Multi-academy trusts

A multi-academy trust (MAT) is a single charitable company that runs more than one academy. Work in a MAT school and the trust is your employer, not the school or the headteacher. The trust board holds legal responsibility for every school in the group. Trusts range from a handful of local primaries to large national groups, and how much freedom a school has depends on the trust.

How a trust is run

A MAT has a board of trustees, who are the legal directors of the company. Above them sit members, a small group who appoint trustees and approve big changes. The board employs a chief executive, sometimes called the CEO or executive headteacher, who answers to the Department for Education for the trust’s results and money.

Each school usually has a local governing body or academy council, but its powers are whatever the trust’s “scheme of delegation” gives it. In some trusts local governors still appoint staff and set the school budget. In others they mainly monitor and report, and the central team takes the hiring, pay and policy decisions.

For staff, that means your headteacher may not have the final word. A pay appeal, a restructure or a redundancy decision may go to a trust committee or the CEO.

Pay and conditions across the trust

Most trusts have one pay policy for all their schools. For teachers it is usually based on the national pay ranges, which rise by 3.5 per cent from 1 September 2026 under the accepted STRB award, but a trust can set its own scales, allowances and progression rules. Some pay a trust-wide bonus or retention payment in shortage subjects, and a few have moved to longer or shorter pay scales than the national ones.

Support staff are commonly on the NJC pay spine, where SCP 3 is £25,614 full time from 1 April 2026, but the trust’s own job evaluation sets the grade for each role. Two teaching assistant jobs with the same title in schools a mile apart can be graded differently if one is in a MAT and the other is council-maintained.

Pensions stay as they were: teachers in the Teachers’ Pension Scheme and support staff in the Local Government Pension Scheme. See academies vs maintained schools for the wider comparison.

Central services and trust-level jobs

Larger trusts run shared services from a central office: HR, payroll, finance, estates, IT, data, safeguarding oversight and sometimes school improvement. That creates jobs a single school would not have, such as trust finance manager, director of education, trust estates manager or trust-wide SEND lead. They are advertised on Teaching Vacancies, the trust’s own website and general job boards.

Central services also change jobs inside schools. A school business manager in a MAT may hand payroll and procurement to the centre and spend more time on operations, and some trusts merge office roles across neighbouring schools.

Moving between schools in the trust

Internal vacancies are often shared across all schools first, and your continuous service is unaffected because the employer stays the same. Many trusts run their own leadership programmes and use internal secondments to fill acting posts.

Mobility has a cost. Some contracts list the trust as your place of work, or include a clause allowing you to be asked to work at other schools in the group “within reasonable travelling distance”. If you rely on a particular school for childcare or travel, read that clause closely and ask for a change before you sign if it is wider than you can live with.

When a school joins or leaves a trust

When a maintained school converts and joins a MAT, staff transfer under TUPE on their existing terms. The same applies when a school moves from one trust to another, which happens when the DfE moves a school after a poor inspection or a trust is wound up. Your contract, pay and continuous service come with you. The new trust may later propose harmonising terms across its schools, which requires consultation and often involves the unions. The rules are in the guide to TUPE.

Unions, consultation and policies

Trusts recognise trade unions much as councils do, but recognition agreements are made trust by trust. Most larger trusts have a joint consultative committee where union reps meet the central HR team to agree policies on pay, appraisal, capability, flexible working and redundancy. Those policies apply in every school in the trust, so one meeting can affect thousands of staff.

A trust that restructures, for example by centralising finance or merging office teams across schools, must consult. Where 20 or more redundancies are proposed at one establishment within 90 days, collective consultation rules apply, starting at least 30 days before the first dismissal. Smaller changes still need individual consultation. A union gives you a rep who knows the trust’s policies; see trade unions in the public sector.

Questions to ask at interview

• Who makes decisions on pay progression, and who hears appeals?
• Is the pay policy the same as the national scales, or different, and how?
• Does the contract name this school or the trust as the place of work?
• Does the trust recognise previous service in other schools and councils for sick pay, maternity pay and redundancy?
• Which trust policies differ from the school’s previous ones (for example, on directed time, PPA or flexible working)?

Ask to see the staff handbook and the scheme of delegation. Most trusts publish governance documents on their website, and your written statement of particulars on day one should name the trust as your employer.