Engagement between multi-academy trusts and their communities is one of the great “untapped areas of potential across the sector”, according to education leaders - but it gets scant mention in official guidance for MATs.

This is despite the sector body that represents MATs making the case for trusts to provide a “greater social good” and become “anchor organisations” in their communities.

New descriptions of what constitutes trust quality, published by the Department for Education this week, detail the need for MATs to be inclusive, raise standards and manage finances well.

But the document makes only passing mention of the need for community engagement or the role of local voices in governance and decision making.

Governance leaders say this is a concern and are calling for the government to go further.

The National Governance Association’s director of policy and information Sam Henson tells Tes: “The department has backtracked on this. In the Schools White Paper, it talked about the need for community engagement from trusts but this has not really come through.”

Last year’s White Paper - which, at the time, signalled the government’s desire for an entirely MAT-led system - set out five key areas of trust performance.

On strategic governance, it said MATs should have a strong local identity, engaging effectively with parents and the wider community.

But the detailed descriptions of trust quality published this week do not expand on this at all. They only say that trust boards and leaders should “involve parents, schools, communities…so that decision making is supported by meaningful engagement”.

The DfE’s academies regulatory and commissioning review published last month was also relatively restrained, saying it “recognised the importance of meaningful local and community engagement” but “will not be prescriptive about how trusts achieve this”.

The “overwhelming majority of MATs” now have local tiers of governance, it added.

Henson says there are benefits in MATs retaining freedom over how they manage local governance tiers.

“We need to be careful not to straitjacket a set of expectations on trusts because one of the strengths of the multi-academy trust model is that it is diverse and trusts have the ability to innovate,” he says.

But, he adds: “We think trusts would benefit from there being more government guidance about how to engage with the communities they serve. It feels as though, having talked about the importance of this last year, they have now withdrawn from this.”

The DfE has said that the vast majority of trusts already benefit from having some form of local governance arrangements for their schools and said it is important that trusts have flexibility to constitute their local governance tier to best suit their circumstances.

A spokesperson added: “That is why in our trust quality descriptions we have focused on how these arrangements should ensure meaningful engagement and involvement of parents, schools, communities, dioceses and other religious authorities with decisions which affect them.”

The NGA had already produced expectations of its own, setting out how it believes the local tier of governance should work.

The tension here comes from the fact that the role of local governors is different in academies, with legal responsibilities and decision-making power across MATs sitting with the overall trust board rather than at school level - unlike at a maintained school.

The NGA guidance for local tiers of governance seeks to ensure that local voices can still feed into decision making as more schools become academies and part of trusts.

It recommends that two-way communication is crucial, including regular meetings with the trust board chair, vice-chair and chairs at the local level. It also says that local boards should have a “meaningful, welcome and accepted role in challenge” and that trusts must not remove the local committee simply for being challenging.

‘One of the strengths of the MAT model is that it is diverse and trusts have the ability to innovate’

The Confederation of School Trusts has given the government’s descriptors of MAT quality a cautious welcome, but notes the lack of focus on trusts’ civic role.

Chief executive Leora Cruddas says: “CST welcomes the trust quality descriptions as a first attempt to build a common conception of what ‘good’ looks like. We note that they are presented in draft form to allow further engagement with the sector.” 

But the sector body believes that the civic role of the MAT remains all-important, and has published guidance on building strong trusts, which Cruddas says goes “further than the DfE’s quality descriptions and include our conception of public benefit and civic duty”.

Cruddas adds: ”It is fundamentally important that parents have a say in their children’s education. We can think about this in different ways. CST has recently published a paper with the Reach Foundation which talks about ‘community anchoring’.

“As a minimum we should provide our parents and communities with balanced and objective information to assist them in understanding the problem, alternatives and opportunities.

“We should also routinely obtain public feedback on analysis, alternatives and decisions we take. Our ambition is that schools and trusts work more directly with our communities to ensure that their concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered. And finally, of course, parents are involved in school or trust governance.”

Covid ‘brought home’ MATs’ community role

Many MATs are attempting to build out this community role, despite the lack of government prioritisation of it in its guidance. 

