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Growth and merger can create significant opportunities for school trusts, but they also bring important decisions about how services should be organised and delivered. Following the merger of two trusts, Excalibur Academies Trust faced a challenge familiar to many growing organisations: how to create a single operating model from two successful, but very different, approaches. One legacy trust operated through a highly decentralised model, while the other had embraced shared

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Across the sector, shared services have become the default operating model for trusts. But while many trusts have centralised functions such as finance, HR, estates and IT, leaders increasingly want to be confident that their shared services are genuinely adding strategic value , not just simply keeping the organisation running. At CJK, we increasingly see trusts asking a different question: " How do we shift from managing problems to enabling performance?" This is the challe

As trusts evolve, their challenges change, from building central functions to integrating, innovating, and sustaining them. Our latest article for Trust Leadership Today distils key lessons from CJK’s research into how successful trusts grow and adapt: 1️⃣ Know your phase – be honest about where you are in your growth journey. 2️⃣ Anticipate the crisis – plan your next operating model shift before it’s forced on you. 3️⃣ Invest in data and systems – technology is the enabler