A report by David McQueen · 2026
What
MATters?
Decision intelligence and the future of Multi-Academy Trust leadership
"The pressures facing MAT executives in 2026 and beyond, are not the normal pressures of a growing public sector organisation. They are the convergent pressures of a financial system under structural strain, a talent pipeline thinning faster than it is being replenished, and a governance architecture that is increasingly reactive rather than strategic."
David McQueen · Foreword
Contents
- 01The Landscape Has ChangedWhat the academy system was promised to be, and what it has become
- 02The Financial ReckoningThe data is stark — and the trend is worsening
- 03The Talent Time BombThe succession pipeline is thin — and the cost is becoming visible
- 04The Governance GapWhat boards know and what executives are experiencing are diverging
- 05What Decision Intelligence Actually MeansBeyond frameworks and training — the discipline of judgement under pressure
- 06Systems Over HeroicsWhy enduring organisations build infrastructure, not rely on individuals
- —Afterword: What Actually MATtersThe things that will remain true regardless of who is in government
The Landscape
Has Changed
What the academy system was promised to be, and what it has become
There are now more than 1,200 Multi-Academy Trusts operating across England, together responsible for the education of the majority of the country's secondary-age children and a growing proportion of its primary cohort.1 The academisation movement — which began as a liberation from what was characterised as bureaucratic local authority control — has produced something its architects did not fully anticipate: a new tier of complex, quasi-public organisations with significant financial autonomy, growing accountability requirements, and leadership demands that have outpaced the development infrastructure that exists to support them.
MATs are not schools. They are not local authorities. They are not quite charities, not quite businesses. They sit in an institutional category that has no perfect precedent, and their executive teams are navigating that ambiguity every day — often without the decision infrastructure, governance frameworks, or leadership advisory support that their complexity demands.
"The academy movement promised autonomy. What it delivered was complexity without a manual."
The DfE has increasingly consolidated its preference for the trust model as the primary vehicle for school improvement at scale.2 The expectation is that MATs will continue to grow — absorbing struggling schools, expanding across regions, and taking on civic responsibilities that in earlier decades sat with elected local government. That is a significant mandate. And it arrives at exactly the moment when the financial model underpinning it is under its most serious strain since the academy programme began.
This is the landscape. And it demands leadership of a different order.
The Financial
Reckoning
The data is stark — and the trend is worsening
The most significant immediate challenge facing MAT executives is financial. Not cash-flow in the short term. Not a single year of difficult budgeting. A structural deterioration in the financial position of the sector that is now showing up in the data with unmistakeable clarity.
To understand how serious this is, consider the trajectory. In 2024, the equivalent sector report found 34% of trusts expecting a deficit. In 2025, that figure has risen to 55%. That is not a fluctuation. That is a trend — and it is moving in one direction.
"More than half of school trusts are expecting an in-year deficit for this academic year, calling on reserves to plug the gap between costs and funding. This is not sustainable year after year."
Leora Cruddas CBE, Chief Executive, Confederation of School Trusts6Where the pressure is coming from
The drivers of this deterioration are multiple — and critically, they compound each other. Staff costs are the primary pressure point, cited by 36% of MAT finance leaders as their biggest challenge for 2025–26.5 Teacher pay awards, support staff pay, and the April 2025 uplift in employer National Insurance contributions have together created a cost base that the current funding model was not designed to absorb. At 85% of trust income being spent on staffing,7 there is almost no slack in the system for absorbing further shocks.
Falling pupil numbers — cited by 28% of finance leaders as a significant concern — are particularly acute in primary trusts, where the primary-age population decline is a demographic reality projected to persist for several years.5 MATs with mostly primary schools are expecting pupil numbers to drop almost 2% by 2026/27, and the funding consequence is direct: fewer pupils means less General Annual Grant income, against largely fixed cost structures.8
The growing complexity of pupil need — particularly the rise in SEND pupils, cited by 21% of finance leaders — creates a further layer of pressure that the existing architecture is poorly equipped to manage. High-needs funding is ring-fenced but chronically underfunded relative to actual demand, leaving trusts absorbing a growing proportion of SEND support costs from their core budget.5
What this demands of executive teams
A financial environment this complex does not call for traditional financial management. It calls for decision intelligence applied to trade-offs that have no clean answers: which schools receive resource priority, which central services genuinely protect educational quality, when does a deficit position require a structural response rather than a one-year mitigation, and how does the executive team prepare the board for decisions they have not had to make before? These are not finance questions. They are leadership questions with financial content — and they require an executive team that can think collectively, act decisively, and govern well under conditions of genuine uncertainty.
