Multi-Academy Trusts (Governance)
Dave Robertson (Lichfield) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make provision about financial transparency, expenditure approval limits and governance of multi-academy trusts; and for connected purposes.
When parents up and down the country think about their children’s education, and their worries and hopes for school, “multi-academy trust governance” will probably not be the phrase foremost in many of their minds, but families across Lichfield, Burntwood and the villages know that when governance goes wrong, it is pupils and teachers who pay the price. That is what this Bill seeks to address.
Before I was elected to Parliament, I taught for almost a decade across the west midlands before working for the NASUWT, one of our teaching unions, but I really did not expect this Bill to be the first that I presented to the House—until that is, at the start of this year, when I became aware of just how bad things were at Arthur Terry Learning Partnership.
ATLP is a multi-academy trust running 24 schools across the west midlands, including six in my constituency. It was established in 2011, shortly after the Conservative-led Government passed legislation to significantly increase the rate at which council-run schools could be turned into academies. In recent years, the trust grew rapidly, almost doubling in size since 2010. Then things started to go very, very badly wrong. In 2024, the Department for Education was forced to give the trust an emergency loan to help it bail out a £4 million deficit, but ATLP insisted it was fixing its finances. Scarcely a year later, its deficit had ballooned to £8 million. The trust leadership blamed an accounting error. The idea that £8 million had gone missing because of a mistake was hardly reassuring to me or any of my constituents, and many of us were somewhat sceptical.
In 2022, ATLP announced that it would acquire 11,000 iPads—one for every pupil across its 24 schools. Exactly how had it paid for 11,000 iPads? I put those questions to ATLP’s leadership over and over again in meetings, alongside my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham Erdington (Paulette Hamilton), for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi), for North Warwickshire and Bedworth (Rachel Taylor) and for Tamworth (Sarah Edwards). We never got a straight answer, and the way that ATLP displayed its financial data—particularly graphs that it was using—really seemed to be designed to hide and obfuscate, rather than explain where the trust’s finances were. Believe me, as a former physics teacher, I am more than comfortable with a graph, and it was clear that these were not quite right.
Last autumn, things got much worse. After taking yet another Government loan, the trust needed to cut costs to get its finances on track. Its leadership decided that teachers and support staff would be the people who paid the price. As many as 100 jobs were put at risk of redundancy across the 24 schools. As much as I know that teachers hate going on strike, in that case, ATLP staff at the National Education Union felt that they had no choice, and the risk of redundancy led to nine days of strike action in a number of the trust’s schools. Nobody across any part of the constituency or the communities affected wanted to see iPads prioritised over teachers, teaching assistants and school support staff. Families were right behind the teachers standing up.
Closer scrutiny of ATLP’s accounts at that time showed that the iPads were a symptom of a deeper problem. Most comparable trusts asked schools to pay about 5% of their budget into a pot for centrally procured services. It is often called a top slice—in some schools, there is a slightly different system known as general annual grant pooling. ATLP was asking its schools to fork out eye-watering sums—as much as 25% of their budgets—for these services. At the same time, it was preserving well-paid roles in head office while teachers and teaching assistants were at risk of losing their jobs.
By February, things had unravelled. After those nine days of strike action, ATLP’s chief financial officer and chief executive had both resigned. An interim leader, with experience helping failing trusts, was brought in, swiftly changing tack on teaching cuts and instead slashing the iPad policy and cutting down the head office. Following that, there were no compulsory redundancies at Arthur Terry Learning Partnership at the end of last year, bringing the figure down to zero. The scale of Arthur Terry Learning Partnership’s failings finally became clear: the trust had spent its reserves on iPads—one of a number of financial missteps that had bankrupted it.
In May, after many discussions with me and my colleagues, the Department for Education announced the break-up of Arthur Terry Learning Partnershiop—one of the biggest trust closures our country has seen. Throughout the process, the stress for pupils, parents, teachers and the community across my area has been serious. Families have feared for the future of ATLP schools, worried that great teachers would leave during this time of uncertainty and upheaval. I thank the amazing staff and school leaders at Arthur Terry schools, and I am pleased that we now have a clear plan for those schools to move to other local trusts, where they can thrive and get the support they deserve.
