Keeping a consistent focus on a long-term, ten year strategy is a challenge for education leaders facing regular policy shifts. It is all too easy to lose our view of the bigger picture. At Diocese of Ely Multi Academy Trust (DEMAT), our board of trustees is determined to ensure every high-level decision we make supports our reason for existing: to create the foundations to build successful futures. It is this focus that has led us to reimagine the way our trust is governed. Over the past few years, we have strategically reviewed and made changes to our core functions and processes, specifically with the aim to improve alignment across the trust. This in turn allows us to provide school improvement at scale across our 38 schools. Whether through our trust-wide educational principles, our common curriculum offer or the full centralisation of each business support function, the purpose is the same – to reduce the administrative burden on school leaders and allow them to flourish and focus on pupils. The impact of this is clear. We’ve seen a 14 per cent point increase in KS2 combined results between 2022 and 2026 (to 66 per cent) and an improvement in Ofsted outcomes from 48 per cent ‘good’ or better to 98 per cent. Our finances are stable, and we have successfully set up a hub network, through which we drive school improvement. Duplication issue However, while we have already made some revisions to our governance structures, we are open about the fact that incremental changes have not addressed a central issue: duplication. At the moment, work on quality assurance processes is delegated to DEMAT’s central team because they monitor these processes across the trust as part of their specialist roles. But it is also duplicated within each local governing body. After careful consideration, we have consulted on a proposal to establish a new regional schools board (RSB) for each of our six hubs. These will include up to 60 members and replace our current local governing bodies. RSB members, who will have a clearly defined remit focussing solely on the educational performance of our schools, will provide the third line of assurance for the work of our hub directors and education strategy. This is a significant change from our current set-up, which includes 220 local governing body members across our 38 – soon to be 39 – schools. I want to be clear that we are very grateful for the dedication of our local governing body members. They have supported us as we have overseen marked progress and achievements across our trust, with all our trust outcomes performing above national benchmarks last year. They have been an important part of our success, which has been recognised nationally. The need to ensure we are operating as efficiently as possible as well as collaboratively does, however, remain more pressing than ever, and our role within our different communities is becoming an increasingly important consideration for leaders. New community councils As part of our reforms we are also establishing community councils within each school and these will also have a clearly defined role. They will support headteachers with community engagement activity and will report to the new RSB via the school’s headteacher. Two places on every RSB will be reserved for parents, and we will be strongly encouraging parents to join our community councils because we hope to see even more engagement with parents as a result of this shift. The insights parents can provide into perceptions of our schools within the community, as well as their ability to promote the ethos of each school, is invaluable to us. All community council members will be known as “community ambassadors” because this is truly how we see them. We plan for the new RSBs to be in place by September 2026 and our spring term very much formed part of our listening phase as we finalised plans after gathering feedback. We know this is a significant change, and we are still committed to maintaining an open dialogue with all our partners so that we can help address any questions or concerns. We know that change is rarely comfortable. Working in partnership with parents and local communities must be held in equal importance to our efficiency as a trust and we are confident that this reform will set us on the right path for the future. There will be many new lessons for us all on this journey, and we look forward to reporting back.