Continuous Improvement: A More Powerful Approach to MAT Leadership

In high-performing organisations—airlines, tech giants, hospitals—Continuous Improvement (CI) is a core operating principle. In education, it’s still an underused opportunity.

Airlines, tech companies, healthcare providers, and global manufacturers have spent decades refining their systems through deliberate, data-driven, and collaborative cycles of improvement. Yet, in education, we often treat improvement as a project—something with a beginning, a middle, and an end—rather than as a way of operating.

Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs) are complex organisations. We span regions, oversee diverse phases, and work with a wide range of communities. We are held accountable for outcomes, yet often lack the tools and language to treat improvement as a systemic function.

This is where Continuous Improvement can transform how we think about Trust leadership. At its heart, CI is about building a culture—not just of high standards, but of high responsiveness. It empowers everyone in the organisation to make things better, every day, in every setting.

The CI approach has already found traction in education-adjacent sectors. In healthcare, the NHS has adopted PDSA and Lean Thinking in patient safety and service design. In the US, the Carnegie Foundation has pioneered Networked Improvement Communities (NICs)—collaborations across schools tackling common problems through shared inquiry.

In the UK, some forward-thinking trusts have quietly begun embedding CI principles: piloting teacher workload initiatives using short cycles of change, improving attendance with rapid-response adaptations, and developing curriculum through iterative co-design. But this is far from the norm – a norm we would do well to change.

A Vision of a Living, Learning Trust

Imagine a MAT where every academy operates as a living lab. Where improvement isn’t handed down in directives, but generated locally, tested carefully, and scaled trust-wide only when it works. Where central teams act not as inspectors or enforcers but as partners in promoting learning across the system.

In such a trust, you’d expect to see:

• Cross-phase teams solving persistent problems together.
• Common frameworks for change trials.
• Dashboards tracking implementation, not just outcomes.
• Leaders asking, “What did we learn?” not just “Did it work?”

CI changes the role of leadership. It’s not about arriving with answers—it’s about creating the conditions for answers to emerge, be tested, and improve over time.

Rethinking Improvement in MATs

MATs operate in a multifaceted environment, often stretched across regions and educational phases. Traditional approaches to improvement tend to rely on periodic interventions or directive “turnaround” models. In contrast, CI offers a way to:

• Empower local leadership to enact small, measurable changes.
• Engage every staff member as a contributor to a collective vision of excellence.
• Integrate data and reflection into the very fabric of daily operations.

Ultimately, it’s about moving from reactive fixes to building a self-improving system.

To make CI stick, we have to shift the culture. That means moving:

• From compliance to curiosity.
• From performance management to system learning.
• From initiative overload to measured, manageable cycles.

This isn’t soft. It’s strategic. CI requires discipline: tight feedback loops, clear hypotheses, rigorous evaluation. But it also requires humility—an acknowledgment that improvement isn’t something we deliver to our academies. It’s something we build with them.

The Pillars of Continuous Improvement

1. Plan–Do–Study–Act (PDSA)

Originally developed from the work of W. Edwards Deming, the PDSA cycle is arguably the most accessible CI tool. In an educational context:

• Plan: Teams identify a challenge—say, improving literacy outcomes—and set clear, testable objectives.
• Do: A small-scale pilot is launched, such as introducing a new teaching strategy in a single class.
• Study: Data is collected, feedback is solicited, and results are carefully reviewed.
• Act: Depending on the outcomes, the change is scaled, adapted, or abandoned.

For a MAT, deploying the PDSA cycle across clusters can foster a culture where iterative learning is valued, risk is minimised, and successes are systematically built on.

2. Lean Thinking

Lean is about creating maximum value with minimal waste. Borrowed from the Toyota Production System, Lean challenges us to rethink every process:

• Eliminate redundancies: In many trusts, duplicative tasks or overly bureaucratic procedures can drain resources that would be better spent on teaching and learning.
• Empower frontline staff: Teachers and school leaders are in the best position to identify process bottlenecks, be it in administrative tasks or curriculum delivery.
• Visual Tools: Techniques like value stream mapping can help a MAT visualise workflows—from pupil enrolment through to exam results—and discover where efficiencies can be gained.

