To sell to an academy trust, aim at the trust's central team first and treat each school as the place where your product gets used. An academy trust is the legal buyer for the schools it runs. Under the Procurement Act 2023 it counts as a contracting authority (a public buyer bound by the Act's rules), generally for procurements that began from 24 February 2025, as the DfE's procurement risk guide for academy trusts states.
The people who approve spend usually sit centrally: the CEO, the CFO or finance director, the COO, the director of IT, the estates director and the head of procurement. Headteachers are mostly users and influencers.
The finance roles are not optional. The Academy trust handbook 2026 says the board must appoint a named accounting officer in writing. It must also appoint a CFO, with delegated responsibility for the trust's detailed financial procedures. So every trust has someone in the CFO role, whatever the title on the website, and you can find them.
The working order looks like this. Find the trust behind each school you know. Map who approves spend there. Learn which compliant buying route the trust could use. Then open with a short message that asks for a conversation and points to a school you already serve.
In January 2026, 48.2% of schools in England were academies and 60.4% of pupils attended one, according to the DfE's school pupils and characteristics release. The advice below fits sellers of software, IT, services and supplies, and it applies to England only.
Who actually buys in an academy trust?
A trust is one organization, but each school has its own website and inbox. That is why so many sellers email the school and wait. The school can like you a lot and still have no authority to sign.
Inside a trust, think in four groups.
| Group | Typical titles | What they do in the deal |
|---|---|---|
| Users | Headteacher or principal, teachers, school office staff | Use the product every day, report problems, back it or quietly block it |
| Influencers | School business manager, trust IT team, data protection lead, a head who piloted you | Shape the requirement, test, raise risks, recommend |
| Approvers | CEO, CFO or finance director, COO, director of IT, estates director | Own the budget and sign, within limits the trust board sets |
| Process owner | Head of procurement or the finance team | Picks the buying route, runs quotes or tenders, checks compliance |
Which approver matters depends on what you sell. IT and software land with the director of IT and the CFO. Finance systems, payroll and insurance land with the CFO. Facilities services such as cleaning or energy usually sit with the COO or the estates director. HR services go to whoever runs people across the trust. The CEO steps in when a purchase changes how every school works.
Titles vary from trust to trust. A smaller trust may have one chief operating officer covering finance, IT oversight and procurement at once. A larger one may have a full central team with a separate head for each function.
When I open a new account, I look at past projects first. I want the person who actually made the call on the last real deal. Their title goes into the search, not the one that sounds most senior. I use the titles buyers in this sector really hold. Never a generic "manager" label. A trust's website and published accounts tell you what it calls those roles.
Can this person approve spend for more than one school? No? Then they are a user or an influencer. Keep them close, because they will be asked for their opinion, and find the approver above them.
Should you sell to the trust or to individual schools?
Sell to the trust when any of these is true:
- The product only works well if several schools share it, such as a finance system, an IT support contract, a data platform or an HR service
- The contract value is high enough that the trust will run a formal procurement anyway
- The trust is trying to make its schools work the same way, so a single-school tool would be one more exception
- Data, safeguarding or security decisions sit with the central team
A school-level conversation can still make sense when the product is classroom-specific, cheap and easy to try. Even then, treat the school as the opening of the trust deal. Ask the head who at the trust approves this kind of spend, and whether the other schools face the same problem.
| Situation | Where to start | What to do next |
|---|---|---|
| Shared system or service across schools | Trust central team | Approver plus procurement lead, with schools as references |
| One school already uses you | That school, for results | Take the results to the trust's CFO or director of IT |
| Low-cost classroom product, one school curious | The school | Tell the trust early so the pilot is never a surprise |
| Trust is running a procurement in your category | The procurement lead | Follow the published process and nothing outside it |
The worst version is fragmented outreach. One rep emails three heads in the same trust, another sends a LinkedIn note to the CFO, and a third sends an email to the procurement inbox. At the center, all of it lands on the same desk. It looks like a vendor with no idea who it is talking to.
So the moment a deal touches budget, data or rollout beyond one school, move the conversation to the trust. Treat the trust and its schools as one account with one owner. That way nobody on your side writes to the same CFO twice. One trust, one owner.
What procurement rules do academy trusts follow?
A trust buys under a handbook, an Act and a set of DfE-approved options. Know all three before you write the first message.