The Talent
Time Bomb
The succession pipeline is thin — and the cost of that is becoming visible
Beneath the financial pressures, there is a quieter crisis forming in MAT leadership. It is less visible in the data because it has not yet fully manifested — but the conditions for it are in place, and the organisations that do not address it now will feel its consequences acutely.
MAT executive leadership is concentrated in a relatively small number of high-capability individuals who have grown with the trust movement, built knowledge through experience, and in many cases are approaching the end of their first decade in post. The pipeline behind them is not deep. The development infrastructure that would systematically produce their successors is not yet built at scale.
The UK's succession planning problem is not a niche concern. Across the UK's largest listed organisations, more than half of incoming chief executives are being recruited externally — a figure significantly higher than in comparable economies.9 In the MAT sector, the dynamics are even more acute. MATs also report growing challenges in filling senior leadership roles, with experienced heads leaving the profession or retiring early — often resulting in less experienced staff taking on roles without adequate support or preparation.12
The CEO as single point of failure
In most Trusts, the CEO carries a disproportionate share of institutional authority, external relationship capital, regulatory knowledge, and strategic clarity. This is not a failure of individual leadership — it is a structural consequence of how the CEO role has evolved in the sector. When CEOs have built organisations largely by accumulating authority and relationship capital personally, the organisation is vulnerable to their departure in ways that healthy governance structures would not permit.
The risk is not only operational continuity. It is strategic coherence. A CEO who leaves takes with them judgements, relationships, and institutional knowledge that cannot be recovered by appointing a successor — even an excellent one — without a significant period of disruption.
The talent pipeline is thinning
Senior leaders in the sector are being developed as functional specialists — excellent at their domain — without the exposure to cross-Trust decision-making, board relationship management, and financial governance that executive MAT leadership actually requires. The transition from headteacher to CEO is widely acknowledged to be more challenging than many anticipate, requiring fundamental shifts in approach from operational to strategic, and from direct to distributed.13 Yet structured pathways for that transition remain thin.
When senior executive posts become available, the field of ready candidates is small. Internal succession is rarer than it should be. External appointments carry higher cultural risk and take longer to become effective — and the financial cost of getting a senior appointment wrong in a Trust already under fiscal pressure can be severe.
Burnout is accelerating the problem
Research published in September 2025 drawing on data from over 1,600 school and college leaders across England found a profession under intense pressure, with leaders spending the majority of their time on administration and student welfare.14 Earlier UK data found that 37% of senior school leaders showed signs of burnout and 41% reported signs of exhaustion — rates significantly higher than classroom teachers.15 When experienced leaders leave earlier than planned — as is happening with increasing frequency — the succession gap that opens is rarely filled well.
"Retaining the great leaders we already have is critical. Retention rates, however, are continuing to fall and headteachers are quitting the profession earlier — particularly secondary heads."
Education Policy Institute, 202516The Governance
Gap
What boards know and what executives are experiencing are increasingly different things
Of all the structural challenges facing Multi-Academy Trusts, the governance gap is the least visible in sector data — and potentially the most consequential. It sits at the intersection of accountability, strategy, and trust. When it opens, it is rarely dramatic. It grows slowly, through the accumulation of small misalignments, deferred conversations, and the gradual compression of board meetings into assurance theatre rather than genuine strategic dialogue.