Rebecca Boomer-Clark, the chief executive of Academies Enterprise Trust, one of the country’s first national MATs, says she believes parental engagement through communities is one of the great “untapped areas of potential across the sector”.

AET now has 57 schools across 26 different local authorities, which Boomer-Clark acknowledges makes it “impossible for us, at the centre of AET, to understand the depth and detail and colour and characteristics of all of our communities”. 

But schools, she says, “absolutely have to” possess that understanding. As a result, she says the trust has “doubled down” on efforts to strengthen local governance - moving from a system of professional paid chairs to one with academy councillors, appointing 490 new governors and 57 new chairs in the process.

She expands: “We were clear that these councils had to be representative of their local communities…and the whole purpose of those bodies is to keep us honest and [help us understand] what is the lived experience of a child, a teacher, a parent, a neighbour of the people in our schools.”

Boomer-Clark suggests trusts need to take a pragmatic attitude to their own prominence, compared with the school’s prominence, in the community.

“I was once asked, ‘Would it matter to me if a parent didn’t know who AET was?’ Fundamentally it probably doesn’t matter very much. The optimal position would be for the parent to know the school was part of a national network that brings with it resilience and a real sense of strength and support, but fundamentally the headteacher needs to be the central figure.”

At Summit Learning Trust, chief executive Vince Green says the trust’s role in supporting the school communities has transformed as a result of the Covid pandemic.

“Covid really brought home the need to ensure children have the same opportunities and the same access,” he says, citing online learning as an example.

While the pandemic highlighted the need to go further in the way the trust supported families, more recent cost-of-living pressures “have only added to this”, Green adds.

As a result, Summit created a financial package last December to support pupils and their families, including free breakfast for all pupils, and “warm spaces” with free wi-fi at schools. 

And Tom Campbell, the chief executive of E-ACT, another of the first large academy trusts to develop a national footprint, says that in some areas, trust support includes services that local authorities used to provide. For example, in Bristol, the trust’s six primary schools have benefited from education psychologists, he says.

He adds: “Across the trust we have used old janitors’ houses to open up hubs. The idea is for the school to work with different organisations to provide services.” 

Local offers for pupils

Ormiston Academies Trust says community engagement needs to extend to curriculum, too. 

As part of its work to engage with each of its school communities, Ormiston has developed localised curriculums.

Chief executive Nick Hudson highlights a maritime curriculum developed at OAT’s school on the Isle of Wight that aims to educate pupils about their local heritage and to raise awareness of wider employment opportunities.

While this started on the Isle of Wight, it has since been shared with other academies in coastal settings within the trust. 

‘Parents and the local community are on the receiving end of a system that has driven local voices out’

But while sector leaders speak earnestly about the importance of parental involvement, critics of the academies programme object to how little of this there is when schools are being moved into or between trusts.

Kevin Courtney, the joint general secretary of the NEU teaching union, says there is a contradiction at the heart of education policy.

“Everybody knows that parental engagement is all-important in education - not only in terms of things like parents reading [to their children], but throughout education. It is so important for a school,” he says. And yet, he adds, “we are moving to a system whereby parents have no say whatsoever in who gets to run their children’s schools”.

When a school is moved into an academy or is rebrokered between trusts, this happens with “little or no meaningful consultation of parents”, he says. 

Courtney continues: “Parents and the local community should absolutely be in the driving seats of decisions about how education is organised and who runs the schools their children attend, but they are on the receiving end of a system that has driven local voices out.”

This week, parents handed DfE officials a petition with 2,706 signatories, protesting against a decision to academise King Edward VII School in Sheffield following an Ofsted inspection that resulted in the school being failed over safeguarding.

Courtney says that cases like this show it is “not sustainable” to run a decision-making process that has parents on the outside protesting. 

So, will communities be brought closer into trusts as they expand?

Last month, the government signalled how it wants trusts to expand, grow, launch and consolidate across the country as it attempts to bring more coherence to the MAT system.

But it is striking how little the DfE has to say on civic duty, suggesting it will be left to trusts to define when and how they interact with their communities.