Five years of the Multi-Academy Trust Maths Leads Community

The MAT Maths Leads Community brings together new and experienced maths leads from primary and secondary trusts. Participants meet and collaborate to develop their vision for effective teaching and learning in maths. Now in its fifth year, the community continues to grow and evolve, with new MAT leads joining each year and 165 participants taking part in 2025/26.

Emma-Jane O’Neill, school improvement lead, Athelstan Trust

I’ve been part of the community since 2021. I joined because I was keen to meet other people doing the same role as me and to be part of a community where I could ask questions and network with these people.

Over the last five years, I’ve called on colleagues from other trusts, which has been really useful. For example, I’ve looked at KS2 to KS3 transition and when I went into primary schools, I sought advice from primary colleagues, as my background is in secondary. 

Carrie Martin, senior network leader of maths, Cabot Learning Federation

The core programme consists of well-crafted materials and sessions that allow us to explore how our role can be most effective. It has enabled me to ask questions about how I speak to people within and outside the trust to make strategic decisions about improving maths teaching trust-wide.

The community involves a group of participants who are used to working together over time. We have learned to collaborate, to talk about what’s going well and what isn’t, and to discuss what’s hard to change. We can go deeper with our ideas, and get to grips with the maths education landscape, because we have existing professional relationships as a basis for our conversations.

Nicole Guy, maths learning leader, Central Learning Partnership Trust

When I first started in my trust-wide role, it was a new position and I was finding my way. I was so grateful to see that the MAT Leads Community existed – I had to grab the opportunity with both hands!

In my first session, we thought about what our vision was, and how we could implement it. I actually thought about how I spend my time, and I realised some of it was being wasted. I needed to allow myself to think about how I could best serve the schools and students in my trust.

In a later session, we explored cross-trust data. I used what I learned to bring together the heads of maths across my trust, and encourage them to compare their own data, looking for dips and sharing what they were doing about it.