In my lovely little maintained school, the big question on everyone鈥檚 minds is whether to have our Christmas dinner in Bethnal Green or Woodford. I am not party to SLT or governance discussions, but my sense is that whether we should join a trust has never been further from anyone鈥檚 thoughts. Since the election, cutting Tory projects like the National Tutoring Programme and the National Citizens Service has given Labour鈥檚 education team chances to bare its more ruthless teeth. Amid the various smoke signals about school structures, it is clear that ministers are pausing to ask serious questions around the efficacy and efficiency of the current system. Fifteen anarchic years of academisation bribery, blackmail and hyperbole appear to be over. Regional improvement teams are being repurposed away from the civil service-anomalous tasks of marketing and cajoling schools into joining MATs. Academy conversion and trust capacity grants are being scrapped. And the government has said it is 鈥榦pen鈥� to the idea of councils setting up new schools and academies returning to maintained status. Meanwhile, yet another set of exam results have shown that joining a MAT or becoming an academy is no silver bullet for improvement. Academies and MATs are hardly waning; too many are vital, effective parts of our school system, and their collective voice is still loud and strong. But it may be time for maintained schools to wax a little. The聽 creation of a Maintained Schools Collective is perfectly timed to ensure these schools can have a voice at policy tables. These schools can show聽how, with autonomy, they can also innovate with impact, and that聽there are other ways to improve your school and support others to improve beyond being part of a so-called 鈥榮trong鈥� MAT.聽 In 2022, when full academisation was (yet again) being proposed, that the political impulse to 鈥榯idy up鈥� our diverse system was misguided. It seems Labour have come to the same conclusion. The obvious corollary is to accept the challenge that actually presents: 鈥渢o make the most of the patchwork of schools, groups and other improvement providers so that no school is left behind, informed by academy-agnostic evidence鈥�. One option could be聽a parental referendum But another challenge arises out of this new policy space. The combination of a decline in the rate of schools interested in converting, a busted inspection system with reduced legitimacy to compel academisation, and some serious value-for-money questions about trust-level spending could lead to a phase of increased trust mergers and acquisitions. This may seem rational at trust level, but at school level it is problematic. It鈥檚 a bit like when a small business is sold to a slightly larger one, but then several acquisitions later it is now part of a massive company with an office half-way around the world. Whatever the 鈥榙eal鈥� was at the point of conversion might look very different when your MAT merges with another. If Bridget Phillipson is as keen as she seems on opening the way for schools to return to council oversight, the government should get ahead of this. And the solution is a simple one: at the point of merger, any school in either trust should be offered an 鈥榚xit clause鈥� 鈥� the right to join a different trust, become a stand-alone academy, or return to maintained status. Yes, a school that has joined a MAT has ceased to exist as a legal entity. But there will be ways around this for a determined government. There always are. One option could be a parental referendum, reserving a right of veto if over, say, 75 per cent of parents oppose a merger. This is not meant as a back-door attempt to end academisation or to return schools en masse to under-resourced council maintenance. A total turn away from the current mixed model would be a time-wasting error. But a merger can trigger a moment for a trust to justify itself to a school community, and for that school community to reflect on what kind of company it wishes to keep. Who knows? If schools like mine knew they couldn鈥檛 join one MAT only to be acquired by another, perhaps they might even think about taking the academy route.