The governance architecture of a MAT is, in theory, well designed. The board of trustees holds strategic oversight and fiduciary responsibility. The executive team holds operational authority within the Scheme of Delegation. The relationship between them should be characterised by clarity about roles, transparency about performance, and mutual confidence in each other's competence. In practice, as MATs grow in size and complexity, that clarity is harder to maintain.
"The Scheme of Delegation was designed to clarify authority. In practice, for many Trusts, it has become a ceiling on executive agency — and a floor below which board engagement rarely goes."
What boards are being asked to assure
A mid-sized MAT operating twelve or more schools generates a volume of information that no governance body can meaningfully process in the time available to trustees. The result, too often, is that boards become expert at approving policies, noting reports, and endorsing decisions already made — rather than exercising genuine strategic oversight of the direction the Trust is taking. This is not a failure of governance intent. Trustees are frequently capable, committed, and experienced. The failure is structural: the information systems, meeting rhythms, and agenda designs that would enable genuine strategic governance have not kept pace with the complexity boards are now asked to oversee.
The DfE is watching more closely
The regulatory environment around MAT governance is tightening. The DfE's Trust Quality Descriptors include explicit expectations about governance quality — not merely compliance, but the quality of strategic oversight, the effectiveness of the board-executive relationship, and the Trust's capacity for continuous improvement.17 The NGA's 2026 report on mature MATs identified governance quality as one of four key priorities for the sector's next phase.18 A Trust whose governance is operating in reactive mode is a Trust that is increasingly exposed to intervention.
The executive team's role in closing the gap
Here is the uncomfortable truth about the governance gap: it is not primarily the board's responsibility to close it. It is the executive team's. A board can only govern effectively with the information, framing, and strategic clarity that the executive provides. When executive teams present boards with data that is operationally rich but strategically thin — or when they manage governance relationships to protect executive decision-making space rather than enable genuine oversight — they are creating the conditions for the gap to widen.
The most effective Trust Cabinets are those that actively invest in governance quality: designing agendas that create space for genuine deliberation, providing strategic summaries that move boards from operational detail to consequential choice, and maintaining the kind of transparent, trust-based relationship with the Chair that allows difficult conversations to happen early rather than late.
What Decision
Intelligence
Actually Means
Beyond frameworks and training — the discipline of judgement under pressure
Decision intelligence is not a decision-making framework. It is not a tool, a model, a matrix, or a course. It is a quality of organisational capacity — the ability of a leadership team to convert information, experience, and collective judgement into good decisions, consistently, under conditions of pressure and uncertainty. This distinction matters enormously. A framework can be taught. Decision intelligence has to be built — through the systematic development of how an executive team operates, how it processes information, how it manages disagreement, how it escalates to the board, and how it recovers when decisions prove to have been wrong.
"The goal is not to make better decisions in the right conditions. The goal is to make better decisions when conditions are wrong — when certainty is unavailable, time is short, and the consequences of being wrong are significant."
The three components
Decision clarity — knowing what decisions the executive team actually needs to make, as distinct from decisions it is making out of habit, deferring unnecessarily, or that should be made by others. Many MAT executive teams carry significant decision debt: choices that have been postponed, partially made, or made implicitly without conscious deliberation. Decision clarity means surfacing that debt and addressing it systematically.
Decision alignment — ensuring that when the executive team has reached a conclusion, it is genuinely a collective conclusion, not a positional compromise or deference to the CEO. Alignment does not mean unanimity. It means each member of the cabinet understands the reasoning behind a decision, is prepared to advocate for it externally, and had a genuine opportunity to shape it. The absence of alignment is one of the most common causes of execution failure.
Decision execution — the capacity to move from decision to action with pace, and to monitor consequences with sufficient granularity to know when course correction is needed. The most analytically excellent decision is worthless if it is not executed. And execution in complex organisations requires clarity about accountabilities, a shared understanding of what success looks like, and the infrastructure to track progress against it.
Why socio-political headwinds cannot become the excuse
The sector will face continued political instability. Funding models will be revised. Regulatory frameworks will be updated. Ofsted will change its inspection methodology — again. The government's priorities for education will shift. All of this is certain. None of it is predictable in its specifics.
