The Department for Education published the 2026 Academy Trust Handbook on 15 July, right at the point when most trust boards had already cleared their diaries for the summer. It normally comes into force at the start of the school year. This one does not. Officials have pushed the implementation date back to 1 October 2026, after the Confederation of School Trusts told them it was not reasonable to expect leaders to absorb a new rulebook with a few weeks' notice.
That delay is the most useful thing in the whole document, because it hands you a term to get ready rather than a fortnight. And there is one change in particular that boards should use that time on.
Inclusion has moved from the staffroom to the boardroom
For the first time, the handbook sets out a trust's responsibilities for inclusion alongside its financial duties. Trusts are told to ensure inclusion is embedded across all aspects of their provision, so that every pupil, particularly those with SEND and those who are disadvantaged, can access appropriate support and participate fully in school life. Boards are told they should designate a trustee, or establish a committee, to support oversight of inclusion, including SEND.
That is a "should" rather than a "must", and I know how tempting it is to file "should" under "later". I would not do that here. The DfE has also confirmed it will publish new trust standards and commissioning guidance later this year, and will consult on the local tier of trust governance. Today's "should" is very often next year's "must", and the trusts that move early will be the ones with something to point at when the standards land.
Inclusion has stopped being an operational matter that sits with the SENCO and become a governance matter that sits with the board.
The part that catches boards out
Designating a trustee is the easy bit. It takes one line in a minute. The hard bit is what that trustee is then supposed to oversee, and where the evidence comes from.
You cannot oversee whether pupils can participate fully in school life without asking pupils, parents and staff whether they can. The DfE's own Academy Trust Governance Guide is already clear on this point. It says the board ensures the trust puts systems in place to regularly seek and consider the views of parents, carers and communities, and to listen and respond to parents, carers, pupils, staff and local communities. That expectation has been sitting there for a while. The handbook has now given it teeth by attaching it to a named person on your board.
So the question a designated inclusion trustee will be asked, sooner or later, is a simple one. How do you know? How do you know that families of pupils with SEND across your trust feel heard? How do you know that the experience in your smallest primary matches the experience in your largest secondary? A conversation at one school gate does not answer that.
Why consistency is the real trust-level problem
The handbook asks for a clear, trust-wide approach. That phrase does a lot of work. In practice most trusts I speak to do not have a trust-wide approach to gathering views. They have a patchwork. One school runs a parent survey every summer. Another sends a form home in book bags and gets eleven responses. A third does a student council election properly, with nominations and a real ballot, and another appoints its student council by asking form tutors to nominate someone sensible.
None of that is anyone's fault. It is what happens when a group of schools with their own histories join together and nobody has yet said "here is how we do this across all of us". But it means that when a trustee asks how inclusion is landing across the trust, the answer arrives in four different formats, covering four different questions, from four different years.
A trust cannot demonstrate consistency it has never actually measured.
What I would do with the extra term
You have roughly ten weeks of term time before 1 October. That is enough to do four things properly.
- Name the person or the committee now. Do it at your first autumn meeting and minute it clearly, including what the role covers and what it will report on. A designation with no terms of reference is not oversight.
- Audit what you already collect. List every survey, consultation, student council election and parent ballot that ran across your schools in the last twelve months. Who was asked, when, how many responded, and what happened as a result. This usually takes an afternoon and it is usually sobering.
- Agree one trust-wide method. Not one topic and not one calendar necessarily, but one way of running it, so that results from different schools can sit on the same page. Same platform, same record, same audit trail.
- Fix your student voice structures before September. If pupils are meant to participate fully in school life, the bodies that represent them should be elected rather than appointed. A student council chosen by staff is a consultation group. One chosen by a proper ballot is representation, and it is far easier to evidence.
A note on the rest of the handbook
Inclusion is not the only change. Trusts must now publish a summary statement alongside their annual accounts by 31 January each year, setting out how funds are distributed across their schools. Boards are told they should have sufficient and effective financial knowledge and expertise to hold the executive to account, with appropriate training, particularly for finance and audit committee members. There are new controls on executive pay above £174,000, new rules on pension alternatives, and requirements around CFO qualifications for trusts educating more than 3,000 pupils.
All of that matters. But most of it is work for your executive team and your auditors. The inclusion oversight duty is one of the few changes that lands squarely on the board itself, and it is the one most likely to be quietly skipped over in a busy September.
The thread running through all of this
Look at the direction of travel over the last eighteen months. Ofsted's framework asks what schools do with the views they gather. The schools white paper talked about proving you listen. The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act put pupil voice on a statutory footing. Now the handbook asks a named trustee to hold inclusion to account across a whole group of schools.
Every one of those points in the same direction. Gathering views is no longer a nice thing to do at the end of term. It is becoming part of how boards evidence that they are doing their job, and the schools that can show a clear record of who was asked, when, and what changed are going to have a much easier time of it than the ones reconstructing an answer from memory in an inspection window.
The good news is that none of this requires a new strategy. It requires a decision about how you run consultations, elections and ballots across your trust, taken once, and applied consistently. Ten weeks is plenty of time to make that decision. It is not much time to make it twice.
If you want to talk through how a trust-wide approach to parent ballots, governor elections and student council votes could work in practice, with a proper audit trail behind every one of them, have a look at choicevoting.co.uk or drop me a line. Happy to walk you through what other trusts have settled on.