fell from 40% to 26%.

The share of these schools in the top half of all secondary schools rose from 18% to 25%. This is despite these schools having a markedly more disadvantaged student intake.

The third new report, by FFT Education Datalab, combines a review of the existing evidence on MAT effectiveness with school performance data and Ofsted inspection grades across local authority schools, academies and MATs. As with both the Confederation of School Trusts and ImpactEd reports, it found that the strongest case for the impact of MATs is for improving struggling schools. Of the 586 schools rated ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted between May 2006 and July 2019 that subsequently joined a MAT or were moved into a MAT with stronger capacity to support them, 87% were rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ at the end of the 2023–24 school year.

Together, this evidence suggests that MATs contribute to significant improvements in school performance, particularly in struggling schools and schools that serve disadvantaged communities.

There are some important caveats, including that outcomes vary between individual MATs and between regions. But this research strengthens the case that Australian governments should trial the MSO model, drawing insights from the highest performing MATs in England to develop a robust model adapted to Australia’s context.