The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act received Royal Assent on 29 April this year. Among everything it changes, one part matters more than most for anyone running a multi-academy trust: for the first time, the trust itself will be inspected, not just the schools inside it.
For years, Ofsted inspected individual academies. The trust above them, the body actually making the big decisions, sat outside the frame. That gap is now closing. Trust-level inspections are coming, and governance is right at the centre of what inspectors will look at.
You have a bit of time. The inspections are not expected to begin before the 2027-28 academic year, and the approach will be piloted first. But the year ahead is not spare time. It is the window to get your house in order, and the most common weak spot is one trusts rarely think of as an inspection risk: consistency.
What the new trust inspections will actually look at
The Department for Education has been clear that trust inspections will focus on leadership, governance and impact. In practice that means how effectively the trust improves its schools, provides good education, supports staff, uses its resources, and promotes pupil wellbeing.
The legislation requires inspection reports to cover the quality and effectiveness of leadership, management and governance. There is also a notable procedural detail worth sitting with: Ofsted must notify the trust before an inspection, and the trust must in turn notify its parents and staff. Your communities will know an inspection is happening. Some of them will have things to say.
That last point tells you something about the direction of travel. Trust inspection is not only about spreadsheets and outcomes. It is about whether the people in your schools, the parents, the staff, the pupils, are genuinely part of how decisions get made.
The gap most trusts have not closed
Here is the uncomfortable question. If an inspector asked your trust to show how each of your schools listens to its community, could you answer with evidence, for every school, in the same format?
Most trusts cannot. And it is not because they do not care. It is because each school has been left to do it its own way. One school runs a proper parent governor election with a clear audit trail. Another fills the vacancy with a quiet word in the car park because nobody put themselves forward. One school runs an annual parent survey. Another did one three years ago and cannot find the results. One does a thorough student council election. Another appoints the loudest pupils.
When you are inspected at school level, that patchwork can hold. When you are inspected at trust level, it becomes the story. Inspectors will be looking at the trust as a single organisation, and inconsistency between your schools is exactly the kind of thing a trust-level view exposes.
A trust is judged on how it governs every school, not on how well its best school governs itself.
This is the shift in mindset the new framework demands. Your strongest school no longer carries the rest. The board has to be able to show that participation and governance work to the same standard across the whole trust.
Why this is really a participation problem
Strip away the inspection language and what trust governance comes down to is straightforward. Meaningful engagement with pupils, parents and staff is what helps a trust board make informed decisions and build genuine ownership of them. Inspectors know this. It is why stakeholder voice keeps appearing in everything they publish about governance.
So the practical task in front of every trust is this. Across all your schools, can you demonstrate that you:
- Run parent and staff governor elections that are open, fair and properly recorded
- Consult parents on the decisions that affect them, and keep the results
- Give pupils a real voice through student council elections that mean something
- Gather staff feedback in a way that is structured rather than anecdotal
- Hold the evidence that all of this happened, ready to show without a scramble
None of that is new work in principle. Schools already do most of it. The problem is that it is scattered, inconsistent, and often undocumented. A note in a clerk's inbox. A paper ballot box that went in the recycling. A survey on a free form tool that nobody owns. When the trust is the unit being inspected, scattered and undocumented is not good enough.
What to do in the year you have
You do not need to overhaul everything. You need to make participation consistent and provable across your schools, and you have until 2027-28 to do it calmly rather than in a panic.
Start by mapping what each school actually does. Not what the policy says, what happens in practice. You will almost certainly find variation you did not expect. That is the point of the exercise.
Then agree a single way of doing the core things. One process for governor elections that every school follows. One approach to parent consultation. One way student voice is gathered and recorded. The schools keep their character. The governance underneath them stops being a lottery.
Finally, make sure the evidence lives somewhere the trust can see it. If your central team has to email twelve clerks to find out how each school ran its last governor election, you are not ready. If you can pull every election, every consultation and every result from one place, you are.
The trusts that will do well are not the ones with the most policies. They are the ones that can prove, in minutes, that every school does what it says it does.
This is exactly the kind of work Choice Voting was built for. Running governor elections, parent consultations, staff votes and student council elections through one platform means every school in your trust does it the same way, and every result is recorded automatically with a full audit trail. When the inspection comes, the evidence is already there. You are not building it under pressure, you are simply opening it up.
The new inspections are not something to fear. They are a reason to do something you probably already wanted to do: make participation across your trust consistent, fair and genuinely visible. The trusts that treat the next year as preparation rather than paperwork will be the ones that walk into inspection with nothing to prove and everything to show.
If you would like to see how a single platform can bring governor elections, consultations and student voice together across every school in your trust, have a look at choicevoting.co.uk or get in touch. I am always happy to talk through what trust-wide participation looks like in practice.