2025-26: the year of people power in the world of multi-academy trusts

Will this coming academic year see more of the same?

The academic year just gone, within the multi-academy trust world which Education Uncovered reports on so frequently, was arguably remarkable for one thing above all.

For 2025-26 was the year when ground-level community opinion did appear in several cases to cut through, in terms of effecting major change on a string of chains, despite academies’ control structures often seeming to leave them about institutionally to operate at a distance from the views of parents, pupils and staff.

Prominent in this website’s news year were the travails of five trusts, three of which have seen either major change at the top or the prospect of being broken up entirely, following campaigns of concern by parents and, in two cases, staff.

These developments were significant because while of course all schools face informal answerability to parents and their staff on a daily basis, formally academy trusts are not answerable to the communities they serve, but rather to the Department for Education and Ofsted.

Yet it appears that in the cases charted below it is ground-level unhappiness which has brought about change, including at England’s two most indebted academy trusts, rather than top-down regulation from the DfE.