MAT Dashboards: What Trustees and CEOs Actually Need to See

The Problem With Most MAT Dashboards

Walk into any MAT central team and you'll find dashboards. Lots of them. Attendance by school. Progress by cohort. Exclusions by term. Finance variance. SEND registers.

The data is there. But trustees and CEOs consistently report the same problem: they can't see the wood for the trees.

A dashboard that shows everything shows nothing. Effective MAT reporting requires intentional design — deciding what matters, what to surface, and what to leave to the school level.

What Trustees Need (vs. What They Get)

Trustees operate at a governance level. Their job is not to manage schools — it is to assure themselves that schools are being managed well. That changes what they need to see.

What trustees need:

• Red/amber/green status across schools on 4–6 key indicators
• Year-on-year trajectory, not just point-in-time data
• Exceptions and outliers, not averages
• Clear accountability — who owns each metric, what action is being taken

What they typically get:

• Comprehensive data dumps from each school
• Inconsistent formats across the trust
• Data from different time periods presented together
• No narrative or context

The Six Metrics That Matter at Trust Level

Based on working with MATs across England, these are the indicators that belong at trustee level:

1. Persistent absence rate — by school, vs. national benchmark 2. Disadvantaged attainment gap — progress 8 equivalent, year-on-year 3. Exclusion rate — fixed-term and permanent, flagged against regional average 4. SEND outcomes — % making expected progress, EHCPs meeting outcomes 5. Staff absence and turnover — leading indicator of school stability 6. Ofsted risk rating — your internal assessment of inspection likelihood and readiness

Everything else belongs at headteacher level.

How to Structure a MAT Dashboard

A well-designed MAT dashboard has three layers:

Layer 1 — Executive Summary (trustees) One page. RAG status. Six metrics. Trend arrows. No tables.

Layer 2 — School Comparison (CEO/CFO) Cross-school comparisons on 10–15 metrics. Sortable. Filterable by phase, region, or cohort.

Layer 3 — School Deep Dive (headteacher) Full data for their school. All metrics. Historical trends. Pupil group breakdowns.

Each audience gets the layer relevant to their role. No one is drowning in data that isn't theirs to act on.

Power BI vs. Spreadsheets

Most MATs start with spreadsheets. They work until they don't — usually around the four to six school mark, when manual consolidation becomes a monthly burden and data quality starts to slip.

A Power BI dashboard connected to your MIS data can automate most of this. The upfront investment (typically one to two days of setup per trust) pays back within a term.

How Northbridge Analytics Helps

Our MAT Partnership service builds this infrastructure from scratch. We design the metrics framework, build the dashboard, train your central team, and provide quarterly reviews to ensure it stays current.

Talk to us about a MAT Partnership →