Last week, The Classroom Partnership joined trust leaders from across the region at MAT Partnership Network (MATPN) Midlands, two days dedicated to the challenges and opportunities shaping Multi Academy Trusts (MATs) today. From workforce strategy to supply staffing reform, the conversations reinforced what we see every day working with trusts nationwide: the sector is thinking harder than ever about how to do more with less, without compromising on quality or compliance.
Here’s a recap of what we discussed, presented, and learned.
The Questions Every Trust Is Asking
No two trusts are identical, but across every conversation at MATPN Midlands, a familiar set of questions kept surfacing:
- How do we improve visibility of supply staffing spend?
- How do we maintain compliance across multiple schools?
- How do we reduce administration and improve oversight?
- How do we ensure value for money?
These questions sit at the heart of why Managed Service Provision (MSP) has become such a central topic for MAT leaders. Trusts don’t just want to know what they spent on supply staffing last year, they want to understand exactly why they spent it, and what could be done differently.
Day One: Supply Staffing Through an MSP Lens
Our session on day one explored how MATs can create greater visibility, consistency and control across supply staffing, while still giving individual schools the flexibility they need and giving trust leaders the oversight they want.
It’s a balance many trusts are still working to strike: centralising enough to drive savings and consistency, without removing the flexibility that headteachers and school-level staff rely on day to day. We had some genuinely valuable conversations with trust leaders about how they’re approaching this trade-off, and it was clear that supply staffing and MSP remain live, pressing issues across the sector.
The £1m Case Study: Shaw Education Trust
The standout moment of the event was our CEO, Paul Broderick, joining Shaw Education Trust‘s CEO, Kerry Inscker, and Trust Recruitment Manager, Natalie Turner, on stage to walk through a trust-wide transformation in real numbers.
The headline: over £1m taken out of the agency supply chain in a single academic year, with zero fulfilment slippage.
That’s a significant reduction in spend delivered without trusts having to compromise on getting the right staff, in the right classrooms, at the right time. But as we said in the lead-up to the event, the saving itself isn’t really the story. What matters is how it was achieved:
- The decisions made at trust level to centralise and standardise supply staffing
- The processes put in place to maintain compliance and oversight across every school
- The stakeholder engagement needed to bring headteachers, business managers and trust boards along with the change
- The data and reporting that gave trust leaders real visibility, not just after the fact, but as spend was happening
This is the difference between a one-off cost-cutting exercise and a genuinely sustainable shift in how a trust manages its workforce spend. Shaw Education Trust’s experience shows what’s possible when an Expert MSP is built around a trust’s actual operating reality, not a generic template.
The Workforce Revolution: Talent, Culture and Capacity
Day two closed with a panel discussion, “The Workforce Revolution: rethinking talent, culture and capacity in MATs,” chaired by Vince Green, which brought together some of the sector’s leading voices:
- Sarah Tallack, Head of Apprenticeships Development and Delivery, Ark
- Shaheen Myers, Founder and CEO, Balance:ed
- Kerry Inscker, CEO, Shaw Education Trust
- Paul Broderick, CEO, The Classroom Partnership
With workforce pressures continuing to intensify across the education sector, the panel challenged trust leaders to think differently about how they attract, grow and retain great people. Discussion ranged from reimagining career pathways and investing in leadership development at every level, through to practical strategies for supporting staff wellbeing and ongoing training.
The common thread running through both the workforce panel and our supply staffing session was clear: workforce strategy and supply staffing strategy are no longer separate conversations. Trusts that treat them as connected, rather than siloed, are the ones best placed to build resilient, cost-effective staffing models for the years ahead.
Why This Matters for Your Trust
If your trust is grappling with any of the questions raised at MATPN Midlands, whether that’s visibility of supply spend, compliance across multiple schools, reducing admin burden, or simply proving value for money, you’re not alone. It’s the reason we built our Expert MSP the way we did, and why we work directly with trust leadership teams to design a model around each trust’s real needs.
Want to learn more about how our Expert MSP could work for your trust? Get in touch with The Classroom Partnership to continue the conversation, whether you caught us at MATPN Midlands or are hearing about our work for the first time.
The Classroom Partnership is a managed staffing provider for Multi Academy Trusts across England, helping trust leaders take control of supply staffing costs, compliance and workforce strategy.