What unfolded at Arthur Terry was unacceptable, and it cannot be allowed to happen at trusts in other parts of the country, but, unfortunately, that is precisely the risk we face. There are not enough financial safeguards in the Academies Act 2010—there are not enough guardrails to stop this happening again. Earlier this year, the Department for Education found “serious” financial issues at SAND Academies Trust in Gloucestershire. The trust’s explanation, blaming “accounting errors”, will be eerily familiar to far too many of my constituents. The boss of St Ralph Sherwin Catholic Multi Academy Trust, based up the road in Derby, quit in June, after the trust accrued an even bigger deficit: over £9 million.
Those are just some examples. There are further example of other trusts that go beyond finances. Analysis by Schools Week found that most trusts put in special financial measures by the Department for Education end up sliding further into the red. Make no mistake, this is a national issue. I have been campaigning for a change in the law to ensure that there are stronger rules on multi-academy trust governance, so that no area has to go through what mine did.
Half of all schools in England are now part of a multi-academy trusts like Arthur Terry, yet research by Parentkind—the national charity for parents—shows that fewer than one in five parents feel that their trust listens to them. I think many parents are shocked by the lack of oversight of trusts; many families in my area certainly asked me at public meetings why the local council could not step in and take the schools back on, particularly when things had gone so wrong at ATLP. The National Governance Association says that that is replicated up and down the country; parents understandably assume that councils still play a significant role in school oversight, when in reality, for academy trust schools, they simply do not.
When the Conservatives aggressively expanded academisation, they said it would drive up standards. What they failed to recognise is that when school leadership fails, pupils suffer, and the Conservative Government failed to put in the adequate safeguards. It is shocking that it took until this Labour Government in 2026—more than 15 years after the Academies Act—for inspections of trusts to be introduced. For almost a decade and a half, the Conservatives presided over a system where Ofsted had no powers to inspect the trusts that ran the schools. In my area, we have seen the problems that that failure of oversight has led to.
We must now go further. Since the break-up of ATLP was announced, I have been consulting experts across the education sector, including: teachers’ unions, such as the NEU, NASUWT and Community; unions representing school staff, including Unite and GMB; the Association of School and College Leaders; the National Association of Headteachers; the Local Government Association; the National Governance Association; the Confederation of School Trusts; and Parentkind. My hon. Friends and I have written to multi-academy trusts to seek their views, and, crucially, I have been working with parents, carers and teachers across my constituency who have first-hand experience, as well as running a survey and holding a townhall meeting earlier this month. I thank everybody who has given their time to this. Together, we have crafted a Bill that makes practical proposals that would put the proper safeguards in place.
The Bill starts with a financial transparency section. Parents need to know if trusts are skimming off sums that could be spent in classrooms, or if their reserves are running low—and they should not have to pore over accounts like a forensic accountant to find out. The Bill would mandate that trusts publish details of the money they are taking from school budgets, and, if they pool and redistribute that, how they are doing so. They would need to include how they plan to spend reserves on their website and the website of every school they run. They would also have to publish details of the reserves they hold in the same place. If trusts cannot explain their decisions to parents, it is a warning sign.
We need stronger oversight, too. Our experience with iPads at ATLP has shown that one big mistake can cost pupils. The Bill would make such purchases subject to additional sign-off. If trusts cannot justify the cost on an education basis, it should not be able to happen. We also need better scrutiny at board level; governors should have better skills to ask those questions. The Bill would compel the Secretary of State to draft statutory guidance to make local governing boards mandatory for trusts and set out the competency that trust boards should have, with specific guidance for chairs of finance committees.
There is more to say, but I am aware of the time, so let me close by saying that the Bill has been a community effort, and it exists to help ensure that no other community goes through what families at Arthur Terry Learning Partnership schools did. Its provisions would build on the Government’s work in strengthening multi-academy accountability. We know the problems, we can see the solutions, and now we need to grasp them.
Question put and agreed to.
Ordered,
That Dave Robertson, Sarah Edwards, Paulette Hamilton, Rachel Taylor, Taiwo Owatemi, Jacob Collier, Jonathan Davies, Josh Fenton-Glynn, Leigh Ingham Jon Pearce, and Mark Sewards present the Bill.
Dave Robertson accordingly presented the Bill.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 15 January 2027, and to be printed (Bill 164).