One Tool, Total Coherence: Unifying Your CMAT’s Improvement, Mission, and Strategy

As a leader in a Catholic Multi-Academy Trust (CMAT), you navigate a unique and complex landscape. You are responsible for upholding and strengthening the Catholic mission across your family of schools, a duty that requires deep, evidence-based reflection. Simultaneously, you are accountable for driving the highest standards of educational excellence, preparing every school for the rigours of Ofsted inspection.

Overseeing this "dual-framework" reality—along with your own trust-level strategic planning—can often feel like juggling multiple, disconnected systems.

Schools grapple with SEFs and SIPs in one format, while developing their Catholic Self-Evaluation Document (CSED) in another. Meanwhile, the central team undertakes its own self-review to report to the Board and the Diocese, often using yet another set of spreadsheets or documents. This fragmentation creates unnecessary workload, isolates valuable insights, and makes it incredibly difficult to see the "golden thread" that connects trust-wide strategy to classroom practice.

What if there was a way to bring all these vital processes into one, simple, coherent system?

Introducing iAbacus: Your Single Platform for All Improvement

iAbacus is a deceptively simple yet powerful online tool designed for self-evaluation and improvement planning. It replaces static, disconnected documents with a live, visual, and collaborative process that guides leaders from reflection to analysis and, crucially, to targeted action.

For CMATs, its true power lies in its versatility. It provides one simple tool for all purposes, bringing consistency and clarity to every layer of your organisation. A CMAT we're working with, along with its 20+ schools, is now using iAbacus to manage every aspect of its evaluation and planning cycle.

Here’s how they are achieving total coherence:

1. For School Evaluation (The Ofsted SEF/SIP)
   
   Each school uses iAbacus with the Ofsted Toolkit Template to manage its core self-evaluation and improvement plan. Leaders and governors can collaboratively make judgements, link evidence directly to the framework, analyse helping and hindering factors, and build their action plan—all in one place. The result is a live, evidence-rich SEF/SIP that reduces workload and ensures the school is "inspection-ready" every day.
   
   

2.  For School Catholic Identity (The CSI CSED)
   
   In parallel, schools use iAbacus with the CSI Framework Template to complete their Catholic Self-Evaluation Document. This allows them to apply the same simple, robust process to evaluating their Catholic Life and Mission, Religious Education, and Collective Worship. They can clearly evidence their strengths and plan improvements, providing robust assurance for the Diocese and preparing for CSI inspection.
   
   

3.  For Trust-Wide Strategic Review (The CMAT Plan)

The CMAT central team and Board of Directors use iAbacus with the "Strong and Flourishing Catholic MAT Framework." This allows them to conduct a high-level strategic review of the trust's own performance, from finance and operations to school improvement, and mission effectiveness. It provides an evidence-based, holistic view that directly informs the CMAT's strategic plan and reporting.

From Fragmentation to a Flourishing Whole

By using iAbacus for all three key processes, this CMAT has created a common language and a consistent "way of working" for improvement. The central team can support schools effectively, best practice is easily identified, and the Board has clear visibility.

Most importantly, it connects everything. The Trust's strategic goals are linked to the schools' evaluation and Catholic improvement plans, ensuring the mission is woven into every aspect of school life.

For CMAT leadership, the true strategic power is unlocked by iAbacus's 'Overlay' and 'Stack' features. With a single click, you can 'Overlay' all 20 school SEFs (or CSEDs) to instantly compare judgements side-by-side. This allows you to spot outliers, identify pockets of excellence, and understand the range of performance across the trust.

You can then 'Stack' the data to see trust-wide trends. This aggregates the analysis, answering critical questions like, "What is the most common hindering factor for curriculum across our trust?" or "Which schools have identified 'pupil voice' as a key strength?" This provides instant, data-rich insight for board reports and strategic planning, allowing you to target support and resources with precision.

In our next article, we’ll take a deep dive into the first use case: How schools are streamlining their Ofsted SEF/SIP process, reducing leadership workload and driving targeted improvement.