The temptation for MAT executives is to treat this uncertainty as a reason to defer strategic decisions — to wait for clarity that will not arrive, to postpone choices that feel too consequential to make without better information. This is understandable. It is also, in most cases, the wrong response. The organisations that navigate political uncertainty well are not those that wait longest before acting. They are those whose internal decision-making architecture is strong enough to function effectively regardless of what happens externally.
Systems
Over Heroics
Why the organisations that will endure are those that build infrastructure, not rely on individuals
The education sector has a long tradition of heroic leadership. The outstanding headteacher who transforms a school through force of personality. The CEO who holds a trust together through sheer capability and relational capital. These individuals exist. Their impact is real. And they are a deeply insufficient model for sustainable organisational performance.
Heroic leadership is fragile. It depends on the continued presence of the hero. It creates organisational dependency rather than organisational capability. And it signals, however unintentionally, that the Trust's performance is a function of individual brilliance rather than collective intelligence. The 'hero headteacher' myth — succeeding against all odds — is not merely an inadequate model. It has become, as the 2025 Sustainable School Leadership research starkly identifies, actively harmful.14
"A trust that needs its CEO to be exceptional every day is a trust that has not yet built an organisation. It has built a monument to its leader."
What systems thinking means in practice
Systems thinking in a MAT context means designing the organisation so that its capacity for good decision-making, high-quality governance, and effective execution is embedded in its structures, processes, and relationships — not concentrated in particular individuals. This does not diminish individual leadership. Exceptional leaders are still needed. The difference is the question being asked: not 'how do we find exceptional leaders?' but 'how do we build an organisation that enables leaders to operate exceptionally?'
Systems-oriented MATs design their executive operating rhythms intentionally — not just in terms of meeting frequency, but how decisions are made, how information flows, how disagreement is managed, and how the board is kept genuinely informed rather than retrospectively notified. They invest in diagnostic infrastructure that tells them, in real time, how their organisations are performing — not just how their schools are performing, but how their executive team is functioning as a collective unit.
The role of technology and data
The growth of management information, data infrastructure, and AI tools available to MAT executives represents a genuine opportunity — not to replace judgement, but to improve the conditions under which judgement is exercised. MATs that use data well are MATs whose executive teams spend less time gathering information and more time interpreting it. Whose boards receive strategic summaries rather than raw operational reports. Whose CFOs can model multiple financial scenarios in hours rather than days. Whose CEOs have a real-time picture of organisational health rather than a quarterly retrospective.
This is not about digitising existing processes. It is about redesigning the information architecture of the organisation so that decision-makers have what they need, when they need it, in a form they can act on. The Hidden Cost of MAT Growth research (March 2026) documents precisely this: trusts that lack joined-up data and planning structures see operational strain compound silently — until it directly affects the pace and confidence of executive decision-making.19
What Actually
MATters
The things that will remain true regardless of who is in government
Funding models will change. They have changed before and they will change again. The current government's priorities for education will shift — and the next government's will shift again. Ofsted's inspection framework will be revised. The regulatory architecture around MATs will evolve. None of this is uncertain. All of it is unpredictable in its specifics.
What will not change is the underlying reality that effective schools require effective leadership. That effective leadership requires good decisions. That good decisions require capable, aligned executive teams. And that capable, aligned executive teams do not emerge by accident — they are built, deliberately, through investment in the infrastructure of collective judgement.
The trusts that will look back on the period between 2025 and 2030 with satisfaction will not necessarily be those with the best funding positions or the most favourable inspection outcomes. They will be the ones that used this period of pressure to build something: governance that is genuinely strategic, executive teams that function as units rather than collections of individuals, succession architectures that protect the organisation from the fragility of heroic leadership, and decision systems that perform regardless of which headwinds are blowing.
Build that. The rest becomes navigable.
