Foreword

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Dave Baker, a visionary leader, dedicated educator and CEO at the Olympus Academy Trust.

This interview was conducted ahead of his scheduled appearance at our MATPN South West event, and captures Dave’s thoughtful reflections on leadership, centralisation, and the future of Multi-Academy Trusts. His insights offer valuable guidance for current and future MAT leaders navigating a rapidly evolving educational landscape.

In sharing this conversation, we hope to honour Dave’s legacy and the passion and purpose he brought to his work. His voice remains a powerful reminder of what thoughtful, values-driven leadership can achieve.

Our thoughts are with his family, colleagues, and all those whose lives he touched.

Interview

Q: Please introduce yourself

A: I’m Dave Baker and I’m chief executive officer of the Olympus Academy Trust. So, we’re a trust of nine schools, one all through, three secondary, five primary and we have a 10th school, a secondary school, free school is due to open next September, but we are in advanced stages of planning a merger with Futura earning partnership and that’s due to happen early 2026.

Q: Perfect. So, we’ll kick off with the first question. As CEO of Olympus, how has your approach to centralisation evolved over the last few years, and what prompted the shift?

A: So as a trust, we’ve been going since 2012 and initially we were two secondary schools. It became very clear when we became four schools and then seven schools in 2015/2016 that it was quite hard to reach consensus about how to do things and that we needed common approaches in order to get the benefit of working together and it became clear that centralising was the right way to do that.

I think the bit that’s become more refined over time has been about demonstrating the benefit of centralisation and only centralising things that do have a benefit to schools and being really clear about why we’re doing it and what the support is for those things happening centrally. That’s made a massive difference.

Q: OK, great. So, for those MATs just beginning their journey towards more centralised operations, what common early-stage mistakes should they be avoiding when rolling out centralised services?

A: I think the first mistake that a lot of trusts make is promising schools that nothing will change when they join the trust. And actually, you can’t get the benefit unless you do go for some kind of centralisation or hub-based approach in a regionalisation in a larger trust. And I think for us, the centralisation lessons were one about capacity that if we wanted things to be centralised, we needed to provide the capacity centrally to make them work, to make it clear where we were taking a burden away from schools and away from heads. And the other was about being able to demonstrate the benefit of those things happening, whether that be a financial benefit or an easing of burden benefit. And I think being able to demonstrate those things and having a proper implementation plan when you do change the way you do things is the key to success.

Q: Perfect. So just going on to balancing centralisation, we know that it can be difficult to do that with school level autonomy. What practical strategies have worked for your organisation to maintain this balance effectively?

A: I think we have clarity and we we’ve gained greater clarity over time about what the role of the head teacher is. The head teachers are responsible for running their schools, my trust central team is not responsible for running the schools. We’re there to support the heads to run their schools and I think we’ve become better at that rather than doing things for them. I think also having great clarity about what the benefit of doing something centrally is really important. We’ve also, I suppose learned over time that if you need to introduce something, sometimes paying for things centrally and easing the burden at the point of implementation can help with head, teacher and school buy-in, and then once schools have seen the benefit to them, it’s easier for them to decide and agree that they’d like to build in their budget planning in a second a subsequent year, and it becomes part of the way of doing things. I think the other thing is about line management for decision-making, that having clear lines of accountability about who’s making the decisions and who they’re answerable to. So, in terms of the finance leads in schools, reporting into our central finance lead, that’s really important. Same with premises and you know I could give you other examples of where having people pointing towards the centre makes it much easier in terms of messaging and decision-making. And also the head teachers meeting regularly and being involved in the decision-making rather than stuff being imposed on them is really important as well, so they do have that sense of autonomy and engagement with central decision-making.

Q: OK, brilliant. So, we’re seeing increased policy pressure around well-being and SEND and safeguarding. So how can centralised systems better support MATs in staying compliant and responsive to these areas?

