Local governing body

What a local governing body is

A multi-academy trust is one legal entity, a charitable company, running several academies. Its board of trustees is accountable for all of them, and its trustees are both charity trustees and company directors. A local governing body is how many trusts keep governance at a local level, close to each school, without creating a second legal body.

The Department for Education's Academy trust governance guide defines it precisely: "A local committee is a committee of a board in a multi-academy trust (MAT) that is established as a local governing body (LGB) under the academy trust's articles of association." Trusts use different names for the same thing: local governing body, local committee, local academy committee, academy council, local governing board. The DfE's model articles call them local governing bodies, and newer DfE guidance calls them local committees.

Three consequences follow, and they are the ones former maintained-school governors most often miss.

1. An LGB has no powers of its own. A maintained school's governing body holds statutory functions in its own right. An LGB holds only what the trust board delegates to it, and the board can change that.
2. The board keeps the legal responsibility. The governance guide is explicit that although trustees can choose to delegate certain powers, they cannot give up their legal duties. A decision an LGB takes under delegation is, legally, the trust's decision.
3. Advisory is still formal. Some trusts delegate no decisions to their LGBs at all. The guidance says that even where local committees are purely advisory, "they are a full and formal part of the governance structure, as determined by the trust's articles".

Most MATs have a local tier. Whether a trust has LGBs, how many, and what they do is for the board to decide within its articles of association. A single academy trust has no LGB in this sense, because its board is the school's governing board.

What an LGB does in practice

The governance guide sets out what local committees can do, and the list is the best short description of the role:

• connect boards and their local academies and communities
• ensure board decisions are well informed by the local context
• share local information with the board
• escalate issues to the board
• provide meaningful engagement with parents and local communities

Within that, the work a trust delegates to its LGBs most often includes:

• Monitoring the school's educational performance and improvement and challenging the headteacher on standards, the curriculum, attendance and the progress of groups such as disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND.
• Safeguarding assurance, usually through a link governor who meets the designated safeguarding lead and reports to the LGB and, through it, to the trust.
• Stakeholder engagement: listening to parents, pupils, staff and the local community, and telling the board what it hears.
• Some statutory panels and procedures the board delegates, such as stages of the complaints procedure or pupil discipline reviews, where the scheme says so.
• Local decisions such as aspects of the school day, where the scheme of delegation passes them down. The governance guide notes that the board is responsible for the length and structure of the school day, and in a MAT this may be delegated to a local committee.
• Input to the headteacher's performance management, usually alongside the trust's executive leaders rather than instead of them.

What an LGB usually does not do is set the trust's strategy or the budget, appoint the headteacher alone, employ staff or set trust-wide policy. Those sit with the board or the executive in most schemes. The honest question for any new local governor is not what governors do, but what this trust's scheme says this LGB does.

The scheme of delegation

The scheme of delegation is the document that turns a local governing body from a name into a role. The governance guide says it "must set out the structure and delegated remit of the trust's members, its board and any committees (including any local committees in a MAT)", and describes what an effective one does. It should:

• include every committee of the board, including each local committee, whether decision-making or advisory, and explain the role and remit of each
• set out which governance powers the board keeps and which it delegates
• make clear where key functions such as vision, budget-setting and oversight of the senior executive leader are exercised for each academy
• explain how the governance roles relate to executive leaders such as the chief executive, regional directors and finance and HR directors, so that the LGB and the trust's executive are not both holding the same headteacher to account for the same thing
• explain when the arrangements may change, including the review timetable and any triggers for changing delegation

Many trusts publish the scheme as a matrix: each function in a row, and a column each for members, board, committees, LGB, chief executive and headteacher, marked to show who decides, who is consulted and who is informed. That format works within the trust because it answers the question a governor actually has in a meeting: is this ours to decide?

Two practical points. Delegation can be earned and varied: some trusts give a school's LGB more delegated authority when the school is performing well and less when it is not, and the scheme should say so rather than leave it to be inferred. And the scheme of delegation of governance functions is not the same as the financial scheme of delegation, which the Academy trust handbook requires the board to approve in writing and review annually. An LGB should know both, because spending decisions are where confusion about authority causes most trouble.

The scheme is only as good as the LGB's knowledge of it. A local governing body that has not read its scheme this year is likely to be either deciding things it has no authority to decide, or failing to do work the trust thinks it is doing.

Who sits on an LGB, and what they need

The trust's articles of association and the board's decisions set the membership. Typically an LGB includes appointed governors chosen for their skills, the headteacher, staff governors in some trusts, parent governors and, in church academies, governors appointed by the diocese or other religious authority.

Parent places are expected. The Academy trust handbook says all trusts should have reserved places for parents or carers in their governance structure, and that trusts with multiple academies should have at least two such places on the board or at least two on each local committee where the trust has established them. Parent governors are elected where possible; if there are no more candidates than places, the board may appoint parents to fill them. The governance guide is clear that elected parents represent the interests of the trust and all its pupils, not their own child's.