David McQueen
2026Notes & Sources
- Department for Education — Academy schools: sector statistics, updated 2025. Approximately 1,200 Multi-Academy Trusts operate in England. gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/academy-schools-data
- Department for Education — Governance Handbook, updated 2024. The DfE states that governance structures spanning more than one school create opportunities for improved teaching and educational outcomes. gov.uk/government/publications/governance-handbook
- IMP Software in association with the Confederation of School Trusts — MAT Finance Sector Insight Report 2025. Budget forecasts compiled from 274 multi-academy trusts for 2025/26–2027/28. Published October 2025. impsoftware.co.uk
- IMP Software / CST — MAT Finance Sector Insight Report 2025. A reserve level below 5% of income is identified by the DfE as a potential indicator of financial vulnerability. See also: DfE, Academy Trust Financial Management Good Practice Guides (2019).
- IMP Software — MAT CFO Insights Survey 2025. Survey of 153 MAT finance leaders. Published July 2025. cfotech.co.uk — Multi-academy trusts warn of worsening finances for 2025-26
- Leora Cruddas CBE, Chief Executive, Confederation of School Trusts — Foreword to the MAT Finance Sector Insight Report 2025. Published October 2025.
- EPM Education — Addressing Education Challenges in 2025. Published October 2025, citing that 85% of trust income is spent on staffing. epm.co.uk — addressing-education-challenges-in-2025
- British Educational Research Association (BERA) — Financial Forecasts in England's Multi-Academy Trusts Could Have a Lasting Impact on Children's Learning. Draws on IMP Software MAT Finance Sector Insight Report 2024. bera.ac.uk
- 25x25 (non-profit research) cited in: The Employment Law Solicitors / City Executive Search — Succession Planning: UK Companies Face Leadership Gaps, September 2025. Analysis of FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 CEO appointments for the year ending March 2025. theemploymentlawsolicitors.co.uk
- Russell Reynolds Associates — Global CEO Turnover Index Annual Report 2025: Shorter Runways, Higher Stakes. Published January 2026. Average FTSE 100 outgoing CEO tenure in 2025 was 6.4 years; global average fell to 7.1 years (an eight-year low). russellreynolds.com
- Russell Reynolds Associates, cited in Management Today — Why is it so hard to get succession planning right? October 2025. 62% of executives do not believe their organisation has a strong CEO succession strategy; UK external hire rates (52% FTSE 100, 62% FTSE 250) compared to US S&P 500 (27%) and Germany's DAX (23%). managementtoday.co.uk
- EPM Education — Addressing Education Challenges in 2025. MATs report challenges filling senior leadership roles with experienced heads leaving or retiring early. Published October 2025.
- Quarterdeck — Leadership Jobs in Education: A Comprehensive Guide to Senior Roles in UK Schools. January 2026. The transition from headteacher to CEO requires fundamental shifts from operational to strategic and from direct to distributed leadership. quarterdeck.co.uk
- Perry et al. — Sustainable School Leadership: UK Survey Report. Universities of Nottingham and Warwick, September 2025. Data from 1,624 school and college leaders. Reported in TeacherToolkit, October 2025. teachertoolkit.co.uk
- UK Education Support / Devlin Peck, Teacher Burnout Statistics 2025. UK-based research (2022) found 37% of senior school leaders showing signs of burnout and 41% signs of exhaustion — higher rates than classroom teachers. devlinpeck.com
- Education Policy Institute — From Burnout to Belonging: Rethinking Headteacher Retention. Labour Party Conference, 2025. EPI research demonstrates pupils under effective headteachers are up to three months ahead academically; leader retention rates are falling. epi.org.uk
- Department for Education — Academy Trust Quality Descriptors (Trust Quality Descriptions). Sets out five pillars of quality for multi-academy trusts, including governance quality as a core expectation. gov.uk
- National Governance Association — The Mature MAT Model: Success, Innovation, and Challenges in the Trust System. Published 2026. Identifies governance quality as one of four key priorities for MATs moving forward. nga.org.uk
- Access Education — The Hidden Cost of Growth in Multi-Academy Trusts. March 2026. Documents how operational strain from growth — including fragmented data, multiple HR processes, and compliance complexity — compounds silently and reduces executive decision-making speed and confidence. theaccessgroup.com