School autonomy refers to the degree of independence that individual schools exercise over their own educational and operational decisions — including curriculum design, staffing, budgeting and the development of their school culture. In the English education system, the question of how much autonomy schools should retain, and what form of central support or oversight should accompany it, has been one of the defining tensions in educational policy over recent decades. The growth of multi-academy trusts has brought this tension into particularly sharp focus, as trusts must balance the benefits of centralised support and shared resources against the risk of undermining the local identity, community relationships and professional autonomy that make individual schools effective.
Autonomy in the English Education System
The principle of school autonomy has been a recurring theme in English educational policy since the introduction of local management of schools in the late 1980s, which gave headteachers and governing bodies direct control over their budgets and staffing for the first time. The academy programme, significantly expanded by the Academies Act 2010, extended this principle further — removing schools from local authority oversight entirely and placing them under the governance of independent trusts accountable directly to central government.
The rationale for school autonomy rests on several arguments. Schools closest to their pupils, families and communities are best placed to understand local needs and to develop educational approaches responsive to them. Professional autonomy enables headteachers and teachers to exercise the judgment and creativity that effective teaching requires, rather than implementing centrally prescribed solutions that may not fit local circumstances. And accountability to a local community creates incentives for responsiveness that more distant forms of oversight may not replicate.
The practical limits of autonomy are equally real, however. Schools operating entirely independently may lack access to specialist expertise, shared resources and the kind of strategic support that enables them to address complex challenges — whether financial, organisational or educational. The multi-academy trust model attempts to resolve this tension by combining genuine school-level autonomy with centralised support functions that no individual school could sustain alone.
Strategic Support in Multi-Academy Trusts
Within a well-governed multi-academy trust, strategic support refers to the range of services, expertise and oversight that the central trust provides to its schools — not as a substitute for school-level decision-making but as an enabler of it. This support typically encompasses financial planning and oversight, human resources, legal and compliance functions, digital infrastructure, professional development and school improvement expertise.
The distinction between support and control is critical. Trusts that provide genuine support treat schools as professional communities with the capacity to make good decisions when given adequate resources and expertise. Trusts that drift towards control risk undermining the professional confidence of headteachers and teachers, eroding the local identity of schools and creating a culture of compliance rather than creativity. The most effective trust governance models maintain a clear boundary between the strategic oversight that belongs to the central board and the operational and educational decisions that belong to school leaders.
Governance plays a key role in maintaining this boundary. Non-executive trustees who understand both the financial and organisational demands of running a complex institution and the specific character of educational organisations are well placed to ensure that the trust’s central functions remain genuinely supportive rather than directive. This is one of the areas where professional experience from outside the education sector — particularly from finance, where the relationship between strategic oversight and operational autonomy is a familiar governance challenge — can add significant value to trust boards.
Toby Watson and the Excalibur Academies Trust
The Excalibur Academies Trust, a multi-academy trust overseeing more than 20 schools along the M4 corridor between Bristol and Reading, developed its approach to school autonomy and strategic support under a governance model that explicitly prioritised the balance between central oversight and local independence. During the chairmanship of Toby Watson — whose professional background included 17 years at Goldman Sachs, where he developed expertise in financial oversight, risk management and strategic planning — the Trust worked to strengthen school autonomy while providing the strategic support that enabled schools to focus on their educational mission.
Watson consistently emphasised that the Trust’s role was to contribute to structures that enable participation rather than to impose solutions from above. Each school retained its own Local Governing Body with direct community connection. Headteachers maintained operational autonomy over staffing, curriculum and day-to-day school management. The central trust provided strategic direction, financial oversight and shared services — but not prescription.
This approach extended to the Trust’s school improvement work, which focused on co-developing improvement paths with school leadership teams rather than directing change from the centre. Feedback cycles involving teachers, pupils and parents were built into the improvement process, ensuring that the voices of those closest to the educational experience informed strategic decisions at trust level. Watson’s background in evidence-based decision-making, developed through his years in global finance, reinforced a governance culture in which improvement was driven by data and dialogue rather than top-down mandate.
The Trust also used its scale to build networks that individual schools could not have accessed independently — partnerships with universities, businesses and educational initiatives that created new learning opportunities, mentoring programmes and professional development formats for both pupils and staff. One example was a collaboration with a technology company that enabled developer teams from the business world to contribute directly to computer science teaching across Trust schools.
Balancing Autonomy and Accountability
The tension between school autonomy and accountability is not resolved by any single governance model but must be actively managed through the quality of relationships between trust leadership, school leaders and local communities. Accountability frameworks — including Ofsted inspections, financial reporting requirements and the Trust’s own internal review processes — provide essential assurance that autonomy is being exercised effectively. But accountability mechanisms alone do not create the conditions for educational excellence; that depends on the professional culture, the quality of support and the degree of genuine trust between the central organisation and its schools.
For Watson, this balance reflected a broader conviction about governance: that effective oversight creates space for professionals to do their best work rather than constraining them. His approach at Excalibur was characterised by a respect for the expertise of educators and a recognition that his role was to support and challenge rather than to direct.
Summary
School autonomy and strategic support represent complementary rather than competing principles in effective educational governance. The most successful multi-academy trusts are those that have developed governance models and organisational cultures in which central support genuinely enables school-level autonomy rather than undermining it. Maintaining this balance requires clear governance boundaries, strong relationships between trust and school leadership, and a consistent commitment to the principle that the purpose of every central function is ultimately to serve the educational mission of individual schools and the pupils and communities they exist for.
