A few weeks ago, I read something that stopped me in my tracks. The Diocese of Ely Multi-Academy Trust, a 38-school chain across East Anglia, announced it would be replacing all of its local governing bodies. All 220 local governors, gone. In their place: six regional school boards, each covering a cluster of schools.
By September 2026, the restructure will be complete.
Now, I should say upfront: this is not a criticism of DEMAT. They have strong results, with KS2 outcomes rising 14 percentage points over four years. Their CEO, Adrian Ball, makes a reasonable case that the old structure created duplication between central oversight and local governing bodies. The new model reserves parent places on every regional board and creates community councils at each school to keep the local connection alive.
But the story made me think about something bigger. Because DEMAT is not the only trust rethinking its governance. And the question every trust should be asking right now is this: when governance structures change, does parent voice get stronger or quieter?
Why trusts are restructuring governance right now
There are three things converging this year that are pushing trusts to look hard at how their governance works.
First, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is days away from Royal Assent. This is the most significant piece of education legislation in a decade, and it brings trust-level inspections into law for the first time. Ofsted will not just inspect individual schools. It will inspect how the trust itself operates, governs, and makes decisions.
Second, the government’s white paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, published in February, sets the expectation that all trusts should be "community centred organisations." It introduces the concept of annual public benefit reporting, where trusts will need to demonstrate how they engage with parents, gather feedback, and act on it. That reporting will feed directly into trust inspections.
Third, falling rolls are forcing difficult conversations about school structures, mergers, and closures. When those conversations happen, governance is where they land. Boards that are not properly constituted or not genuinely connected to their communities will struggle to navigate what comes next.
Put those three things together and it is no surprise that trusts are restructuring. The question is whether that restructuring strengthens parent voice or accidentally hollows it out.
The risk nobody talks about
When a trust replaces local governing bodies with regional boards or advisory councils, it can look tidy on paper. Fewer meetings, clearer lines of accountability, less duplication. I understand the appeal.
But there is a risk. Local governing bodies, for all their imperfections, are the place where parents have a guaranteed seat. They are the place where a parent can stand for election, be voted in by other parents, and have a direct role in how their child’s school is governed. That matters.
When you restructure governance, the first thing that should be stress-tested is whether parent voice survives the transition.
In DEMAT’s case, they have thought about this carefully. Two places on every regional board reserved for parents. Community councils at each school. Community ambassadors. That is good practice. But not every trust will be this intentional.
And here is the thing that concerns me. The white paper talks about "clearer expectations around local governance’s role in engaging with stakeholders." The public benefit return will require evidence that parent feedback is gathered and acted upon. But the mechanics of how trusts actually do this are left undefined. The DfE has set the expectation without providing the playbook.
What "evidencing parent voice" actually looks like
If you are a trust governance lead reading this and thinking about what public benefit reporting will require, here is what I would be putting in place now.
First, your parent governor elections need to be documented and transparent. Whether you have traditional local governing bodies or a new regional model, parents need to know how representatives are chosen, who stood, and how the vote was conducted. A show of hands at a parents’ evening is not good enough. An email that goes out and comes back with three names is not good enough. You need a proper process with a proper audit trail.
Second, your consultation processes need to be more than a Google Form that disappears into someone’s inbox. When the trust asks parents about uniform changes, school meals, behaviour policies, or anything else that affects their children, the process should be documented, the results should be shared, and there should be a clear record of what happened next. That is what inspectors will want to see.
Third, this needs to be consistent across the trust. If one school runs a rigorous, transparent election process and another appoints parent representatives informally, that inconsistency will show up in a trust-level inspection. The whole point of inspecting at trust level is to look at whether standards are consistent.
The trusts that will do well in inspection are the ones that can show, clearly and consistently, how they listen to their communities and what they do with what they hear.
Getting ahead of this before September
September 2026 is when many of these changes start to bite. The Bill will likely have received Royal Assent. Trust inspections will be on the horizon. The expectations around public benefit reporting will start to firm up.
If your trust is restructuring governance, that is fine. Structures should evolve. But do it in a way that protects and strengthens parent voice, not one that tidies it away.
And if you are not restructuring but you know your parent election process is a bit informal, or your consultation processes are not documented, or different schools in your trust handle things differently, now is the time to sort it out.
The trusts that are already running transparent elections, documenting consultations, and building a clear evidence base of parent engagement are the ones that will find public benefit reporting straightforward. Everyone else will be scrambling.
If you want to see how other trusts are running transparent, documented elections and consultations across all their schools, take a look at what we have built at choicevoting.co.uk. It is designed for exactly this.