The schools White Paper, unveiled last week, offers a vision of a more inclusive, community-driven school system that delivers for every child.

It’s an ambition everyone in education can get behind - including school governors and trustees, of which there are around 230,000 in schools across the country, and who play a crucial role in helping ensure schools are anchors in their communities and that pupils’ interests are at the heart of decision making.

As such, it is vital that policymakers listen to the governance community directly and recognise their role in delivering these changes so that all pupils achieve the best outcomes possible.

Empowering local governance

The White Paper’s emphasis on schools as community anchors recognises a truth governors and trustees know well: education thrives when it is rooted in place, partnership and trust.

The move towards a universal multi-academy trust system without coercion acknowledges the benefits of scale and formal collaboration alongside the need for geographical coherence and meaningful local links.

This is a chance to focus on beneficiaries rather than structures and league tables. Governance can help make that promise real. We therefore welcome the commitment to consult on requiring local governance in all MATs.

But a requirement alone is not a silver bullet: to drive culture change and ensure schools and trusts are truly answerable to the communities they serve, local or school-level governance must be valued, have genuine agency, clear delegation and the confidence to challenge constructively.

Turning ambition into reality

Many White Paper proposals reflect longstanding calls from the National Governance Association (NGA) and the governance community.

Most notable is the significant reform of special educational needs and disabilities through earlier intervention, greater mainstream investment, strengthened professional capacity and renewed parent‑school relationships.

Yet for families whose children currently rely on education, health and care plans, reform brings understandable anxiety.

Parents and carers have waited too long and fought too hard to be left uncertain again. Government must move quickly to provide clarity and reassurance, engaging meaningfully with families and ensuring reforms deliver simpler processes and funding that meet children’s actual needs.

Proposals on complaints, behaviour, workforce and disadvantage also align closely with boards’ core responsibilities for culture, accountability, sustainability and equity. A clearer complaints process could help to restore trust and refocus governing boards on strategic oversight.

There is also a renewed attention to behaviour that supports safe, inclusive environments, and workforce plans that speak directly to long‑standing concerns about resilience and stewardship.

The direction of travel is welcome, but the White Paper stops short of setting out what will make these ambitions achievable in practice.

Boards know better than most that vision alone does not deliver change. Without clarity on roles, genuine delegation, capacity, prioritisation and funding, aspiration remains just that. This is now the challenge facing government, and it is one where governance insight can play a crucial role.

Recognising governance as strategic leadership

Our recent report, The Case for Governance, reframes governance as a leadership function that unlocks the crucial capacities schools, trusts and government alike need if they are to deliver lasting change for the better.

This means boards holding their long‑term vision steady, resisting operational drift and creating strategic clarity.

As research by the NGA and the National Foundation for Educational Research shows, this stability allows improvement to take root. Delivering a bold vision depends on sticking to it, avoiding disruptive policy churn and reducing the unsustainable workload pressures that constant change places on school and trust staff.

Our report also details how governance enables responsiveness, answerability and stewardship - the conditions that turn vision into impact.

Good governance brings diverse insights, judgement and lived understanding, helping schools and trusts adapt more intelligently to change while managing risk and prioritising reforms sustainably.

Importantly, school or local level boards create structured routes for community voices to shape better decisions, connecting schools to the people they serve and strengthening legitimacy and trust.

Through stewardship, governance provides clarity of direction while ensuring public resources are used responsibly and ethically.

This helps to ensure that any changes or priority areas are properly funded, and that benchmarking is considered in the context of managing public resources, avoiding a “race to the top” that is not compatible with public sector ethos or intentions.

The message is clear: to deliver the White Paper’s ambitions, the government must listen, adapt and invest - working with the profession, not at its expense.

Crucially, system change depends on the governance community: support us, learn from us and work with us. Boards hold both the vision and accountability for every child’s educational experience - without their engagement, true systemic change is not possible.

Emma Balchin is the chief executive of the National Governance Association

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