Jason Hawkins, Choice Voting | March 2026 | choicevoting.co.uk
From September 2026, academies will be required to follow the National Curriculum and align to national pay and conditions for teachers. That's a significant change. For the best part of fifteen years, one of the main selling points of academy conversion was flexibility: the ability to do things differently. That flexibility is now being wound back.
I'm not going to get into the politics of whether that's a good thing. What I do want to talk about is what it means practically for the people running governance in schools and trusts, because I think the governance angle is being largely overlooked in the wider conversation.
Why did the divide exist in the first place?
When academies started converting in larger numbers, the promise was autonomy. Freedom from local authority oversight, the ability to set your own pay scales, your own curriculum priorities. Some schools used that freedom really well. Others found it created inconsistency, both within their own trust and compared to the maintained school down the road.
Over time, parents and staff started noticing. Two schools in the same area, similar children, similar challenges, but operating under noticeably different rules. The 2026 changes are partly a response to that. The government wants greater consistency across the system, and it's prepared to reduce academy freedoms to get there.
So what does this actually mean for governance?
Three things, as I see it.
First, if operational rules are converging, the expectation around governance processes will converge too. Schools that have been running elections informally, or not running them properly at all, will find that harder to justify when their maintained school neighbours are held to a defined standard. The bar is rising for everyone.
Second, the white paper makes clear that the government expects all schools to eventually sit within a high-quality multi-academy trust, and that trust-level inspections are coming. That's a significant shift. It means governance processes at individual school level, including how governors are elected, will face external scrutiny in a way many schools simply haven't experienced before.
Third, and this one is easy to underestimate: as academies align more closely with maintained schools on curriculum and pay, parents will reasonably expect the same level of transparency and participation in governance. If the school now looks and feels like a maintained school from the outside, the expectation of parent involvement follows.
The trust-level inspections that are coming will look at governance processes. If you can't demonstrate how your governor elections work, that's a gap worth closing now rather than later.
The election process problem nobody talks about
I've been working with schools on governor elections for over twenty years, and one of the things I see regularly is that elections run on institutional memory rather than documented process. The school business manager who ran the last three elections retires, and the knowledge goes with them. A new headteacher inherits a school that hasn't run a contested election in four years because nobody put their hand up last time, so nobody knows what to do when they finally do.
That's always been a risk. In the new governance landscape, it becomes a more visible one. When inspectors start looking at trust governance, the question won't just be whether elections happened. It'll be whether they happened properly: documented, accessible, fairly run, with a result that can be verified.
I'm not trying to alarm anyone. Most schools are doing their best with limited time and resource. But this is a good moment to review how elections are being run, because the expectations around it are only going to increase.
Does the type of school still matter?
For election purposes, academy and maintained school governor elections have always followed broadly similar principles, even if the precise rules differ slightly. What's changing is the environment around those elections: more scrutiny, more consistency expected, more accountability at trust level.
If you're running a multi-academy trust with a mix of academy and maintained schools, this is actually a good opportunity to ask whether your election processes are genuinely consistent across all of them, or whether each school is doing something slightly different because that's how it's always been done.
Consistent doesn't have to mean identical. It means there's a clear, repeatable process that you can explain and demonstrate. That's what good governance looks like, and it's what the reforms are pushing the whole sector towards.
If you're running a trust with ten schools, are all ten running elections the same way? Could you explain the process for each one if you had to?
A word on parent voice
It's worth saying this plainly: governor elections are one of the few moments in the school year where parents are directly invited to participate in how their school is run. Not just informed. Actually invited to take part.
A well-run election, where parents understand what's happening, where voting is straightforward, and where the outcome feels legitimate, does something important. It says the school takes its own governance seriously and values the people it serves.
A poorly run one, or one that doesn't happen at all, sends the opposite message, even if that's not the intention.
As the sector moves towards greater consistency and accountability, the schools that are ahead of this are the ones that have already made governance something they're proud of, rather than something they're trying not to get wrong.
What's worth doing now?
If I were advising a governance clerk or a school business manager today, I'd suggest a few straightforward things.
Check when your next governor elections fall due. Across all schools in your trust if that applies. It's easier to plan if you know what's coming.
Write down your current election process, even roughly. Who does what, when, how voting works, how results are communicated. If you can't write it down, you can't demonstrate it to anyone else.
Think about whether your process would hold up to scrutiny. Not whether it's perfect, but whether it's documented, fair, and accessible. If there are gaps, now is a reasonable time to address them before the inspection environment gets more demanding.
And if you're working across multiple schools, ask whether your processes are genuinely consistent, or whether each school is quietly doing its own thing. That's a question worth knowing the answer to.
I'm happy to talk through how Choice Voting works with schools and trusts, whether you're running a single maintained school or a trust with multiple sites. Visit choicevoting.co.uk or drop me a message directly.