Buying educational video resources for a single primary school works fine. It becomes an administrative burden when a multi-academy trust is running the same decision across eight, fifteen, or forty primary schools, each with its own budget line, renewal date, and version of what “good enough” looks like. Central teams end up managing a patchwork of separate logins, invoices, and inconsistent access, rather than a coherent picture of what every school in the trust actually has.
LearningMole provides a single trust-wide subscription that gives every primary school in a MAT access to the same 3,300+ curriculum-aligned video resources, under one licence, managed from one place. Instead of each school head negotiating its own renewal, the trust’s central buying team holds a single agreement, a single point of contact, and a single dashboard showing usage across every school. This is built for UK academy trusts working within the National Curriculum, whether the trust runs three primary schools or thirty.
This page sets out how trust-wide licensing works, what central management actually looks like day to day, how it compares with buying school by school, how the arrangement supports CPD and trust improvement priorities, and how a trust typically moves from first enquiry to a live rollout across every school. If you are part of a MAT central team, an education director, or a trust CEO weighing up whether a single trust-wide agreement makes more sense than leaving each school to buy independently, the detail below is aimed squarely at you.
A trust-wide subscription gives every primary school named on the agreement full access to LearningMole’s library: educational videos, worksheets, and teaching resources covering maths, English, science, and the wider primary curriculum, all aligned to the UK National Curriculum from EYFS through KS2. There is no reduced or “lite” version for schools further down a priority list; access is identical across every school covered by the licence, regardless of that school’s size, its individual budget, or how long it has been part of the trust.
The licence sits at trust level rather than school level, which means a school joining the trust partway through the year, or a new school opening under the trust’s umbrella, can typically be added to the existing agreement rather than starting a separate procurement process from scratch. New academies and free schools joining a MAT often inherit whatever technology and resource agreements the trust already holds; a trust-wide LearningMole subscription works the same way, so growth by acquisition or conversion doesn’t automatically mean another round of individual school procurement.
For central teams managing a trust improvement plan, this also means resourcing decisions stop being made forty times over by forty different people with forty different priorities. One agreement covers the curriculum resourcing question for the whole trust, freeing central staff to focus on decisions that genuinely need to be made, school by school.
One of the biggest practical differences between school-by-school buying and a trust-wide agreement is who does the admin. With individual subscriptions, someone at each school (often a deputy head or office manager already stretched across a dozen other jobs) has to track their own renewal date, request their own invoice, and chase their own usage reports. Multiply that by every school in the trust, and central visibility disappears almost entirely; a trust CEO asking “which schools are actually using this?” often can’t get a straight answer without contacting every school individually.
A LearningMole trust subscription gives the central buying team a single administrative view: one renewal date for the whole trust, one point of contact for support, and reporting that shows which schools and year groups are actually using the resources rather than leaving that information locked inside each school’s own account. Central teams can add or remove named school contacts, monitor usage patterns across the trust, and raise support requests without needing to go through each school individually, which matters most during busy periods like the start of the academic year, when every school is setting up new classes and new staff at once.
This central view also supports the kind of oversight a board of trustees might reasonably expect: a clear answer to what resources are in place across every school, rather than a patchwork that varies by which head negotiated hardest. Central management doesn’t remove each school’s ability to use the resources as they see fit; it simply means someone at the trust level can see the whole picture.
Trusts exist partly to raise consistency across their schools, and resourcing is one of the clearest places that consistency either shows up or falls apart. Where schools buy independently, it is common to find one school in a trust with a rich library of curriculum-aligned video content and another, often the one with the tighter budget that year, with almost nothing. Children in the same trust end up with meaningfully different access depending on which school they attend, which sits awkwardly against a trust’s own stated aim of giving every child the same standard of education regardless of postcode.
A single trust-wide subscription removes that gap by design. Every school gets the same resources on the same terms, regardless of that individual school’s budget position in a given year. For MAT leadership focused on closing attainment gaps between schools in the same trust, consistent access to the same quality of teaching resource is a straightforward lever, one that doesn’t depend on convincing every headteacher to prioritise the same spending line during a budget round already stretched thin by staffing costs and building maintenance.
Consistency also matters for staff who move between schools within the same trust, whether through planned rotation, a secondment, or a permanent transfer. When every school runs on the same LearningMole subscription, that particular adjustment disappears; the videos, worksheets, and teaching approaches a teacher used at their previous school within the trust are exactly the same ones waiting for them at the next.
