When parents up and down the country think about their child’s education – their hopes and fears – few will think about multi-academy trust (MAT) governance. Until, that is, things go wrong – and teachers and pupils pay the price.
Half of all schools in England are now part of a MAT. When the Conservative-led government passed the Academies Act in 2010, they argued that academisation would drive up standards. But they did not put in place the safeguards our kids need.
My constituents know that too well. Lichfield is home to six schools in the Arthur Terry Learning Partnership (ATLP), a MAT with 24 schools across the West Midlands. In 2024 ATLP asked the Department for Education (DfE) for a loan to cover a £4 million hole in its budget. By the following year the deficit had doubled to £8 million – one of the largest in the country.
ATLP blamed its deficit on an “accounting error” – a worrying admission. But for many of us, that explanation did not wash. In 2022 the trust had announced it would acquire 10,000 iPads, one for each pupil. We wondered where the money for that scheme had come from.
By then – the autumn of last year – the situation was deteriorating rapidly. ATLP announced that it would cut jobs in an attempt to balance its books. Up to 100 were put at risk – with frontline school staff bearing the brunt of the proposed redundancies.
Before I was elected to parliament, I worked as a teacher for almost a decade, then for a teaching union. I know that teachers only strike reluctantly. But NEU members at ATLP schools knew that they had to act – and families were behind them.
By February ATLP’s chief executive and chief financial officer had resigned. It turned out the trust had spent reserves on iPads, one of several missteps that had sent its finances into a tailspin. In May the DfE announced that the trust would be broken up – a recognition of the breakdown in trust between staff and families on the one hand, and the leadership of the MAT on the other.
ATLP is far from alone. Up and down the country, there are trusts with swelling deficits. We must act to make sure this stops.
This Labour government has already started to right some of the wrongs we saw under the Conservatives. For the first time, MATs themselves – not just the schools within them – will be subject to Ofsted inspections. It is staggering that for a decade and a half that has not been the case.
But we have an opportunity to go further – and last week, I presented a bill to parliament that shows how we could fix gaps in governance.
Start with financial transparency. Families and school staff deserve to know what MATs’ central offices are spending on, and why – after all, this money comes from school budgets. Under my bill, MATs would have to publish details of the funds they divert to their central teams – and why. They’d also have to publish details of their reserves. All this would go on the MAT website and on the website of every school in the trust – so the figures would be easy to find.
As well as being open about their spending, trusts need stronger challenge on the decisions they take. My bill would compel the secretary of state to publish statutory guidance making local governance boards mandatory for MATs. That guidance would also set out the competencies boards would need.
We know that in some areas, MATs struggle to recruit governors. Under my bill, trusts would have to publish a statement annually on how they’re meeting the guidance. If they’re struggling to recruit trustees with the right skills, that would be flagged to the DfE. There’d be stronger oversight of big-ticket spending, too – like the huge iPad purchase at ATLP.
We also need consequences when school leaders fail. It isn’t always down to an individual – but where it is, we can’t tolerate a situation where a person leaves a struggling trust under a cloud, only to appear at another, months later. My bill would compel the secretary of state to consult with the sector on a mechanism to fix this.
And, perhaps most importantly, the bill would compel MATs to listen. Representation for families, teachers and non-teaching staff on MAT boards would be mandatory.
The problems on MAT governance have become clear over the past 15 years. We can see the solutions – and I’m grateful to organisations across the sector who consulted with me on this bill to put forward realistic fixes. Now is the time to act on them.
