Ask a group of heads in a multi-academy trust how much autonomy they actually have, and you'll get very different answers depending on which trust they're in — and which decision you're asking about. One might set her own curriculum sequencing but need sign-off for any spend over £2,000. Another can hire his own deputy but has to use the trust's central HR script for every difficult conversation with staff. A third has almost total day-to-day control but sits two governance layers away from anyone who could actually change the school's admissions policy. There's no single template for what "trust" means in multi-academy trust, and that's precisely why the question of autonomy keeps coming up at every CST conference, every NGA governance briefing, and every headteacher WhatsApp group discussing whether to join one.
This isn't a design flaw. It's the central governance question every trust has to answer for itself, in writing, in a document most heads have read once at induction and then rarely opened again: the scheme of delegation.
What a scheme of delegation actually is
Every academy trust in England is legally one entity — one employer, one admissions authority, one body accountable to the Department for Education and, for larger trusts, to the Education and Skills Funding Agency's regularity requirements. Individual schools within a trust don't hold their own legal status the way a maintained school's governing body once did. So when a trust has three, twelve, or forty schools, someone has to decide, formally, which decisions get made where.
That's the scheme of delegation: a written document, reviewed and approved by the trust board, that sets out which functions sit with the board itself, which are delegated to the chief executive and central executive team, and which are delegated further down to committees at individual school level — bodies still widely called local governing bodies in the sector, though the Department for Education's current governance guidance refers to them as local committees, precisely to make the point that they are committees of the trust board rather than free-standing entities with powers of their own. That terminology shift matters more than it looks. A local governing body sounds like it has independent authority. A local committee, by definition, only has whatever authority the trust board has chosen to hand it — and can, in principle, have that authority adjusted or withdrawn.
The Department's expectation, set out in its Academy Trust Governance Guide, is that the scheme should be clear enough that "everyone is clear about their responsibilities" and reviewed at least annually, with immediate revision whenever national requirements or the trust's own structure changes. The National Governance Association makes the same point in its practical guidance for trusts building or revising their scheme: simplicity and clarity aren't optional extras, they're the entire purpose of the document. A scheme of delegation that takes a headteacher twenty minutes and three phone calls to interpret has already failed at its job.
The Academy Trust Handbook — the Department's mandatory governance and financial framework, binding on every academy trust as a condition of its funding agreement — sets the outer edge of what any scheme of delegation can contain. However a trust chooses to divide up decision-making internally, the trust board itself can never delegate away its overall responsibility for the trust's funds and regularity, the chief executive (as accounting officer) retains personal responsibility for financial propriety and value for money regardless of what's been delegated downward, and certain transactions — severance payments above £50,000, and anything the Department would regard as novel, contentious or repercussive — require prior DfE approval no matter what any internal scheme says. Worth knowing that name, too: this document was the Academies Financial Handbook until 2021, when it was renamed to reflect that it was never purely about finance — it always covered safeguarding, estates and governance as well, the rename just made that honest. The current edition, the Academy Trust Handbook 2026, takes effect from 1 October 2026 and sharpens the emphasis on procurement, value for money and executive accountability further still. If your trust's scheme of delegation hasn't been checked against it, that's worth raising before the effective date, not after.
The tension nobody quite resolves
Here's the honest version of the argument for centralising more, made by trust CEOs rather than critics of the model: a shared curriculum sequence built once and refined by specialists is very often better than eleven different departments each reinventing GCSE English from scratch. A single HR function that knows employment law properly protects staff and the trust from costly mistakes that an overstretched school business manager might make once and never again. Procurement done at trust scale — energy contracts, IT infrastructure, catering, school software licences — genuinely does save money that can go back into staffing or resources, and multi-academy trusts were partly built on exactly that logic.
And here's the honest version of the case for keeping decisions local, made by heads who've watched what happens when it isn't: a school's relationship with its community isn't a variable you can standardise. The way a rural primary talks to parents at pickup, the assemblies that matter to a school with a strong faith character, the local employers a secondary has spent a decade building work-experience relationships with, the specific safeguarding context of one estate versus another three miles away — none of that survives being run through a single trust-wide template designed for the median school. Push curriculum, behaviour policy, uniform, communications and staffing decisions too far up the chain, and a school stops being recognisable to the people who've sent their children there for years. It becomes a branch, not a school.
Neither side of that argument is wrong, which is exactly why it doesn't resolve cleanly. The journalist Warwick Mansell, a long-standing and sharp critic of academy governance, has described the MAT model as amounting to "a centralisation of power unprecedented in English education" — a framing many CEOs would push back on hard, but one that captures why local governance powers remain, by most sector accounts, one of the most contested parts of trust structure. The trusts that handle this well aren't the ones that have found a clever way to make the tension disappear. They're the ones that have been honest about where the trade-off sits, and deliberate about which things they centralise and why.
A useful way to think about it, borrowed from the "aligned autonomy" language Dixons Academies Trust uses to describe its own model: the trust sets aligned expectations everyone adheres to, and schools have real flexibility in how those expectations get delivered on the ground. The distinction that matters is between mandating an outcome and mandating a method. A trust can reasonably insist that every school teaches phonics with fidelity to a chosen scheme, safeguards to one non-negotiable standard, and reports behaviour incidents through one system — and still leave a head free to decide how assemblies run, how the school talks to its specific parent body, and what its pastoral culture feels like day to day.
Headteacher or CEO: who actually decides what, in practice
On paper, the CEO is the trust's senior executive and accounting officer, accountable to the trust board; headteachers (sometimes titled heads of school, or principal, depending on the trust) run their schools within whatever the scheme of delegation gives them, and in larger trusts often report to the CEO through an executive layer of regional directors or heads of school improvement rather than directly. In practice, the real distribution of authority is set far more by the specific scheme of delegation — and by how rigidly or loosely it's actually applied — than by job titles.
