Every growing organisation faces the same challenge.
As it becomes larger and more complex, it invests in structures. Clearer governance. Clearer accountability. Clearer processes. Clearer expectations. It has to.
Without them, organisations become inconsistent, difficult to navigate and increasingly dependent on individual personalities. As organisations grow, coherence becomes more important, not less. For a multi-academy trust, this challenge is amplified. The larger the trust becomes, the more responsibility sits with the centre. A CEO must hold financial sustainability, regulatory compliance, workforce strategy, risk, reputation and performance across multiple schools. Their view inevitably becomes broader.
Meanwhile, a headteacher is looking at something very different. The child who arrived distressed that morning, the family that needs support, and the staffing challenge that has appeared unexpectedly. The nuances of a local community that rarely show up in trust-wide dashboards, neither perspective is more important than the other – both are essential.
But the view looks different from here.
Coherence matters
One of the most important jobs of trust leadership is creating coherence across complexity. People need a shared understanding of what they are trying to achieve together and how they are trying to achieve it. That understanding is shaped by vision, values, ethos and the systems that bring them to life. It provides direction, creates consistency and helps people understand how decisions are made.
Without them, trusts struggle to scale. Priorities compete for attention, schools pull in different directions, and improvement becomes dependent on individual leaders rather than collective endeavour, yet coherence alone is not enough. A trust can have a compelling vision, clear values and robust systems and still find itself working harder than it needs to.
The social capital sitting in plain sight
There is normally no shortage of expertise, experience and insight across a trust. Leaders are solving problems, developing practice, building relationships with families and finding creative ways to support children and young people. The knowledge already exists. The question is whether it moves.
Expertise does not automatically flow through an organisation simply because people share the same logo, attend the same conference or report into the same structure.
What allows knowledge to travel is social capital.
Social capital lives in the trust between people, the relationships that connect them, and the confidence to ask for help, share an idea, challenge a piece of thinking or contribute to shaping something together. It is often treated as a by-product of organisational life. I would argue it is one of the most valuable assets a trust possesses. When knowledge, experience and insight move freely across an organisation, the collective capability of the trust becomes greater than the sum of its individual schools.
The danger of the disconnected middle
This is where many organisations become stuck, not because they lack talent, commitment or vision. The challenge sits in the space between the system and the people – the vision may be clear, the people may be highly capable. Yet the organisation has not created enough opportunities for expertise, relationships and influence to move between them.
As a result, schools often experience the trust primarily through systems, reporting structures and improvement priorities. Leaders understand where the trst is heading, but experience it individually rather than collectively.
Over time, organisations often respond by strengthening the mechanics. More reporting, more meetings, more communication, more oversight. Sometimes those things are necessary, but they do not automatically create the relationships that allow knowledge, responsibility and influence to flow across the organisation.
That requires something different.
What turns a group of schools into a collective?
The answer is not choosing between coherence and autonomy, nor is it another framework, strategy document, or organisational restructure. It is creating the conditions in which people can contribute to and co-create something beyond the boundaries of their own role, team or school.
The trusts that appear to harness the greatest collective intelligence are rarely those with the most impressive plans. They are often the ones who have invested intentionally in the relationships that sit between the structures.
The organisation starts to benefit from the social capital it already possesses. Knowledge moves more freely, expertise becomes more accessible, and good ideas travel further. Challenges are solved collectively rather than repeatedly in isolation, not because people have been instructed to collaborate, but because the conditions exist for contribution, dialogue and co-creation to happen naturally.
Perhaps the challenge facing many trusts is not choosing between autonomy and coherence, but recognising that neither is sufficient on its own.
Coherence provides direction. Relationships create the conditions for contribution. Culture determines whether the expertise, insight and experience within an organisation remain isolated or become collective. When that happens, expertise travels further, responsibility becomes more widely shared, and schools remain deeply rooted in their own communities whilst contributing to something larger than themselves.
That is when a trust begins to feel less like a collection of schools and more like a genuine collective.