A: So, I think in terms of accountability for compliance, we absolutely hold that centrally in terms of governance within Olympus. So, the support is there for their centrally to make sure that compliance is in place and also that it’s being checked and monitored. I think also expertise is really important in that sense. So we have a central role that oversees SEND and safeguarding in particular well-being probably sits more with schools, although we have a central Employee Assistance Programme, which is very much about supporting colleagues if they need access to additional services, but the safeguarding and SEND support and expertise that can be provided centrally is massive in terms of taking a burden off people in terms of decision-making and support.

And also, we have a network for safeguarding leads of a network for sencos, which means that that expertise is being shared and there is a sense of kind of sharing a burden with the group when there are issues to be resolved and extra capacity being able to be drawn on from outside.

And I suppose that then helps us when there’s change that we can kind of jointly decide how we’re going to do that. So, we have, for example, a set of trust Olympus principles for SEND, which apply across the trust, but the responsibility is very much sitting within schools with access to support from the centre and I think that’s really helped with the volume of change and the volume of pressure and it means there’s a bit more capacity to go back into school budgets and school staffing to support those areas as well.

Q: Brilliant, thank you. So, the idea of standardising support for better outcomes is quite central to your upcoming session at MATPN South West. So could you share a concrete example of how this has improved student learning in one of your schools.

A: So if I take an example around teaching and learning and quality of teaching, one way that we’ve standardised support is that we’ve given all colleagues access to high quality training and development. So, for example, one of our kind of key strategies over the last few years has been around consistency in the classroom and working with Doug Lemov’s teach like a champion approach where we’ve had Doug and his team over to train a whole group of people across the trust in a kind of train the trainer sense and then those people have led training for everyone else in the trust. And I think that’s a really good example of where everyone getting the same means that we get consistency for young people.

However, although we have a standardised model, obviously we customise it in terms of levels of support that are then needed for implementation, because some people will need more support to make that happen than others, so we’re able to identify best practise and how best practise is developing quickly in some areas of the trust, more so than others, and then those people can be used as reference points for those who need a bit more, either to go and watch them teaching. Or it has more sessions around supporting them to have people coming and watching them and giving them feedback about their teaching. And we’ve seen a real shift in that consistency of student experience and quality first teaching through that approach.

Q: That’s great, thank you. So, when it comes to staff readiness, it can often be quite a barrier to change. How do you ensure your teams are fully prepared and supported when adopting these centralised processes?

A: So, I think the first thing is about involving people in the decision-making, so that there is full engagement in processes before they’re implemented. Sometimes that isn’t possible, but in many cases, it is absolutely possible to Share with people there’s a plan to change the way we’re doing things and to then give them the chance to hear and think about and discuss the different ways that we might go about adopting a new system. And then I think the second thing is about having a proper implementation plan and doing a kind of Impact assessment around you know any issues to do with how that will be implemented and what fallout there might be. And then communication is absolutely critical in terms of telling people what you’re going to do, telling them what you’re doing when you’re doing it and telling them why, why you’re doing it and making sure you carry on telling them why you did it after you’ve implemented it Because there will always be some people who will not be as understanding, if you like about why change has taken place or the need to change to take place and that kind of communication is really important. So, in my trust I do fortnightly update out to all staff and we’re trying to spell stuff out there that’s coming up and why we’re making changes if changes are planned at that point and I think that helps.

Q: So, kind of moving towards what you said about bringing people together over communication, these events like MATPN South West aim to bring together senior leaders from across the sector. Why you think these gatherings are important for MAT leaders, especially at a time of such rapid operational and policy change?

