We take seriously our accountability to the pupils and parents* served by our academies. Because of this, we have reworked our local governance model to ensure that it focuses on parental engagement.

We ask each of our academies to ensure they have in place an effective parental engagement statement and we seek feedback from all stakeholder groups to feed into our governance. In addition, each academy within GAT now recruits a number of 'Academy Parent Ambassadors (APAs)' who perform some local governance functions as detailed in our Governance Structure document.

This includes the convening of Governor Disciplinary Committees (GDCs) and complaint panels as required by our policies and statutory guidance. The constitution of these is described on page 22 of the above document.

Our APAs will be formally appointed during the course of the spring term in 2025, and information about them will be published on individual academy websites at the appropriate time.

It is worth remembering that our Board of Trustees retains full accountability for the work and performance of each of our academies, alongside our extensive executive teams.

*we consider 'parent' to include any person who has parental responsibility for or care of one of our pupils