Checks apply to local governors too. The handbook requires members, trustees and committee members, including those on local committees or governing bodies, to have an enhanced DBS certificate, without a barred list check unless they are also in regulated activity.

Interests must be registered. The trust's register of business and financial interests covers local governors as well as trustees, and must be published. See our guide to conflict of interest policies for what a declaration should record.

Training is expected. The governance guide expects boards to provide induction and development for those on local committees, and says all trustees, those sitting on local committees and the governance professional should have read and follow 'The management of safeguarding' in Keeping children safe in education 2026. Local committees should also have enough financial knowledge to do their job.

Every LGB needs a chair and a clerk. The chair leads the committee and is usually the link to the trust board, and the chair's role and limits are similar to a maintained school chair's, with fewer powers. The clerk, usually provided or overseen by the trust's governance professional, keeps the LGB within its remit and makes the record.

Meetings, minutes and what must be published

LGB meetings are committee meetings of the trust, and the trust's obligations reach them. The Academy trust handbook 2026, effective from 1 October 2026, requires a trust to publish on its website, in a readily accessible format, the structure and remit of its members, board, committees and local committees or governing bodies, the full name of the chair of each, the register of interests including local governors, and "for each local governor, their attendance records at local governing body meetings over the last academic year".

It also requires the trust to make available on request for public inspection the agenda for every meeting of the trustees, local committees or governing bodies and committees, the approved minutes of each meeting, and any paper considered at each meeting. The trust may exclude material relating to a named member of staff, a named pupil, or anything the trustees are satisfied should remain confidential. Write the minutes on the assumption that a parent may ask to read them, and keep confidential items in a separate, restricted minute.

The governance guide adds that the board and trust must accurately document evidence of the board's and its committees' discussions and decisions. For an LGB, good minutes record:

• who attended, apologies and whether the meeting was quorate under the LGB's terms of reference
• declarations of interest, and how each was handled
• each decision taken under delegated authority, with the delegation it relied on
• each recommendation to the board, clearly marked as advice rather than a decision
• the challenge: the questions governors asked the headteacher, and the answers, so the minutes show the LGB holding leaders to account rather than receiving reports
• matters escalated to the board or the trust's executive, with the reason
• actions, owners and deadlines, followed up at the next meeting

Minutes are approved at the next meeting and kept according to the trust's retention schedule; our guides to minute taking and board minutes retention cover the detail. The test of an LGB's minutes is whether the trust board, an external reviewer of governance or Ofsted could see from them what the LGB decided, what it challenged and what it passed upwards.

The business done between meetings

An LGB meets perhaps six times a year. Its business does not.

Between meetings, local governors talk. The chair and the headteacher message about a parent complaint that is heading for a panel. The link governor for safeguarding texts the DSL after a visit. Governors form a view in a group chat about the headteacher's proposal to change the school day, so that the meeting that follows rubber-stamps a position agreed elsewhere. A parent governor is asked by other parents, on the playground and then by message, what the LGB is going to do about something.

Much of that is healthy: it is how volunteers who meet rarely keep up. The difficulty is that it creates a second record the trust cannot see. If a decision under delegated authority was in substance taken in a group chat, the minutes record a ratification without its reasoning. If a local governor learned of a safeguarding concern by text, the trust's record of what its governance knew, and when, sits on a personal phone. The handbook's requirement that approved minutes be available for inspection means little if the discussion that mattered never reached them, and a local governor who steps down takes those messages with them.

The practical response is partly discipline: bring anything settled informally back to the meeting with its reasoning, and never let a delegated decision be taken by message unless the scheme allows urgent action and says how it is recorded. It is also partly about where those conversations happen. ComplyChat is designed to give them a channel the trust controls, recorded on the server as they are sent, with everyone added told that the channel is on the record. A mobile number verified by SMS is the identity, which matters because local governors are volunteers who rarely have a trust email account. On paid plans the lasting record files into the trust's own Microsoft 365 once its tenant is connected, under its retention rules. It does not replace the clerk, the minutes or the scheme of delegation.

A question for the next LGB or trust board meeting: if an external reviewer asked how this LGB reached its last significant decision, would the answer be in the minutes, or in a group chat?

Official guidance and your next step

The DfE's Academy trust governance guide (section 4.3 covers committees, local committees and the scheme of delegation) and the Academy trust handbook are the primary sources; the 2026 handbook takes effect on 1 October 2026 and replaces the 2025 edition. The National Governance Association publishes practical material on local governance in trusts. Quotations here are from those documents as read on 25 September 2026.

This guide is a practical summary for multi-academy trusts in England, not legal advice. Your trust's articles of association and scheme of delegation decide what your LGB may do, and they override any general description, including this one.

Then do one thing: at the next LGB meeting, take the scheme of delegation and mark every function the LGB is responsible for. For each, find the last minute that shows the LGB doing it. Any function without one is either not being done or not being recorded.