Scheme of Delegation

The Scheme of Delegation lays out who has responsibility for what in the Trust, the individual schools and the Headteachers.

The ‘Scheme of delegation’ is fundamental to how a MAT operates, laying out who has responsibility for what in terms of the Trust and the individual schools and Headteachers. We have provided the details of our scheme of delegation on each of the schools’ websites. The principle behind our scheme of delegation is that individual schools and their Local Governing Bodies need to continue to set the ethos and culture within the school and drive improvement within their own institution.

The Trust is able to make that easier by taking on some of the responsibilities and functions that sometimes get in the way of the focus on young people and their school experience. Areas such as finance, facilities management, Human Resources and IT are often better provided centrally where economies of scale and specialism can make a positive difference to quality and value for money. Schools working together in the Trust can also negotiate from a stronger position for other services such as insurance, energy, auditing etc.

This is the default position for our scheme of delegation but if a school was in, or getting into, difficulty then the Trust would look to adjust the scheme of delegation to allow it to take a more active role.  The MAT has overall responsibility for all the schools in the Trust and will be pro-active in ensuring all its schools continue to improve and strive for excellence. The Trust will carry out an annual review with its schools and help provide a local, robust and expert safety net for schools if things are not going well.

By working together in an open and constructive partnership where we view all Trust schools as ‘our’ schools we hope that the need for such intervention is much less likely than if a school stood alone.