Editorial for Special Issue - Leadership in Multi-School Organisations

Multi-School Organisations and the new ‘middle tier’ in education systems

This special issue focusses on governance, leadership and improvement in Multi-School Organisations (MSOs). Three types of MSO are examined across the five articles - Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) in England, Boards of Multiple Schools (BMSs) in the Netherlands, and Charter Management Organisations (CMOs) in the USA.

The emergence and evolution of these new MSO types is worthy of study for a number of reasons. Most significantly, in each of the three countries, these MSOs are now responsible for operating multiple schools which educate thousands of children, often in the most deprived communities. These MSOs can exert influence over many aspects of the schools they operate, including curriculum, instruction, hiring, leadership, professional development, and various related areas that bear directly on teaching and learning. More broadly, as the article by Jacqueline Baxter and Anna John in this special issue illustrates, these MSOs play a role in translating policy mandates, local community needs, and professional expertise into specific educational visions and strategies as well as systems for operationalising these. Furthermore, these new MSOs now form part of the larger middle tier in the systems in which they operate, with significant implications for larger societal concerns, such as equity, segregation, inclusion and efficiency.

The three MSO types we focus on here have developed in context-specific ways, meaning that they differ in various non-trivial aspects. However, the reason for studying them alongside each other here is that they have a number of features in common, including:

• a single organisation – the MSO - has responsibility for the operation and performance of multiple publicly funded schools

• the organisation is regulated and held publicly accountable for its performance

• the organisation sits largely outside any framework for local democratic oversight of schools

• the organisation need not operate within one specific geographic locality or community.

These features serve to distinguish these three MSO types from other ‘middle tier’ – or meso layer – bodies in education, where the ‘middle tier’ is understood to encompass any aspect of statutory or non-statutory support or influence operating between individual schools and central government (Greany 2020). The traditional ‘middle tier’ in most school systems is centred on formal hierarchical bodies, such as school districts, local authorities, or municipalities, which differ from our three MSO types because they have a democratic mandate and a place-based focus (Greany 2020). In addition, various researchers have observed the dynamic role of networks, whether between schools and/or between schools and other partners, in ‘middle tier’ governance arrangements (Greany and Kamp forthcoming; Armstrong, Brown, and Chapman 2020; Ehren and Baxter 2021); leading Azorin to argue in a previous special issue in this journal that ‘in many respects, the vertical-hierarchical organisation is giving way to a horizontal-lateral framework’ (2020, 105). However, the three MSO types examined in this special issue are not networks in the sense defined by Provan and Kenis, where a ‘network’ involves three or more ‘legally autonomous organisations that work together to achieve not only their own goals but also a collective goal’ (2008, 231), because the schools within the MSO are not legally autonomous. Thus, these new, hierarchical but non-place-based MSOs represent an important but under-studied development in several contemporary school systems.

This special issue thus provides a distinctive contribution to broader debates about the nature of governance and leadership in school systems globally, and particularly the shape, nature and role of the ‘middle tier.’ These debates have long recognised the ways in which governments around the world have been stepping back from direct hierarchical oversight of schools, adopting marketisation and other New Public Management (NPM) approaches as they seek to increase choice, improve quality, enhance equity and encourage innovation (Hood 1991). Of course, stepping back has not prevented governments from steering at a distance, through meta-governance (Jessop 2011). Indeed, as Greany (2020) argues, at a structural level, two parallel shifts can be discerned. Decentralisation comes through granting schools greater autonomy (aka ‘school-based management’), with school leaders taking responsibility for operational areas such as staffing, pedagogy and budgets, usually in combination with competitive market incentives such as parental choice of school (Caldwell and Spinks 2013). Meanwhile, centralisation develops as national and/or state/provincial governments seek to measure school quality and sharpen accountability, for example through the development of national curricula, standardised testing and the publication of performance data (Ozga 2011). Critically, the three MSO types examined here insert new forms of bureaucratic school oversight, thus reducing the autonomy of individual schools and their headteachers. However, the new MSOs are not simply a straightforward ‘replacement’ for traditional school districts and local authorities. For example, unlike districts and local authorities, these new MSOs do not have a direct electoral mandate from the local population, so their legitimacy is arguably more contractual (Gibton 2017). Furthermore, because these MSOs are not place-based, they insert new levels of scale into the processes of decentralisation and centralisation outlined above. Central steering can thus continue, with MSOs held accountable for their performance, while competition between MSOs can replace, or – more likely - augment, markets between individual schools.

