There’s a 108-page business case. Have you seen it?

One of the things I’ve asked for via and FOI in JUly was the business case supporting the merger. Because this sort of things should be submitted for the DofE to decide whether or not to go ahead.

Last week I received a 108-page dump of stuff. Which was mostly irrelevant. I’ll linked it below in case you’re interest.

Now, I’m not going to pretend I’ve read it all, because it’s mostly irrelevant. But one of the things I (and an AI tool) scanned it for were aspects of the business case. I@m not that interested in financials. I understand that these would be commerically sensitve. But the question is why?

Why is it in the interest of Learning Partners to merge with these church schools? If the “cost” of the merger is sacrificing aspects of control and giving it to the Diocese, what’s in it for LP and its member schools.

the business case and supporting information for the merger.

It covers the rationale for bringing the three trusts together, the proposed structure of the enlarged trust, governance, finance, staffing, estates, risks and the anticipated benefits.

In other words, a considerable amount of work has already gone into deciding what this new trust could look like.

The business case: who actually benefits?

There is a 108-page business case behind the proposed merger of Learning Partners.

It makes interesting reading.

Because when you strip away the language about collaboration, scale and shared values, one point keeps occurring to me:

For the CofE schools, some of the benefits are pretty clear.

They become part of a substantially larger trust. REcall the secular MAT is 17-schools. The other two have 5 and 6 schools. So the smalled trusts gain access to the infrastructure, capacity and resources of that larger organisation.

And, of course, the new trust is being specifically redesigned so that CofE schools can join it, thereby giving some power and control to the church.

So the Diocese gains something too: formal rights within the governance structure of a trust containing a significant number of community schools.

So what do the existing community schools gain in return?

The business case talks about the advantages you would expect: economies of scale, collaboration, shared expertise, financial resilience, stronger central services and opportunities for staff.

Those may well be genuine benefits.

But they are also the kinds of benefits normally advanced for almost any MAT merger.

Learning Partners could have chosen any other secular MAT to merge with and therby obtained economies of scale. Instead it is choosing to merage with CofE MATS and dilute the governance model.

So what does this merger give the existing community schools that they could not achieve without giving the Church of England a formal role in the governance of their trust?

For a proposal supported by 108 pages of business case, that feels like a fairly fundamental question.

Sources:

• The FOI response