The academy trust handbook. Every trust's funding agreement binds it to the academy trust handbook, and DfE describes it as the overarching framework for financial management and controls. The 2026 edition takes effect on 1 October 2026 (this is not legal advice). According to the DfE risk guide, the handbook asks for a competitive procurement procedure, appropriate due diligence and spending used for the purpose intended.
The Procurement Act 2023. The Act defines contracting authorities, sets rules for preliminary market engagement, tender notices and award criteria, and gives conflicts of interest a part of their own. The DfE guide says trust procurement must be well governed, transparent and good value for money, with notices published on Find a Tender, the UK government's site for public contract notices.
The same guide says the law demands a conflict check on each procurement the Act covers, and it should take in anyone who may influence the decision. For a seller, that includes the head who loves your product. Keep every conversation professional and easy to put on the record.
DfE-approved buying options. The Get help buying for schools directory lists frameworks, dynamic purchasing systems (open supplier lists that new suppliers can join) and catalogues by category. Each is run by a named provider such as ESPO or YPO, and several carry an expiry date.
DfE's guidance on approved frameworks says these options give compliance with the relevant procurement law, pre-checked suppliers and pre-agreed terms, and sets out 5 buying routes so buyers can decide which are permitted.
In one category the choice is close to fixed: the risk guide says trusts must use the RM6376 agreement for supply teachers and education recruitment, unless they hold another compliant agreement at equal or better rates.
If your category has an approved option and you are on it, the procurement lead has an easy path to you. If you are not, expect quotes or a tender sized to the contract value. Either way, the procurement lead picks the route and the approver picks the supplier.
Before the first message, know which route the trust could use to buy from you. If you cannot answer that, the CFO will not be able to either.
What do academy trusts buy that outbound can reach?
The DfE directory groups trust and school spending into categories, and most of them are managed from the center of a trust.
| Category in the DfE directory | Who usually owns it centrally | Where outreach tends to fit |
|---|---|---|
| ICT and business systems | Director of IT, CFO | Often a fit: the trust has to choose a specific product and plan a rollout |
| HR, people and professional services | COO, head of HR or people | Often a fit: services are chosen on fit and track record |
| Finance, legal and insurance | CFO | Often a fit for specialist services, less often for standard cover |
| Energy and utilities | COO, estates director | Less often a fit: mostly bought through frameworks |
| Classroom, curriculum and office supplies | Procurement lead, school business managers | Less often a fit for commodity items, often a fit for specialist resources |
| Catering | COO, estates director | Depends: often contracted trust-wide for years |
| Transport | COO | Depends: varies with how spread out the schools are |
The ownership and fit columns are my working view, not DfE data.
In my view, outreach works best where a trust must pick between real alternatives and live with the choice for years. Where a framework catalogue already settles a commodity price, a cold message adds little unless you offer something the catalogue lacks.
Before you write, check what the trust actually spends. DfE's Financial Benchmarking and Insights Tool lets anyone compare spending across schools, academies and trusts in England. Some parts need a DfE Sign-in account.
How do you build a trust target list without wasting reps?
Start from what you already have.
- Write down every school and trust you already serve. Before I open any lead tool, I check past and current clients and only then look for similar organizations to target. In this sector that means recording the trust behind each school customer. It is the same order I use for picking a market before writing any copy.
- Find who approved each past deal. The paperwork often comes from a school business manager while the CFO or director of IT makes the call. The second name is the title you search for.
- Use the sector's own titles. CFO, chief operating officer, director of IT, head of procurement, estates director. I remove Assistant, Associate and plain Manager titles from every target list on purpose. Keep one exception: a buyer title the sector really uses, such as school business manager at a smaller trust, once you have checked it. A short audit of the lead list for titles and duplicates catches most of what slips through.
- Find lookalike trusts. Match on region, number of schools, phase (primary, secondary, special or mixed) and the problem your current customers had.
- Split regions by rep. I give every rep and every sending account its own territory, so no two of them ever contact the same people. For trusts, give each rep whole regions, and keep each trust inside one region.
- Check what a buyer finds when they look you up. Your website and LinkedIn profiles should show which schools or trusts you serve and what changed for them. A trust CFO will look you up before replying, and what they find decides the answer. I have watched one message pull 2% replies when one company sent it and 7.5% when another did. Same words, different sender.
A worked example: one school win into a trust list
Here is an illustration, with made-up details, of how one deal becomes a list.
Say you run a managed IT support service and one primary academy in the North West has used it for a year. Its website names the trust it belongs to, which runs 9 schools. The order went through the school business manager, but the trust's director of IT approved it.