The areas that most commonly sit with the centre, across the trusts that publish their schemes publicly, tend to include: employment contracts and pay scales, safeguarding policy (though not day-to-day safeguarding decisions, which stay with the school's designated safeguarding lead), finance above a set threshold, capital works and estates, admissions criteria, and — increasingly, as trusts grow — a common curriculum framework, even where individual sequencing is left to subject leads. The areas that most commonly stay local include day-to-day pastoral decisions, timetabling within trust parameters, parent and community communication, extracurricular provision, and the specific implementation of trust-wide policy on the ground.
Where it gets harder is the middle ground: recruitment of teaching staff below senior leadership level, decisions about which interventions to fund for which pupils, how a school responds to an Ofsted visit, whether a school can deviate from the trust behaviour policy for a cohort with particular needs. These are exactly the decisions that tend not to be spelled out cleanly in a scheme of delegation, because they don't map neatly onto a single line in a delegation matrix — and they're exactly the decisions where a head who assumed they had authority, and a CEO who assumed they didn't, end up in the same room having an argument that a clearer document would have prevented months earlier.
How the trusts that get this right actually operate
The difference between a trust where heads feel consulted and one where they feel managed rarely comes down to the org chart. It comes down to whether trust-wide decisions are issued as instructions or built with school leaders in the room before they're finalised.
A few patterns show up repeatedly in how well-regarded trusts describe their own practice. Some run centrally-developed frameworks — a curriculum spine, a behaviour system, a professional development offer — but hand ownership of specific elements to individual schools within the trust, so that expertise runs both ways rather than only downward from the centre; LEO Academy Trust, for example, has had individual schools lead trust-wide work in specific areas rather than routing every initiative through a central team. Others deliberately co-write trust-wide policy documents with headteacher and staff input before they're adopted, rather than consulting after the fact on something already drafted — Infinity Academies Trust's collaboratively built behaviour guidance is one documented example. Cirrus Primary Academy Trust has taken the approach of setting shared values as guiding principles that headteachers are trusted to interpret for their own context, rather than translating those values into a single rigid procedure applied identically everywhere.
What these approaches have in common isn't a particular org structure — it's a working assumption that headteachers are professionals with judgement worth using, not administrators executing someone else's plan. The Confederation of School Trusts, which represents roughly two-thirds of the academy sector and is the closest thing the sector has to a body setting expectations for what good trust governance looks like, published detailed guidance on governing a school trust in September 2025 built around the idea that good governance sits across several distinct domains rather than a single delegation chart — a reminder that decision rights are only one part of the picture; how those decisions get made, and who has a genuine voice in shaping them before they're final, matters just as much as where the line sits on paper.
The practical markers of a trust that's serious about this tend to be visible before you even see the scheme of delegation: a regular forum where heads can genuinely shape trust-wide policy rather than simply hear about it, a CEO and executive team who visit schools often enough to know them as more than a line on a dashboard, and a habit of explaining the reasoning behind centralised decisions rather than just issuing them. None of that requires giving up central control of the things that genuinely need to be consistent. It just requires treating the people running the schools as partners in getting there, not obstacles to be managed around.
Questions worth asking — whether you're joining a trust or already inside one
If you're weighing up joining a MAT, or trying to work out why your current one feels either too controlling or too hands-off, the scheme of delegation is the document to start with — but it's worth going in with sharper questions than "can I see your scheme of delegation," because most trusts will happily hand it over and it won't tell you everything you need to know.
On the document itself
- When was the scheme of delegation last reviewed, and does that review show any actual changes, or has it been rubber-stamped unchanged for several years running?
- Where the scheme is vague or silent — and most schemes are silent on more than they'd like to admit — what actually happens in practice? Ask for a real example, not a hypothetical.
- Is there a formal route to request a change to what's delegated to you, or is the current split effectively fixed?
On money, staffing and curriculum specifically
- What's your actual spending threshold before you need sign-off, and has it changed as the trust has grown?
- Can you appoint your own senior leadership team, or does the centre have a role in those appointments?
- How much latitude do you have to adapt the trust curriculum for your cohort — and who decides if "adapt" tips into "deviate"?
On voice and relationships
- Is there a standing forum of headteachers that shapes trust-wide policy before it's finalised, or one that hears about it afterwards?
- How does the trust handle a head who disagrees publicly, in a governance meeting, with a central decision — is that treated as legitimate challenge or as a problem to be managed?
- Who owns the relationship with your school's specific community — parents, local employers, feeder schools — you, or someone at the centre?
On growth and change
- Has the scheme of delegation shifted meaningfully as the trust has added schools? Centralisation tends to increase with scale — ask how the trust has handled that, and whether it was discussed with heads or simply applied.
- If the trust is planning to grow further, is there a stated intention for how delegation will change, or is that a decision for a later date with no current commitment either way?
None of these questions have a right answer that applies across every trust. A tightly centralised trust with excellent central curriculum expertise and heads who trust the model can be a genuinely good place to lead a school. A loosely federated trust that leaves almost everything local can work just as well, provided the things that do need consistency — safeguarding chief among them — are actually consistent. What matters isn't which model a trust has chosen. It's whether the model is deliberate, documented, explained, and open to challenge — rather than something that simply accumulated as the trust grew and nobody stopped to write it down properly.
Academy trust governance structures vary considerably between trusts, and the specifics of any scheme of delegation depend on that trust's own constitution, articles of association and board decisions. This article is general orientation on how the model works and the questions worth asking, not governance or legal advice specific to any individual trust. Headteachers and governors with a live question about their own trust's scheme of delegation, or about compliance with the Academy Trust Handbook, should check their trust's own governance documents and, where needed, take independent advice.
