Circling the line of Multi-Academy Trust accountability

Superman fans may recall the scene where the pant-sporting hero flies up to catch Lois Lane as she falls from a skyscraper. He reassures the distressed damsel, “Easy, miss. I’ve got you.” Lane stammers “You – you’ve got me? Who’s got you?”

I’ve been wondering the same about multi-academy trust (MAT) boards.

Since becoming a trustee in the autumn, I’ve been trying to understand how accountability for pupil outcomes flows through the MAT and how the Standards Committee I chair fits in. I was lucky to join a trust that had recently undertaken a governance review and already had a clear scheme of delegation, but the visual learner in me needed to see it in diagram form to really understand it.

It’s taken us a few months, but a diagram now exists which shows a ‘golden thread’ of accountability from headteachers to the board of trustees. I would urge anyone involved in MAT governance to attempt this task, as the process led us to some useful streamlining and refinement of roles, bringing greater clarity to the important question of “who does what and why?”

The one question it has left me with is “who is the board of trustees accountable to?” I tested this out recently with CEOs and aspiring CEOs on The Future Leader’s Trust’s Executive Educators programme and some of the trustees they’d brought with them. Inevitably the accountability they most keenly felt was to DfE, RSCs and Ofsted. But I wonder whether these are the people we should be most concerned about serving – especially given the autonomy that supposedly comes with academy status?

In the private sector, ‘shareholders’ are clearly defined, though boards may also be accountable to regulatory bodies (in banking, for example). In education, there are many potential ‘shareholders’ with an interest in the value our trusts deliver, even if they don’t hold a share certificate to denote that status. Pupils and their parents must be chief among these, but also the wider community, universities, employers, and tax payers to name but a few. How are their voices heard and embedded in our governance structures?

Governance experts at both ICSA: The Governance Institute and the National Governance Association have suggested that one way to do this could be through expanding the remit and make-up of the Members charged with overseeing MAT boards. Members are a group often missing from governance diagrams because they meet infrequently and have limited (if ultimately very fundamental) responsibilities. Could they be expanded to become our ‘shareholder’ group?

The short, current answer to this is “no”, with DfE guidance suggesting no more than 5 members, recruited (like everyone else involved in school governance) based on their skill sets. This seems an odd requirement for a group that may meet only once a year to review the annual accounts and amend the Articles of Association. Why couldn’t they instead be a broad group representing the various ‘shareholders’ with an interest in our children’s outcomes? Like Emma Knights in her recent blog, I think this is an idea that worth exploring.

In the meantime, there is a challenge for all of us involved in MATs to consider how those important ‘shareholders’ are represented and heard. Perhaps accountability needs to be conceived as a circle rather than a line because in the end, we all need to be supporting each other and holding each other to account. There is no caped superhero/ine waiting to catch us if we fall, and if we do, the consequences could be catastrophic for those who matter most – our children.