The ramifications of these shifts, which Lubienski (2014) characterises in terms of disintermediation, are clearly momentous for both system and school-level leaders, and this special issue does not pretend to address them all. For example, it does not ask how the new MSOs interact with wider ‘middle tier’ bodies or networks, or the impact of their emergence on wider system coherence and equity, although parallel work is beginning to explore these issues (Glazer et al. forthcoming; Greany and Higham 2018). Instead, in line with the leadership and management remit of this journal, the special issue focuses mainly on the internal development of the new MSOs, asking how governance, leadership and improvement approaches are conceptualised and enacted.

About the contributions

Contributors to this special issue include academics from England, the Netherlands and the US, all of whom have undertaken research into the MSOs they examine. As yet, no comparative research has explored the development of the new MSOs across multiple national contexts, so each article retains a national focus.

The first three articles focus on MATs in England and move progressively from the level of overarching governance and strategy, to MAT-level improvement approaches, to a study of how one Chief Executive Officer (CEO) works to enact policy.

In the first article, Jacqueline Baxter and Anna John explore the ways in which Boards of Trustees and CEOs of MATs develop strategy, drawing on 42 interviews with trustees and CEOs in eight different trusts. They examine the extent to which trustees and executives enact strategy as learning, drawing on a richly conceptualised schema-based model. This allows the authors to draw out a number of important conclusions, including the extent to which trust boards tend to defer to the expert contextual knowledge of CEOs in strategy development, and the challenges that trustees whose background lies outside education – particularly those from private sector backgrounds - face when trying to apply their existing schemas to the new educational context.

The second article, by Toby Greany and Ruth McGinity, analyses the ways in which MAT leaders work to develop shared improvement practices across the schools they operate, drawing on case studies of twenty-three MATs and 231 interviews with leaders. The authors draw on research into Mergers and Acquisitions and ‘post-merger integration’ in organisational studies to assess the theories of action which underpin different MAT leaders’ approaches to integrating new member schools and to securing improvement across the group. They conclude by setting out a categorisation framework and typology aimed at strengthening understanding of MAT approaches to improvement.

The third article, by Mark Innes focuses on one MAT CEO’s account of their own efforts to enact a trust-wide literacy policy. Drawing on theories of micro-politics and concepts from Bourdieu, the author critically examines how the CEO seeks to enact policies and structure the organisation in ways that limit opportunities for debate while monitoring the work of teachers and headteachers. These findings are contextualised within the wider pressures that MAT leaders face to expand and demonstrate performance and cost-effectiveness.

The fourth article, by Matthew Malone, Laura Groth and Josh Glazer, uses the framework of epistemic communities (Glazer and Peurach 2015) to examine how one CMO in Tennessee has worked to generate, manage, and transfer knowledge within and across its member schools. The authors show how the CMO’s strategy evolves over time and in response to internal and external pressures, becoming less reliant on the skills and drive of individual leaders and working instead to generate a shared curriculum and instructional design coupled with a supportive central office team. The authors argue that epistemic communities across MSO schools, characterised by common theories, language and tools, may be necessary for improvement in complex and hard-pressed community contexts, but requires time as well as sophisticated forms of leadership at scale.

Finally, Lars Stevenson, Marlies Honingh and Annemarie Neeleman, outline the emergence of Boards of Multiple Schools (BMSs) as the main form of governance for primary and secondary schools in the Netherlands. They sketch recent policy developments and their consequences for school and Board level leadership as well as the challenges that BMSs face in enhancing educational quality across the groups they are now responsible for. Evidence in these areas remains limited, so the authors set out a research agenda that can begin to address the gaps that exist.