“When every school in a trust has access to the same resources, teachers moving between schools within the trust find familiar tools waiting for them, and pupils get the same quality of provision wherever they are on the roll. Trust-wide consistency in resourcing is one of the simplest ways a MAT can close gaps between its schools without adding to any individual school’s workload.” — Michelle Connolly, Founder of LearningMole and former teacher with over 15 years of classroom experience
The table below sets out the practical differences a central buying team is likely to weigh up when comparing the two approaches. These are the considerations that tend to come up most often in early conversations with MAT central teams, whether they are moving from a mix of existing school subscriptions or setting up curriculum video resourcing across the trust for the first time.
| Consideration | Per-School Purchasing | Trust-Wide Subscription |
|---|---|---|
| Renewal dates | Different for every school, tracked individually | One renewal date for the whole trust |
| Invoicing | Separate invoice per school | Single consolidated invoice |
| Access consistency | Varies by school budget each year | Identical access across every school |
| Admin overhead | Falls to each school office | Managed centrally by the trust team |
| Usage visibility | Locked inside each school’s account | Trust-wide reporting available centrally |
| New school onboarding | Fresh procurement process each time | Added to the existing trust agreement |
| Staff mobility | Different tools at each school | Same resources wherever staff are deployed |
Cost is rarely the only reason a MAT moves to a trust-wide agreement, but it is usually part of the conversation. Buying separately means the trust pays for administrative duplication as much as it pays for content: each school’s finance team processes its own purchase order, each renewal is negotiated from scratch, and any school that misses a renewal window simply loses access until someone notices, sometimes weeks into a term.
A trust-wide agreement consolidates that cost into one negotiation and one invoice, which typically works out more efficiently than the sum of separate school agreements once administrative time is factored in alongside the licence cost itself. Because pricing depends on the number of schools and pupils covered, LearningMole works out a trust-specific quote rather than publishing a fixed rate; MAT teams can request this directly through the trust enquiry route below, and the quote reflects the trust’s actual size rather than a one-size-fits-all figure.
The value case tends to be clearest for trusts still in a growth phase, since each new school folds into an existing agreement rather than triggering a fresh procurement cycle. For established trusts, the value case is more often about consistency and reduced administrative load, but the underlying principle is the same: one decision covers every school rather than the same decision being made separately, and often inconsistently, forty times over.
| Trust Size | Typical Number of Primary Schools | What Changes |
|---|---|---|
| Growing trust | 2 to 5 schools | Single agreement replaces individual school renewals; central onboarding for each new school |
| Established trust | 6 to 15 schools | Dedicated trust account contact; usage reporting across all schools |
| Large trust | 16+ schools | Full central dashboard; support for staggered rollout across school clusters |
Trust-wide access does more than put the same videos in front of the same year groups; it gives a MAT’s CPD lead a shared resource base to build staff development around. Rather than running separate training sessions tailored to whatever each school happens to have access to, a trust CPD lead can plan INSET days, subject-lead network meetings, and new-teacher induction around one common set of teaching resources that every school already has, without first checking which schools actually subscribe to what.
This matters most for subject leadership across a trust. A trust-wide maths lead running cross-school moderation or planning sessions can reference the same fraction videos, phonics resources, or science demonstrations, regardless of which school’s teachers are in the room, because every school already has access. New teachers joining any school in the trust also start from the same baseline, rather than needing separate induction into the tools their specific school uses, which shortens the induction period and reduces the number of different systems a new teacher has to learn in their first term.
Trust-wide CPD planning also benefits when trusts run joint practice development across a cluster of schools. Where the resource base is identical across every school, sharing a successful lesson approach from one school with teachers at another doesn’t require translating it into a different system; the resources are already the same, so the practice transfers directly.
Most MATs already run a central technology stack: a management information system shared across schools, a common learning platform, and often single sign-on arranged through the trust’s IT team rather than left to each school individually. A trust-wide LearningMole subscription is designed to sit alongside that existing stack rather than compete with it or require schools to abandon tools they already rely on.
Central IT teams can raise single sign-on and integration questions directly through the trust account contact rather than each school working it out independently with support, which reduces the number of separate technical conversations a trust’s IT lead has to have with a provider.
Where a trust already has an established process for evaluating new technology and data-sharing arrangements before rolling something out across every school, a trust-wide agreement fits that process more naturally than separate school-level subscriptions would. Instead of the same evaluation being repeated, and potentially answered differently, at every school, the trust’s IT and data protection leads can complete a single review that covers the whole agreement, and every school benefits from that one review rather than each school needing its own.
MAT central teams evaluating any trust-wide agreement typically want clarity on data protection responsibilities. A single trust-wide agreement with LearningMole means one data processing arrangement covering every school, reviewed once by the trust’s data protection lead, rather than separate arrangements varying from school to school.
For trusts that follow a formal procurement process for supplier agreements above a certain value, a trust-wide agreement is generally easier to evaluate and approve than several separate school-level purchases that individually fall below the procurement threshold but collectively represent significant trust-wide spend. Central procurement teams can request the information they need to complete their own due diligence directly through the trust enquiry route.
Many MATs set trust-wide improvement priorities each year, often tied to closing gaps between the trust’s strongest and weakest schools, raising outcomes in a particular subject, or supporting schools that have recently joined the trust and are still adjusting to trust-wide expectations. Resourcing decisions rarely feature explicitly in these plans, but inconsistent access to quality teaching materials can quietly undermine them regardless.
