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Weak governance in multi-academy trusts poses a “systemic risk” to the government’s ambition for all schools to be in a trust, the National Governance Association has warned.

Strong governance in many trusts should be “celebrated and built on”, the NGA says, but it warns good practice is “unevenly distributed” and “absent and underdeveloped” in some MATs.

“Uneven distribution is a systemic risk that needs to be addressed before the potential of a trust-based system can be fully realised,” a report from the NGA, published today, states.

The NGA calls on the government to create minimum governance standards to be included in the Department for Education’s , which are due to be introduced later this year.

The government’s , published in February, set out an ambition for all schools to be in “high-quality” trusts rooted in local communities.

‘Not a solution but a baseline’

The government’s commitment to “locally-led trusts” is a “significant step forward”, the NGA says, but it warns that simply mandating their existence is “not a solution but a baseline”.

The NGA’s annual survey data shows that 97 per cent of trusts already operate some form of local governance.

However, the organisation’s new report, titled Governing in 4D, says: “The real systemic risk lies in the box-ticking minority, where presence does not equate to substance or efficacy.”

It adds that to achieve the government’s ambition of community-rooted trusts, the conversation must move towards whether local governance “has the agency and influence to harness and apply community knowledge”.

The DfE should embed governance “non-negotiables” across four dimensions of trust governance, the NGA argues. These are: the trust board, members, local tier and trust executives.

These should form part of the new trust standards, it says, building on the previous trust quality descriptions.

Local governance

Local governance is where “the gap between rhetoric and reality remains the widest”, the report argues, adding that this is also where the White Paper’s ambition “will be won or lost”.

It says local tiers should be able to hold trust-wide decisions to account locally and bring community insight into trust decision-making.

Local governance “is not a relic of the maintained era preserved out of sentiment” but “the right structural answer to a genuine and ongoing leadership and governance challenge”, the report says.

It warns that as trusts centralise more functions, such as school improvement, finance and estates, local governance must evolve rather than be left with unclear responsibilities.

Only 60 per cent of local governors consider communication between the local tier and the trust board to be effective and well managed, the NGA survey found.

And only 47 per cent of local governors agreed that their school’s resources, including reserves, should be shared across the trust - down 10 percentage points on the previous year.

MAT executives ‘must not crowd out trustees’

Trust executives must support, rather than “crowd out”, volunteer governance, the report adds.

A MAT’s executive team strengthens governance when it supports other parts of the system, but weakens it when it “crowds out local challenge or replaces volunteer governance”, it says.

The NGA says executives should provide data to boards in a way that “supports and welcomes meaningful volunteer scrutiny”, and that executive oversight must not “invalidate local tier challenge and local accountability”.

Trustees should hold executives to account “with rigour and respect”, with “substantive and regular” challenge, it adds. This should form “independent judgement rather than being led by the executive”.

The report argues that trust boards must be able to show how they balance centralisation with local responsiveness, including specific examples of where local insight has informed trust-wide decisions.

It adds that boards should understand community-facing risks, including “erosion of trust with parents” and “loss of local legitimacy”.

The report concludes that the government’s reforms to trust standards and the introduction of MAT inspections provide a mechanism to embed stronger governance across the system.

Sam Henson, deputy chief executive of the NGA, said: “This report is about defining what good looks like in a way that is practical, consistent and rooted in the communities schools serve.

“Governance works best when each part of the system understands its role, respects the others and operates with clarity and purpose.”

Samira Sadeghi, director of governance at the Confederation of School Trusts, said: “It is important trusts are held to high standards, but we need to do that while respecting the diversity of approaches in the sector as a positive factor that has been instrumental to its success.”