MAT inspection policy paper | National Governance Association

Multi academy trust (MAT) inspection is on its way, with the legislation in place and national policy direction laid out. What is not settled are the key details which will determine whether it works: what inspection should look at, how it should reach a judgement, who those judgements are for, and whether the inspectorate has the capacity and credibility to deliver.

This paper builds on a fundamental NGA position: we support the introduction of proportionate MAT inspection, but it must be designed as a genuinely trust-level framework and not simply manifest as an extension of school inspection.

This policy paper explores:

what inspection must achieve
what inspection should look at
what good evaluation looks like in practice
what happens after inspection

Recommendations

NGA asks government and the inspectorate to:

1. Build inspection around the trust dividend - the value a trust adds across its schools over time.

2. Evaluate the distinct dimensions of governance and leadership, the trust board, the executive, the local tier and the members.

3. Use school-level evidence contextually, with clear and transparent protocols showing how school findings inform, but do not dictate, trust-level judgements, and how conflicts between the two levels are resolved.

4. Design out the disincentive to take on struggling schools by recognising improvement trajectories and context, including deprivation, SEND and starting points, rather than raw performance, and by making that weighting explicit.

5. Build specialist capacity through sustained training and the deliberate, transparent recruitment of inspectors with direct experience of trust governance and leadership, deployed in balanced teams.

6. Keep it proportionate, minimising duplication and workload, resisting demands for manufactured evidence, and ensuring the benefit to pupils justifies the burden created.

7. Pilot before full implementation across a representative range of trusts by size, phase, geography and model, to test the methodology and surface unintended consequences, and publish the findings.

8. Establish clear, proportionate post-inspection pathways, with improvement support before structural change, a targeted governance review where governance is the root issue, regional context taken into account, and full integration with the Department’s accountability and intervention architecture.