The schools white paper landed last month, and buried inside the 130-odd pages of "Every Child Achieving and Thriving" is a governance commitment that deserves far more attention than it has received so far. The government will consult on requiring trusts to hold annual parental forums and to ensure boards hear directly from parents and school communities.
If that sounds like a modest proposal, I think it is anything but. For many trusts, this is a fundamental shift in how they engage with the families they serve.
What the white paper actually says
The key line is this: the government will consult on requiring school trusts to have governance structures that "include all their schools, hold annual parental forums, and ensure boards hear directly from parents and school communities." There is also a consultation coming on requiring every trust to maintain local governance arrangements covering every school in its organisation.
The consultation is expected in summer 2026, so there is still time before anything becomes statutory. But the direction of travel is clear. If you run a trust, or sit on a trust board, parent voice is about to move from "nice to have" to "structurally required."
Why this matters more than it looks
Most trusts already say they listen to parents. Many do. But there is a world of difference between informal engagement and a structured, documented forum that the DfE expects you to run annually across every school in your trust.
Think about what that means in practice. A ten-school trust needs to organise, run, and evidence ten parental forums every year, minimum. Each one needs to be accessible, meaningful, and connected to the board. That is a significant governance and operational commitment.
The National Governance Association was careful in its response, welcoming the direction but noting that "the most important thing is not the presence of a local tier but that it is empowered and valued by the trust so it can meaningfully influence decision-making." In other words, it is not enough to just hold a meeting and tick a box. The forum has to actually change things.
If parent forums become a compliance exercise rather than a genuine conversation, everyone loses. The schools lose trust, the parents lose patience, and the DfE loses confidence in the model.
The practical challenge for trusts
Here is where it gets interesting from a governance perspective. Running a meaningful parental forum is not just about booking a hall and sending a letter home. You need to think about who is invited, how views are collected from parents who cannot attend, how feedback is recorded, and how it reaches the board in a form that can actually be acted on.
For single-school trusts, this is relatively straightforward. But for larger multi-academy trusts, the logistics multiply quickly. Forum Strategy's analysis of the white paper noted that larger trusts will need to achieve "coherence through local hubs or clusters," and that is exactly the kind of structural thinking that governance teams need to start doing now.
There is also the question of consistency. If one school in a trust runs a well-attended, well-documented forum and another barely manages a handful of parents in a draughty hall, the trust has a governance problem. The new Trust Standards will require trusts to demonstrate community collaboration and report on it through annual public benefit reporting. That means the quality and reach of parent engagement will be visible, and comparable.
Where parent governor elections fit in
This consultation sits alongside existing requirements for parent representation on trust boards and local governing bodies. Most trusts already run parent governor elections, though the quality and consistency of those processes varies enormously. I have spoken to school business managers who still run elections using paper slips collected in book bags, and others who have moved to proper digital processes with audit trails and accessibility built in.
The white paper does not change the requirement for parent governors. But it does add another layer of structured parent engagement that needs to work alongside existing election processes. If you are already running robust parent governor elections, you have a foundation to build on. If your elections are informal and undocumented, the parental forum requirement is going to expose that gap.
The trusts that will handle this best are the ones that already treat parent engagement as a governance function, not an afterthought.
What you can do now
The consultation has not happened yet, so nothing is set in stone. But waiting for the final guidance before thinking about this would be a mistake. Here is what I would suggest.
First, audit your current parent engagement. How do parents currently feed into governance at each school in your trust? Is it consistent? Is it documented? Could you evidence it if asked?
Second, look at your parent governor election processes. Are they accessible, transparent, and auditable? If you are still relying on paper-based systems, now is the time to move to something more robust. A well-run digital election process gives you both better turnout and a clear evidence trail, which is exactly what the new requirements will demand.
Third, start thinking about what a meaningful annual parental forum looks like for your context. It does not have to be a formal event. It could be a structured online consultation, a series of smaller meetings, or a combination. The point is that it needs to be planned, inclusive, and connected to governance decision-making.
Finally, talk to your board about this now. The white paper is signalling where governance expectations are heading. Boards that start preparing early will be in a much stronger position when the consultation concludes and the requirements land.
If you want to strengthen your parent engagement processes, starting with how you run elections and collect parent voice, take a look at what we have built at choicevoting.co.uk. It is designed for exactly this kind of structured, accessible, trust-wide governance process.