A trust-wide subscription gives an executive team something concrete to point to when a school improvement plan calls for consistent curriculum resourcing across the trust: every school already has the same access, so improvement work can focus on how well that access is used rather than whether it exists at all. This is particularly useful for a school that has recently converted or joined through a sponsored transfer, where the incoming school may previously have had little or no access to curriculum-aligned video resources; a trust-wide agreement brings it onto the same footing as every other school immediately.
A common pattern for MATs moving from separate school subscriptions to a single trust agreement starts with an initial conversation between the trust’s central buying team and LearningMole to confirm the number of schools, pupils, and any existing licences due to lapse. From there, a small number of schools typically pilot the transition first, often the schools already using LearningMole individually, before the remaining schools in the trust are brought onto the same agreement in a staggered rollout timed around each school’s existing renewal date.
Central teams generally find the administrative side of this transition faster than expected, precisely because it replaces several separate processes with one: instead of negotiating, invoicing, and onboarding forty times, the trust does it once and then adds schools to an existing structure.
Staggering the rollout by cluster tends to work best for larger trusts, giving the central team a smaller group to support closely during the first few weeks while the remaining schools continue as normal until their scheduled transition date.
Because trust-level procurement and single-school subscriptions are handled differently, the enquiry route on this page should route visitors accordingly, rather than sending every enquiry into the same general contact form.
A short prompt above the form (“Are you enquiring on behalf of a single school or a multi-academy trust?”) should sit before the two paths so visitors self-select correctly rather than filling in the wrong form and needing to be redirected manually. This matters in practice because a trust enquiry that arrives through the general schools form often sits in the wrong queue until someone notices it names multiple schools, adding avoidable delay to what should be a straightforward first conversation.
Want full access to LearningMole’s library of our videos, quizzes, and printable resources? See our subscription plans to unlock everything KS1 and KS2 teachers need for primary education.
A trust-wide subscription is a single licence agreement that gives every primary school named under a multi-academy trust access to LearningMole’s full library of curriculum-aligned videos and teaching resources. Rather than each school holding its own subscription, the trust’s central team manages a single agreement covering all schools, with a single renewal date and a single point of contact. It works the same way whether the trust has two primary schools or twenty.
The licence is issued at the trust level and covers every named school under it. Schools that are already subscribed to individually can be consolidated into the trust agreement once their existing subscriptions reach renewal. Any new school joining the trust, whether a newly opened academy or an existing school converting through a sponsored transfer, can typically be added to the same agreement rather than needing a separate contract negotiated from scratch.
A named central contact, usually someone in the trust’s central buying, IT, or education standards team, holds administrative access to add or remove schools, view usage across the trust, and liaise directly with LearningMole’s support team. Individual schools retain their own day-to-day account access for teachers, but renewal and contract management sit with the trust rather than each school.
Yes. Teachers at each school access the full resource library through their own school account exactly as they would with an individual subscription. What changes is the contract and billing layer sitting above that, not what teachers and pupils can see and use day to day.
Because every school has identical access, a trust’s CPD lead or subject leads can plan training, moderation, and INSET sessions around one shared set of resources rather than working around whatever each school happens to have. This also gives new teachers joining any school in the trust the same starting point during induction.
Pricing depends on the number of schools and pupils covered, so LearningMole provides a trust-specific quote rather than a fixed published rate. Trusts typically find that consolidating separate school agreements into one reduces administrative overhead alongside the licence cost itself. The exact saving depends on the trust’s current arrangement.
LearningMole’s trust-wide subscription is designed to sit alongside existing management information systems, learning platforms, and single sign-on arrangements already used across the trust. Specific integration questions are handled through the trust’s dedicated account contact rather than requiring each school to raise them separately with support.
Central teams can get in touch through the multi-academy trust enquiry route on this page, providing the trust name, number of primary schools, and approximate pupil numbers. This route directly to the trust accounts team rather than the general schools enquiry process. From that first enquiry, the usual next step is a short conversation to confirm the trust’s arrangement before a trust-specific quote is prepared.
Buying resources through a school trust makes the administrative burden someone else’s problem every renewal cycle, right up until a central team is asked to explain why one school in the trust has strong provision, and another has almost none. A single trust-wide subscription removes that inconsistency at the source, replacing a patchwork of separate agreements with one licence, one renewal date, and one point of contact for every primary school under the trust, regardless of how the trust has grown or how many schools it currently includes.
For MAT central teams, education directors, and trust CEOs, the case for consolidating is rarely just about cost, though the administrative savings are real. It is about giving every school in the trust the same starting point, the same CPD foundation, and the same quality of teaching resource, regardless of which school a child happens to attend or which head negotiated the best deal that year.
If your trust is currently managing separate LearningMole subscriptions across different schools, or weighing up whether to move away from per-school purchasing altogether, the trust enquiry route above is the fastest way to get a quote tailored to your trust’s size and current arrangement.
Want full access to LearningMole’s library of our videos, quizzes, and printable resources? See our subscription plans to unlock everything KS1 and KS2 teachers need for primary education.
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