Three teams. Three ways of doing the same thing.

Nobody intentionally chose this. Each team solved the same problem in the year they had it, with the tools and the people available then. Because every version works locally, there is never an obvious moment to stop and reconcile them.

Trusts and multi-site organisations arrive here fastest, because sites join at different times and each one turns up with its habits and its systems already formed. Bringing them into line is a cost paid now for a benefit felt later, so it slips.

It stays invisible until you want one number across all three, or you move a member of staff between them, or someone asks a question that only makes sense if the answer is consistent.

Pick something all three teams do (recording an incident, approving spend, taking on a new pupil or client) and ask each of them to walk you through it. Not the policy, the actual steps.

Listen to the words they use. Where teams use different names for the same thing, or the same name for different things, you cannot safely add their numbers together.

Then ask all three for last term's total. If the definitions differ, the totals will too, and none of them is wrong.

The immediate cost is that you cannot report across the organisation without somebody translating first. Translation is a judgement call, so your central figures are one person's interpretation rather than a fact.

It also makes people non-portable. Move somebody between teams, or ask one team to cover another, and they arrive knowing the job but not that team's version of it, so in practice they start again.

And it narrows what you can do later. Any shared system, any trust-wide reporting, any new site or merger is priced on how far apart the three ways have drifted. The gap widens quietly until it becomes the reason a sensible project is called off as too expensive.