Adding a school to your MAT: resource toolkit

Use our downloadable resources to assess your trust's capacity to grow, and to conduct thorough due diligence on each joining school.

Last reviewed on 26 November 2024
School types: AllSchool phases: AllRef: 44221
Contents
  1. Understand where you are now
  2. Conduct thorough due diligence: download our template
  3. Review your top-slicing strategy
  4. Tips for sustainable growth

Understand where you are now

Consider whether you could grow your trust, either locally or beyond. Think about whether merging with another trust would benefit your schools.

Review your operating model

Review your current operating model to make sure you have the resources and capacity needed to add a new school.

This process will help you:

  • Understand what you're spending on processes, for both staff and goods and services, and evaluate how effectively these are working
  • Design a central team structure that has the capacity to support a new school

Conduct a SWOT analysis

Doing a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis will help you to think self-evaluatively about:

  • Where you're currently performing well
  • Where you need to improve
  • What opportunities adding a school presents
  • What threats adding a school may pose

Download our template to make sure you get this right: 

Download: SWOT analysis (trust growth) DOCX, 128.4 KB
Download

Use these questions to help scaffold