Applied across a MAT, Lean Thinking not only reduces wasted time and energy but also promotes a culture where every member is a proactive problem-solver.

3. Kaizen

Derived from Japanese business practices, Kaizen emphasises continuous, incremental improvement. Its principles include:

• Bottom-Up Innovation: Everyone in the organisation, from classroom teachers to senior leaders, should contribute ideas.
• Small, Daily Changes: Rather than waiting for big reforms, Kaizen champions the value of countless minor enhancements that compound over time.
• Collaboration and Commitment: Teams work together to identify issues, propose changes, and rapidly test innovations.

For a MAT, adopting Kaizen means embedding continuous feedback loops into everyday operations—transforming improvement from a sporadic event into a persistent organisational activity.

4. Six Sigma (DMAIC)

Although Six Sigma is often associated with manufacturing, its DMAIC framework—Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, and Control—can rigorously address long-standing challenges:

• Define: What specific problem (for instance, a gap in pupil attainment) needs resolution?
• Measure: What metrics are in place to quantify the issue?
• Analyse: What are the root causes?
• Improve: What interventions will deliver measurable results?
• Control: How will improvements be sustained?

In the MAT context, Six Sigma can be useful for solving complex problems where data integrity and precision are paramount. While it demands a more analytical approach, its disciplined methodology can provide robust evidence for scale and replication.

Debating Implementation: Challenges and Opportunities

A Cultural Shift

Adopting CI across a MAT means more than just introducing new tools—it requires a cultural metamorphosis. Traditional hierarchies may resist the bottom-up ethos that CI champions. Senior leaders must champion a shift from a “command and control” mindset to one where:

• Risk-Taking is Safe: Staff are encouraged to experiment without fear of punitive consequences.
• Failures are Learning Opportunities: Each setback is documented and analysed to inform future strategies.
• Every Voice is Valued: Improving outcomes is seen as a collective responsibility that includes inputs from all staff members.

System Integration

CI cannot operate in isolation. It must be integrated with existing data systems, professional development, and strategic planning. For a MAT:

• Data-Driven Decisions: Effective CI requires robust data collection and analysis frameworks that can track progress in real-time.
• Distributed Leadership: Continuous Improvement Partners (CIPs) can be embedded as regional facilitators, ensuring that each academy’s unique context informs the overall trust strategy.
• Training and Support: For CI to succeed, all staff must be trained not only in the tools but in the underlying philosophy of constant, measured improvement.

Balancing Scale with Local Needs

One of the biggest debates around CI in large organisations like MATs is finding the balance between standardisation and local autonomy:

• Consistency vs. Flexibility: Central oversight through CI dashboards and regular trust-wide reviews ensures consistency. Yet, individual academies must retain the flexibility to experiment and tailor solutions to their unique challenges.
• Aggregating Learnings: Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) can play a crucial role here, acting as forums where successful pilots are shared and adapted across the network, building a rich, iterative learning ecosystem.

Looking to the Future

The promise of Continuous Improvement in education lies in its ability to foster an environment where innovation is the norm. When applied thoughtfully:

• Leaders become coaches rather than commanders.
• Every school becomes a data-rich learning ecosystem.
• Improvement is not episodic but a continual state of progress.

For MAT CEOs, the CI model offers a pathway to not only streamline processes and cut waste but to build a system where all stakeholders are engaged in a relentless pursuit of excellence. The journey requires commitment, strategic alignment, and a willingness to challenge the status quo—but the potential rewards in educational outcomes and organisational agility are significant.

The Opportunity

In an era of tighter funding, greater accountability, and growing complexity, MATs need powerful models of improvement. Not those based on top-down enforcement or endless external interventions—but improvement grounded in trust-wide learning, continuous iteration, and purposeful change.

Bringing Continuous Improvement to education isn’t about importing jargon. It’s about creating a system that gets better, faster—because it knows how to learn from itself.