Multi-academy trusts
How a trust sees its schools
One account across several schools, and what it can and cannot see of each.
On this page
A multi-academy trust holds an account of its own, alongside the accounts of each of its schools. Your trust page is where the member schools are listed and where you move between them.
The trust and its schools are separate organisations
Each school keeps its own record, its own number on roll, its own contracts and its own people. The trust is a parent above them rather than a replacement for them.
That is not administrative tidiness. Prices are per school because schools are what have pupils in them, contracts are per school because that is what an SLA covers, and compliance is per school because that is what an inspector asks about. A trust with one roll and one contract would be unable to answer any of those.
What the trust can see
- Every member school, with its roll and what it holds.
- Each school's contracts, orders and renewals.
- Each school's compliance position.
It is a view across the trust rather than a merged one: the columns are schools, and it stays that way, because "which of our nine has not done the safeguarding refresher" is the question worth answering.
What it can do
The trust can act for a member school — buy, renew, administer — by switching into it. Everything done that way is recorded as done by the trust. See acting on behalf of a member school.
Entitlement passes down
Where the trust holds something that carries an entitlement, the member schools get it. A subscription bought once at trust level opens the reserved guidance for every school in it, without anybody being added to a list.
The reverse does not hold: one school's subscription is that school's. See buying for more than one school.
People
Somebody at the trust has an account at the trust, not at each school. A member school's own staff have accounts at their school and see their school, exactly as any other school's staff do. Nobody is quietly given a view of all nine because their trust has one.
Adding and removing schools
Which schools belong to a trust is held by City Council, since it follows from the legal position rather than from a preference. A school joining or leaving is worth telling them about promptly: it changes what the trust can see, what entitlement flows down, and which invoices go where.
Not what you were after?
Ask City Council in the bubble at the corner of any page, or open your help conversation in full. It is one conversation that never closes, so there is nothing to raise and no subject line to invent.