A: So, if I go back to last year and the MATPN South West event in Bristol, I suppose I attended out of curiosity and I thought it was brilliant and there are a number of reasons why it was brilliant. One was, there were quite a few people in the room who I already knew and engaged with. There were a whole lot of other people who weren’t from the Southwest region who had travelled, so it was great to kind of meet new people or kind of encounter people who I might not have come across. There was quite a lot of unstructured and networking time, so really good opportunity to share practise with people and talk about how things work and why they work in different contexts. And then I think the industry experts who were involved in the event, it was really interesting to go and talk to companies I might not have taken the time to have one to ones with and to hear about what they offer and how they do things, and I took a lot of ideas back into my trust from that. The stimulated conversation with a number of other people, and this year, rather than me going by myself, I’m bringing some colleagues with me because I think the benefit to the trust is going to be huge of the other people being involved in those conversations so that we can then go back and talk further about them and decide you know where we might need change to happen. And I think also you know, if you look at the quality of some of the keynotes and speakers, there are some really good people who are who are doing inputs and talking at the event. And you know, why wouldn’t you want to be there, if you’re a leader in the in the area, quite apart from the fact it’s going to be in a nice environment and will be well looked after.

Q: That’s great. So, reflecting on your time at Olympus, what’s one centralization initiative you’re most proud of and what difference has it made to your schools or your learners?

A: I could pick loads because we’ve done all sorts of centralization, but I think one of them, probably the one that visibly has made the most difference and people would say, has made the most difference from being academies rather than being maintained schools is around premises.

So, because we’re a trust of over five schools and over 3,000 learners, we get an allocation of capital each year under the SCA scheme, which is enables us to do a whole load of improvement works across the trust and the condition of all the schools in the trust is much, much better than it was at the point at which the schools joined, and that’s because we have a central team, our kind of estates lead and head of business operations. They basically produce a plan based on kind of audits of the quality of our surveys of the quality of our premises and then we have a plan of action and each year we’re able to take off some major items on that plan of action to address improvements and the quality of the environment in the school for young people to learn and staff to work in and I think that is probably the single biggest visible factor the you know is there for anyone to see when they come into the schools and you know that has a big impact on teaching and learning as well in terms of motivation for people to learn in in spaces that are suitable to learn in.

Q: Yeah, definitely. So, we’ve talked about past projects, so let’s look ahead. How do you see the role of centralization of centralised MAT operations evolving in response to new challenges, whether that’s political, financial or technological challenges?

A: I’m going to think in terms of technology. Obviously, the role of AI is huge and every trust has got to consider how that is going to change the way that some aspects of the way we function change over a period of time.

I think for the specifics around Olympus, because we’re going into a merger with Futura in the next few months, clearly one of the things we’re looking at is how can we provide the best possible service with more specialisation than we have at the moment.

So, there is a significant piece of work going on right now about what roles we provide centrally and what support we provide centrally in order to respond to you know what you described as political, financial, technological challenges. We know that there’s a white paper coming in the autumn for schools. SEND is going to be at the heart of that. We know that at the moment young people with additional needs and coming from under resourced households are the ones where we have the greatest challenge about making progress and their outcomes being where they need to be. So, we want to be able to invest more resource in that and centralising will be one way of doing that, certainly around our SEND provision and coordination of how we work with pupil premium and other resources. So, I think trusts have got a massive opportunity about reviewing the way that we do things and the Secretary of State told recently about how there is not going to be loads and loads of additional money. So, we’ve got to look at how we spend and how we do rather than expecting more money to come in. And I think that’s exactly where we are about looking at what are the best things to send in order to get the best value and the most impact in the coming weeks, months and years.

Q: OK, great. So last question: if you could give one piece of advice to a MAT leader hesitant about centralisation, what would it be?

A: I guess the best piece of advice would be to go and talk to another trust leader or people in a trust where centralisation is well established and they’re seeing the benefits from it because they’ll be able to demonstrate both financially and in terms of buying and in terms of outcomes and what difference that has made. And that has a clear impact on what you can do for young people in terms of their outcomes as well. So, you know it’s a just do it scenario, you know go and find out and then get it in place.

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Thank you for reading and for taking a moment to reflect on Dave’s words.

As we come together at MATPN South West, we’ll be carrying Dave’s voice with us – a reminder of what thoughtful leadership looks like, and of the difference one person’s vision can make.

Find out more about MATPN South West