3 October 2026

MAT cover: running it across several schools

How a trust handles cover when each school has its own sheet: shared staff, one view for the centre, and a rollout that does not start everywhere on Monday.

A multi-academy trust does not have one rota. It has one per school, plus a centre that wants to know they were published. The failure mode is five spreadsheets, five owners, and a Friday email asking which version went out. This is how trusts usually try to fix that, and what is worth keeping. The product page is MAT rota. The model is the five-school example.

The trust problem is visibility, not a bigger sheet

Each school still needs its own posts, its own lunch, and a named person who knows the staff. Merging five schools onto one tab makes the primary look at the secondary's lessons and helps nobody at 07:40. What the centre lacks is a current copy, a sense of which school is thin on cover, and any chance of moving a person across a site when you have chosen to allow it.

What five separate files cost

If each school is at least at a 5-hour week, five schools are 25 hours before you add a secondary that runs longer, and before anyone at the centre chases PDFs. The five-school model lands near 35 hours. That is leadership and office time, costed on STPCD rates in the case study, not a claim that you will delete a post. It is also five chances for the only person who understands the file to be off.

One rota person for the trust

Some trusts try to centralise the morning: one cover lead for every school. It can work where the schools are close, the timetables are understood, and the person is not also teaching. It fails when they cannot know who is first-aid trained at a village primary, or when two schools have a crisis at the same time. You have moved the single point of failure to the centre.

A lighter version is better. Each school keeps a local owner. The centre sets the rules (who may cover, what gets protected) and reads the result.

A shared pool, used on purpose

A TA who can work at two schools is useful on a planned day and dangerous as a default. Site-scoped access means a primary user does not open the secondary board. Cross-site supply is a switch you turn on, not a side effect of sharing a login. Term dates stay different. An inset day at one school is not a spare workforce for the others unless you have said so.

One board per school, one seat pool

This is the shape SchoolRota uses. Each school has its own duty areas and daily board. The trust shares sign-in, the seats you pay for, and a view of what was published. You are not buying five products and you are not running one giant rota. School groups use the same tools when the organisation is a federation or a diocese rather than a MAT.

School login matters here more than in a single primary. Entra, Okta or Google, plus SCIM if starters and leavers are already in the directory, stops five office managers retyping the same people. What is connected today is on integrations. Do not assume a MIS write-back. The MIS stays the record.

What trust operations can reasonably ask for

Did each school publish today
Where are the empty posts
Which school is spending its TAs on cover and dropping interventions
One invoice, priced on staff seats rather than on a per-school surprise
An audit trail that is not an emailed spreadsheet

Cover depth, in plain language, is how many absences you can absorb before you are into supply or into leadership. A trust that cannot see that per school finds out from a head, late.

Go live one school at a time

Pick the school whose rota owner is willing, run a real week, and compare the PDF with what they would have printed. Then add the next. A trust-wide Monday is how you get five half-finished boards and a revolt. The five-school study is the cost of not doing this. It is a model. If you want the rollout talked through, use contact rather than five separate signups.

What not to centralise

Do not centralise the names on the gate. Do centralise the question 'did you publish, and are you inside the rules'. A primary head who loses the right to say 'not that TA, not today' will route around whatever system you buy. The useful centre is boring: one login method, one seat count, one place to see empty posts. The useless centre is a person in another town assigning playground duty from a spreadsheet they do not walk.

If two schools share a person, write the days down. A TA who is 'available across the trust' without a diary will be expected in two halls at 12:00. Site-scoped access stops the accidental version of that. It does not stop you planning a Wednesday at the other school on purpose. Plan it the day before, publish both boards, and do not discover the clash at the car park. Mileage, lunch, and who line-manages them that day are operational details the rota will not invent. Write them next to the assignment or you will argue about them in the car park too.

Ask each school, once a fortnight, whether the published PDF was the one staff used. If they say they still pin a private copy, you do not have trust-wide cover. You have five schools and a dashboard. Fix the local habit before you add a sixth school to the login. The habit is the work. The dashboard will wait. Name the person at each school who is allowed to say the PDF is wrong, so the centre is not the only editor. Write that name down. Put it on the front of the PDF. Do it before half term.

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