This article was originally published in Academy Trusts Today: Summer 2026 edition

The delivery challenge for trusts

The DfE’s latest White Paper, “Every Child Achieving and Thriving”, sets out ambitious plans to place pupils’ individual needs and achievements at the centre of education.

Alongside efforts to tackle rising absences and growing disengagement, the Government is seeking to build a holistic education system that staff, teachers, families and pupils can trust. This includes a greater emphasis on supporting children’s wider needs, from physical health, wellbeing and allergy management and the impact of these on attendance and pastoral care, at a time when an increasing number of families struggle to access the support their children require.

Rising expectations

Expectations are rising on all sides. On one hand, because children spend most of their time in school, families increasingly expect them to manage pupils’ health with the precision of clinical settings. On the other, the Government has made clear that schools must evolve to close gaps in care and deliver better outcomes for every child, ultimately reducing the number of pupils whose needs fall through the cracks of a system which is designed for cohorts and therefore does not always respond quickly or effectively enough to individual needs.

For trust leaders, while the goals are clear, the pressure is extraordinary. In the past year alone, they have faced two major changes: the White Paper and Benedict’s Law.

The case for interoperable systems

The challenge for trusts now lies in delivering on expectations without placing further strain on already overstretched administrative staff and teachers or overlooking consistency – particularly
across large trusts where processes vary and teams tend to operate in siloes.

"When faced with a new compliance requirement, the instinct is to reach for another solution: a new form, a new spreadsheet or a new standalone platform. This is precisely the problem."

Trust leaders cannot be everywhere at once. They can roll out policies and training but ensuring that processes are consistently and accurately implemented across every school, not just nominally adopted, exceeds most leaders’ capacity and time. In most contexts, limited visibility is uncomfortable. When the subject is child health and safety, it becomes outcome-limiting.

When faced with a new compliance requirement, the instinct is to reach for another solution: a new form, a new spreadsheet or a new standalone platform. This is precisely the problem.

Most trusts already operate with a patchwork of disconnected systems. Attendance lives here, medical records live there, and pastoral notes are somewhere else. The dots between declining attendance, an unmanaged medical condition and pastoral referrals raised six weeks ago must still be connected manually, because those critical data points remain trapped in separate silos.

Surfacing the right information

The DfE White Paper calls for ‘wrap-around support’. Wrap-around support requires wrap-around data. It requires specialist platforms that are genuinely interoperable, that surface the right information to the right people at the right time and provide trust leaders with a real-time picture of what is happening across their entire community.

"Integrated specialist solutions remove fragmentation. They allow trusts to reconcile wellbeing, health, pastoral care and attendance in one coherent picture."

Integrated, specialist solutions, built specifically for the school context and designed to work together, remove fragmentation. They allow trusts to reconcile wellbeing, health, pastoral care and attendance in one coherent picture, meeting the Government’s own stated goals while ensuring no child falls through the gaps.

Ultimately, this is not a technology question. It is a leadership question – and one that goes to the heart of children achieving and thriving. If you have read this far, you already know which systems in your trust are not talking to the others. Start there.

 

Alex Oselton

Marketing Director at Medical Tracker

 

Alex Oselton, DipM ACIM, is a marketing leader with over eight years of experience in the global Edtech industry. Throughout his career, he's worked closely with education leaders, schools, councils and local authorities and is passionate about supporting innovation in education.