Local governance and parental engagement play an important part in linking our Board of Trustees to those local communities and providing support for our Principals on a day-to-day basis.

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

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.

Information about our APAs is available from individual academies.

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

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