That one win gives you:
- An expansion target: the 8 other schools in the same trust, which the director of IT already oversees
- A reference: the head of the school you serve, who can describe the year in plain terms
- A buyer profile: director of IT plus CFO, at trusts of 5 to 15 schools, mostly primary, in your region
- A lookalike list: trusts in the North West and neighboring regions that match that profile, with 3 to 5 named people at the center of each
The first conversation goes to the director of IT at your current trust about the other 8 schools. The lookalike trusts come next, and the proof you take to them is that first school's year.
When should you reach out to trust teams?
Buying follows the budget and the academic year, and both turn over around September. A new cost that missed the trust's budget plan usually waits for the next one.
- Avoid the first weeks of September. Central teams are opening schools, fixing problems and settling new staff. A supplier pitch competes with all of it.
- Start months ahead for anything meant to go live in September. Rollouts that disrupt lessons often wait for the holidays, so the spending decision has to come well before that. The later you write, the more likely it slips a year.
- Watch Find a Tender. The Act provides for preliminary market engagement notices, and the DfE risk guide says trusts use Find a Tender to publish notices. If a trust announces engagement in your category, talk to it through the process it describes.
- Treat a later date as an answer. A CFO who says to come back after planning is telling you when to follow up.
Decision rule: if your product could be live by next September and the summer holidays are still months away, open the conversation now. If not, open lightly, ask the CFO when the trust plans next year's spend, and follow up at that point.
What should your first message to a trust say?
In the first message I sell the meeting, never the service. A CFO cannot buy an IT contract from a LinkedIn message, but they can agree to 20 minutes about whether their schools have a problem you already fixed somewhere else.
A single pitch sent once is a lottery ticket. So I set the monthly target as conversations started, with booked calls coming out of them, and the first message only has to open one.
What goes in, kept short and written by a person:
- One line on why you are writing to this trust and this person
- One proof line from a school or trust you serve, with what changed (ask that customer's permission first)
- A small, specific ask
Continuing the illustration above, a first message to the CFO of a lookalike trust could read:
Hi Sarah, I saw the trust added two primary schools this year. We run IT support for one school in a 9-school primary trust nearby, and its support tickets now go to one place. Would 20 minutes be useful to see whether the same setup fits your schools?
Keep these out of the opening line: a feature list, "we help schools achieve", a demo link, and any hint that the CFO should check with a head first. A pitch from a stranger gives a CFO nothing to answer, so ask about the problem and keep the product for the call.
One message is not a campaign. Plan 5 to 6 touches across channels, and open with LinkedIn outreach so the follow-up email reaches someone who has already seen the name. In our campaigns, the third follow-up usually does the best work, as long as real time passes between sends. The step-by-step version is in how a LinkedIn and email sequence fits together.
Selling to academy trusts and unsure who actually signs? You are welcome to book a call with me and ask.
Questions suppliers ask about academy trusts
Do standalone academies buy differently from trust schools?
Often, yes. Research for the Department for Education by IFF Research found that schools outside a multi-academy trust (MAT) are not convinced that joining one would bring more positives than negatives. Expect many to stay standalone. Treat each one as its own buyer that signs for itself, and do not pitch it central control or trust-wide rollout.
How do you make an educational product stand out to schools?
Tie it to a problem staff already talk about, and leave the feature list for later. Find the wording of that problem in improvement plans, inspection reports or annual reports. Then reuse that wording in your proof line, so the reader recognizes their own priority before they see your name.
Are academies private businesses?
No. Academies are publicly funded schools run by charitable companies, so a sale to one spends public money. That is why buyers ask for evidence of value, transparent pricing and declarations of any personal links between your staff and theirs.
The DfE guide asks for transparent, good-value procurement, so assume your terms may be read by people outside the deal. Write proposals, discounts and renewal clauses that you would be comfortable seeing in a published set of accounts.
Does any of this apply outside England?
No, the academy model is specific to England. Schools in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are run mainly through local councils or education authorities, which buy through their own purchasing teams. If you sell across the UK, build a separate target list for each nation. Identify the council or authority purchasing team, and check which regional agreements it uses before contacting anyone.
Can a small supplier win trust work under the Procurement Act?
Yes, if the buyer sees a compliant route to contract with you. The Act gives below-threshold contracts their own part, Part 6, which includes a duty to consider small and medium-sized enterprises. Keep your company details current and set Find a Tender alerts for your category. Start with lower-value work, and consider subcontracting to a supplier already on a framework.