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Multi-academy trust governance. It’s not a phrase that keeps most parents up at night. But, as families in my area know, when it goes wrong, the consequences can be nightmarish.

The Arthur Terry Learning Partnership (ATLP) is a multi-academy trust running 24 schools across the West Midlands, including six in my constituency.

It was established in 2011, shortly after the Conservative-led government passed legislation to turbo-charge the conversion of council-run schools into academies.

In recent years, ATLP grew rapidly, almost doubling in size since 2020. Then things started to go badly wrong.

In 2024, the Department for Education handed the trust an emergency loan to help bail out a £4 million deficit. ATLP insisted it was fixing its finances. But within a year, the deficit had reached £8 million.

Redundancy risks

The trust’s leadership blamed the problem on an “accounting error”. The notion that millions of pounds had gone missing because of a mistake was hardly reassuring - and many of us were sceptical. In 2022, ATLP announced it would buy 11,000 iPads, one for every pupil. How had it afforded them?

Last autumn, things got much worse. After taking another DfE loan, the trust needed to cut costs to get its finances on track. Its leadership decided that teachers would pay the price. As many as 100 jobs were put at risk of redundancy.

Before I became an MP, I taught for almost a decade, then worked for one of the biggest teaching unions. Teachers hate going on strike. But in this case, ATLP staff felt they had no choice - and families were right behind them. No one wanted iPads over teachers.

Closer scrutiny of ATLP’s accounts showed that the iPads were a symptom of a deeper problem. Most comparable trusts ask schools to pay about 5 per cent of their budgets into a pot for centrally procured services. But ATLP was asking its schools to fork out eye-watering sums - as much as 25 per cent of their budgets.

By February, things had unravelled. ATLP’s chief executive resigned. An interim leader, with experience helping failing trusts, swiftly changed tack on teaching cuts and instead slashed the iPad policy and cut down the head office.

Further concerns

The scale of ATLP’s failings finally became clear, and soon after, the DfE announced the - one of the biggest trust closures our country has seen.

But ATLP is not alone. Last month, the DfE found “serious” in Gloucestershire.

The trust’s explanation, blaming “accounting errors”, will be eerily familiar to my constituents. The boss of St Ralph Sherwin Catholic Multi Academy Trust, based in Derby, - it has the biggest deficit in the country, at .

Clearly, the current system is not working. Labour has already taken steps to better regulate academy trusts. For the first time, trusts themselves - not just the schools within them - will be subject to Ofsted inspections.

Academies also now have to teach the national curriculum and council-maintained schools can be opened again - an acknowledgement that academies aren’t always best.

But we must go further.

Start with topslice. Parents need to know if trusts are skimming off sums that could be spent in classrooms - and they shouldn’t have to pore through accounts to find out.

Trusts should publish details of their topslice on their website, and on the website of every school they run. If they can’t explain it to parents, that is a warning sign.

Greater oversight

We need stronger oversight, too. Our experience with iPads at ATLP shows how one big mistake can cost pupils.

Huge purchases like this - anything over £1 million - should be subject to sign off by the DfE. If trusts can’t justify the cost, they shouldn’t spend the cash.

We also need better scrutiny at board level. Governors should have the skills to ask difficult questions. We need statutory guidance on the competency that trust boards should have, with specific guidance for chairs of finance committees.

Boards should review their position annually and publish a statement on how they meet the guidelines.

When leaders fail, there must be consequences. We cannot tolerate a situation where senior leadership or board members can step down at one scandal-hit trust, only to reappear months later at another.

And, crucially, trusts need to listen to parents. As ATLP grew, its leadership became increasingly remote. Families’ concerns were not taken seriously. We need stronger rules about how parents’ voices should be heard at school level, and by senior leadership in trusts.

The price of failure is clear. No family should have to go through what those in my area did. But without reform, they will.

Dave Robertson is MP for Lichfield, Burntwood and the Villages and a former secondary school physics teacher