Being a Computing Teacher in a Multi-Academy Trust
Teaching computing within a multi-academy trust situates teachers within wider organisational networks of curriculum policy, shared resources, and institutional expectations. These stories reveal how teachers interpret and adapt those structures in practice, negotiating autonomy, collaboration, and accountability while attempting to sustain meaningful computing experiences for their students.
Tom
The multi-academy trust I am now working for might say they are a group of collegiate schools that work together, but they are not.
It was frustrating when we first became an academy because I could no longer attend local authority subject meetings. We were developing all these new courses and computing resources at the time, and I couldn’t contribute to that local network. So, I would say to teachers asking for help: ‘I'm not allowed there; my trust says I can go, but the authority says I have to pay, and the trust says, ‘Well, we don't pay to train you; why should we?’
So, I set up a CAS Hub as a workaround. We got some of the teachers coming along to provide training, and that looked good for the school because we were a CAS Hub, but it also meant we could continue to support local schools that wanted to develop physical computing.
Tom
Another issue with the larger academy chains is the same approach to teaching computing in all schools. So, if you have a computing coordinator at the trust level and they do not embrace physical computing, it will not exist.
Tom
Our school is part of a large academy chain; our core IT team runs on a business basis, keeping the network secure without considering how we make it most useful for students’ learning. They create tensions because they always work from the place of ‘No, you're not doing something,’. They never come from the opposite direction: ‘What do you want to teach? We'll make that work for you, but there might be some provisos to keep it secure.
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It wasn't long ago when we came into school one day, and the trust decided to block all USB ports. We were in the middle of teaching with micro:bits, and I said to the technician, ‘I plugged it in, and it doesn't work,’ and he said, ‘Yes, we've blocked USB ports now.’ This policy of blocking things causes many problems, and physical computing is risky because if it doesn't work, you suddenly create an extra barrier you can do without.
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You must remember that only some teachers, like Naomi and I, have a technical background outside of education and understand how technology works. Over the years, we have worked with the technical team to suggest how things can work. They'll say, ‘Okay, we'll try that’, so now there's an additional trust level to get through compared to what we used to have.
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Sometimes teaching ideas come to you in the middle of the night, and you want to do it the next day, but now I've got to fill out a form and ask someone to do it. They come back to me with a no, and then I must send an escalation to the core IT manager, and we may have something in place by half past two. You lose that spontaneity.
Sometimes you have a great idea that you know will excite the children, and it may be something straightforward that you want to do, but you can't because there's bureaucracy in your way, and that's frustrating.