I have been following the NGA's latest intervention on trust governance with interest. Earlier this month, Schools Week published an investigation showing that 34 of the 52 largest academy trusts in England have a chair of trustees who is also a member of the trust. The NGA's response was blunt: those individuals should give up one of their roles.
It is a governance problem that has been hiding in plain sight for years. And it raises a question that goes well beyond boardroom protocol: if the people responsible for holding your trust to account are the same people running it, how confident are you that your governance can withstand scrutiny?
Why the dual role matters
To understand the issue, you need to understand the difference between members and trustees. In an academy trust, members sit above the board of trustees. They are the trust's equivalent of shareholders in a company. Their job is to provide oversight, to appoint and remove trustees, and to ensure the trust is being governed effectively. Trustees, meanwhile, run the trust day to day. The chair of trustees leads the board.
When the same person holds both roles, that separation collapses. As the NGA's director of policy and information Sam Henson put it, members have a role in "casting an eye over how effective the governance of the trust is, and so they have to be free from conflict to do so." If the chair is also a member, they are effectively overseeing their own performance.
The DfE's own governance guide states its "strong preference" is for a majority of members to be independent of the board of trustees. If members sit on the board, it "may reduce the objectivity with which the members can exercise their powers."
The NGA wants to go further. They are calling for "complete separation between those at a local level, trustees, executives and members." That is a significant statement from the sector's leading governance body.
Why this is coming to a head now
This is not a new concern, but the timing matters. Trust inspections are being legislated through the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill. The new Ofsted framework places governance more clearly within the inspection process than ever before. And the NGA has described 2026 as "a pivotal year for governance," with MAT inspections, policy reform, and a new accountability framework all converging at once.
When inspectors start looking at trust-level governance, the structures and processes behind your board will be examined properly. A chair who is also a member, appointing other members, who in turn appoint trustees, who the chair then leads, is exactly the kind of circular arrangement that will draw uncomfortable questions.
But the dual-role issue is really a symptom of something broader: many trusts have governance structures that evolved informally over time. Articles of association written when the trust had two schools may not have been updated now it has twelve. Processes that were understood between a small group of founders may not be documented anywhere. And when governance depends on relationships rather than systems, it becomes fragile.
What good governance looks like in practice
I talk to schools and trusts every week, and I see the same pattern again and again. The trusts that are confident about governance accountability are the ones that have documented, transparent processes for everything. Not just the big decisions, but the routine ones too: how governors are appointed, how elections are run, how stakeholders are consulted, how decisions are recorded and evidenced.
The NGA's guidance on parental engagement for MATs, published earlier this year with Parentkind, makes the same point. Visible governance increases credibility. Transparency around decision-making increases the likelihood of parents buying into the trust's strategy, "particularly if parents have been consulted in reaching decisions."
If your trust cannot show exactly how its parent governors were elected, who was eligible to vote, and what the turnout was, that is a governance gap waiting to be found.
Parent governor elections are a good example. In maintained schools, the Constitution Regulations 2012 set out clear requirements for how parent governors must be elected. In academy trusts, the articles of association determine the process, but many trusts have considerable discretion in how they structure parent representation. That discretion is fine, as long as the process is clear, consistent, and documented.
The same applies to staff governor elections, student council votes, and any form of stakeholder consultation. If you are asking parents for their views on a uniform policy, or gathering staff feedback on workload, or running a student voice exercise, the process matters as much as the outcome. Can you show who was consulted? How they were asked? What happened with the results?
Building governance that survives scrutiny
The NGA's intervention on dual roles is a reminder that governance is not just about having the right people around the table. It is about having the right structures, the right separation of responsibilities, and the right processes to demonstrate that accountability is real, not theoretical.
If trust inspections are coming, and they are, then every trust needs to be asking itself some uncomfortable questions. Not just "do we have a conflict of interest at board level?" but "can we evidence how every governance process works, from elections to consultations to decision-making?"
Here is what I would suggest as a starting point:
- Review your articles of association. Are member and trustee roles properly separated? Does the current structure reflect the size and complexity of your trust today?
- Audit your election processes. How are parent governors elected? Is the process documented? Is there an audit trail showing who was eligible, who voted, and what the result was?
- Document your consultation processes. When you consult parents, staff, or students, how do you record it? Could you show an inspector the evidence?
- Make governance visible. Publish annual governance statements, share how decisions are made, and show your communities that accountability is built into how the trust operates.
None of this needs to be complicated. It just needs to be deliberate. The trusts that will come through inspection confidently are the ones that can point to clear, documented, transparent processes at every level. Not because an inspector asked for them, but because that is how good governance works.
If you are thinking about how to make your election and consultation processes more transparent, choicevoting.co.uk is a good place to start.