Why do MATs struggle with school messaging platforms?

Communicating with parents is more complicated for Multi-Academy Trusts than it is for schools. 

But why is that? And does it have to be more complicated?

Can the way Trusts and their schools communicate with parents be scaled for consistency and improvement — or is the complexity necessary?

The future of MATs

The government’s goal is that all schools will eventually be part of a Trust.

That was one of the takeaways from the February 2026 schools white paper (Every child achieving and thriving).

The direction of travel seems clear: the number of schools in a MAT has risen from 15 per cent in 2016 to 50 per cent in 2026's latest data (Get Information about Schools).

With MATs becoming more and more common, the question of how centralised parent communications are — and how centralised they can be — becomes more important. 

Communicating as a single school vs communicating as a MAT

Why are communications more complex for MATs?

There are two answers to this question.

The first and most obvious answer is that MATs are made up of multiple schools. While a single school only has its own communications to keep track of, a MAT must keep track of every school in the Trust's communications. 

Even if each school only uses one channel for communications, this can still mean the MAT must keep track of as many as five or six different channels across the Trust. 

But many schools use more than one channel. In fact, 50 per cent of schools use six or more channels to communicate with parents.

For MATs, this can quickly become difficult to manage. A MAT with 10 schools, each using six channels, may find it now needs to keep track of 60 different channels... which brings us to the second answer to the question of why communications are more complex for MATs. 

The second answer is that MATs lack a central place to manage all of those communications. Without one single place where every communication and every channel is managed, MATs are forced to use ever-growing spreadsheets and manual checks to make sure nothing slips through the net. It's a time-consuming process that only gets worse with every school added to that MAT.

Are centralised communications the answer?

We recently spoke to Matrix Academy Trust about how they used ReachMoreParents to centralise oversight of how every school in the Trust communicated with parents. The key takeaway was clear: pivoting to a single platforms didn't just make communications easier to manage for the Trust itself, it also made them easier for the schools and for parents. 

How Matrix Academy Trust got central oversight over how its schools communicate

With nine schools and growing, Matrix Academy Trust's biggest challenge was bringing parent communications under one roof.

Read the case study

Emerging data shows that MATs increasingly care more about centralisation. A recent report from NGA found that MATs:

• are centralising functions away from school level and towards a central team

• are increasingly taking more internal responsibility, instead of contracting to third parties

• are more often recruiting specialists, rather than 'jack-of-all-trades'
  

Making sure every school in a Trust is using one central platform to communicate with parents is an effective way to centralise oversight of those communications. As we heard in our case study, being able to use ReachMoreParents to see, at a glance, which schools were communicating well and which needed more support was a sea change for the Trust.

As MATs become more commonplace, the sector needs to reconsider how schools communicate - and how. Central oversight is no longer a 'nice to have' addition. Instead, it's becoming essential.

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