Academy trust governance in 2026.

The confusion this year is worth clearing up first, because boards are being told two different start dates and both are correct.

• The Academy Trust Governance Guide was updated on 20 July 2026. Its new duties come into force on 1 September 2026. This is the document that carries the inclusion and SEND oversight changes.
• The Academy Trust Handbook 2026 applies from 1 October 2026. That is a month later than in previous years, and it is deliberate: the DfE moved it back to give trusts time to put the changes in place. Note that the academy financial year still starts on 1 September, so for one month a trust is in its new financial year under the old handbook.

If a board is told it must have everything in place by 1 September, that is only true of the governance guide duties. If it is told nothing changes until October, that is only true of the handbook.

The headline change is that inclusion now sits alongside financial duties in the trust's governance framework. This is the first time the handbook has set out a trust's responsibilities for inclusion in that way, and it moves SEND from something the executive reports on to something the board is expected to oversee.

Three parts matter for the board rather than the executive.

Designated oversight

A trust is expected to designate a trustee, or establish a committee, to support oversight of inclusion including SEND. Read that carefully, because it is more flexible than it first appears. It does not require a new appointment or a new committee. An existing trustee can hold the remit. An existing committee can take it into its terms of reference. What the board cannot do is leave it unassigned and unrecorded.

A trust-wide approach

Multi-academy trusts are expected to work to a consistent approach across their schools: consistent systems for identifying need, deliberate deployment of expertise and additional support across the trust, and monitoring of how pupils with SEND, disadvantaged pupils and those known to social care access school, participate and achieve. The point being made is about consistency. A trust where one school does this well and another does not is the situation the guidance is aimed at.

Working with local authorities

Trusts are expected to work constructively with local authorities on place planning and on local inclusion priorities. For a board this usually surfaces as a question about whether the trust can evidence the engagement, not whether it happened.

Guidance of this kind is rarely tested by an inspection of intent. It is tested by whether a board can produce a record. In practice that means four things, and all four are governance records rather than school improvement work.

1. A minuted decision naming where oversight sits. Which trustee, or which committee. Dated, and carried into terms of reference if it is a committee.
2. Terms of reference that reflect it. If the remit has gone to an existing committee, the terms of reference need to say so. A verbal understanding is not a governance record.
3. A reporting rhythm. What comes to the board on inclusion, how often, and in what form. A board that receives nothing on SEND between one annual report and the next will struggle to show oversight.
4. A record of what the board did with it. Papers received are not oversight. The minute needs to show the board considered the information and what followed from it.

None of this is difficult. It is, however, the kind of work that quietly does not happen when a board has no governance professional, or has one who is stretched across too many meetings to keep terms of reference current.

Two related changes sit underneath this, and together they say something about how the role is now understood.

First, an academy trust must appoint a governance professional to support the board, and that person must be someone other than a trustee, the principal or the chief executive of the trust. That requirement is not new, but it is worth restating because it is the requirement most often met informally, by a member of the executive team taking minutes. That arrangement does not satisfy it.

Second, the DfE guidance now uses governance professional consistently in place of clerk, and the separate Clerking Competency Framework has been withdrawn. The department now points to guidance from the Chartered Governance Institute, the Confederation of School Trusts and the National Governance Association instead.

The language change is not cosmetic. The remit it describes has grown well beyond agendas and minutes, into advice on delegation and quorum, the handling of complaints and exclusions, admissions, data protection and compliance. A board that treats the role as note taking will find the compliance work lands somewhere else, usually on the headteacher or the chief executive, which is precisely the arrangement the guidance rules out.

This page summarises published guidance. The primary documents are worth reading in full before a board acts on them.

• Academy trusts: governance guide, Department for Education, updated 20 July 2026.
• Academy trust handbook 2026, effective from 1 October 2026, Department for Education.
• Maintained schools: governance guide, Department for Education, for boards outside a trust.

Boardmet is a governance support provider, not a law firm. Where a decision carries legal risk, take advice from your solicitors.

• Interim governance support when the governance professional role needs covering for a term or longer.
• Meeting cover when the whole problem is one meeting.
• Specialist panels for exclusion reviews and complaints panels.
• Governance recovery where minutes, terms of reference and records have fallen behind.
• Service levels for the deadlines this is all measured against.
• The Employment Rights Act in schools for the employment duties commencing this term and in January.
• All Boardmet insights, including complaints procedure, subject access requests and SEND appeals.