How E-ACT built governance at scale through a period of rapid growth

Hear how Emma Myers, Head of Governance at E-ACT, is using Robin to build consistency and real-time oversight across a fast-growing national trust.

She talks to us about scaling governance from 28 schools to 37, moving on from manual checks for good, and why compliance is only ever the starting point.

Can you tell me a bit about your trust and your role?

We're E-ACT, a national multi-academy trust of 37 schools serving around 25,000 young people across the country. We're one of the most established trusts in the sector, working with a diverse range of communities, and serving some of the most disadvantaged young people is a real focus of our work.

I joined E-ACT in February 2025 as Head of Governance, so I'm just over a year in. My role covers overall responsibility for governance and overseeing compliance across the trust: robust oversight, enabling effective decision-making, and making sure we adhere to regulatory and statutory requirements.

What are your biggest challenges at the moment?

I don't love the word "challenge", so I'll talk about our greatest opportunity instead. As a large national trust, one of my key focuses right now is governance at scale: keeping consistency and high standards across 37 schools, while still leaving room for flexibility and innovation.

When we started using Robin, we'd just gone from 28 to 38 schools, a big jump in numbers. That gives us the opportunity to look at where we can streamline processes, use our scale to share best practice, and keep enhancing the impact of governance across the trust.

What was happening with website compliance and policy checks before Robin, and what made you look for a different approach?

It was very manual, I'm sure like everyone's is. We had a central services team, a headteacher, and a person responsible for the website in each school, and it was a very manual process between all of them to check what was actually on our websites. It was time-consuming, and hard to keep pace with changing statutory requirements.

As our trust grew, particularly with the addition of 10 new schools, we recognised we needed something more scalable and efficient if we wanted to keep growing. We needed something that would take the pain out of manual checking, give us stronger central oversight, and still let schools maintain compliance locally. Robin gives us a streamlined, proactive way to do that.

I first heard about Robin before I joined E-ACT, at a GovernorHub conference in Birmingham. I remember jumping up and down in my seat. "This is amazing! Why has no one done this sooner?"

How are you using Robin across your trust (centrally and with schools)?

Centrally, I use it for real-time oversight of compliance. When our audits land, I look at them to monitor trends, identify trust-wide risks, and share best practice. If a school's struggling, I can point them straight to another school that's doing it well.

At academy level, it's more about targeted insight and reassurance. Schools look at their own individual records, and because the guidance is so clear on what they're missing, they can usually fix gaps really quickly.

Robin has shifted how we think about our website: not just as a compliance tool, but as an accessibility one too. If an AI tool can't find something, how's a parent supposed to?

It's also made keeping policies up to date far simpler. When we update something like our safeguarding and child protection policy, schools sometimes add the new version but forget an old link is still live elsewhere. Robin picks that up, so we can go straight in and say: you've got two versions, remove one.

All our heads, website staff, education directors and the whole governance team have access, so it's a genuinely multi-strand approach across the trust.

What has internal feedback been like? Do you use the trust overviews/ dashboards?

We were really clear from the start about how we positioned it. Before we launched Robin, we told all our heads: this is a tool to help you have the best website in the easiest way possible, it's not a stick to beat you with.

We do use it to inform the risk register, but it's not a hold-people-to-account tool, it's an enabling one. There was a bit of hesitancy at first, because most trusts think their compliance is better than it actually is, so the first set of results was a bit of an awakening. We got the whole team on a Team's call to talk through how to use Robin and where to find information, and Robin joined one session to walk everyone through the functionality.

Now, schools often check their Robin audit before I even get to it. I'll open it up and the emails are already coming in: "Emma, we've checked ours, it's fixed, just letting you know." The feedback's been genuinely positive, and it's made life easier. It's real assurance instead of an internal DfE checklist and picking things off one by one.

What were you hoping Robin would achieve, and what impact has it had across your trust?

We wanted to make website compliance manageable and sustainable, something that would keep working as we grow. If we onboard another 10 schools, we need to be able to bring them into our systems easily.

The bigger, slightly unintended impact has been a shift in understanding. Leaders are far more confident with statutory requirements now, and they think more critically about the content and presentation of their websites, accessibility included. I've had conversations with heads who'll say, "But it is there, if you click here, here, here, here, here," and I'll ask, "Would we want to present that to a parent?" That's fed into a wider piece of work on making our websites the best shop front they can be for our academies.

It's embedded consistency, informed practice, and a genuinely proactive culture across all our academies. It's been brilliant, really has.

If a trust leader asked, “Should we use Robin?” What would you say?

Absolutely, 110%. When we went through procurement, we needed three quotes, and there was nothing else to compare it to.

It's not just about how effective the tool is, it's how simple it is to use, and the fact that it's backed by a knowledgeable, accessible, supportive team. Anything we've needed, we just reach out, Robin’s jumped on calls with us, and we always get a response that actually helps. The product's evolving too, so it's only going to deliver more value as we go. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone looking to strengthen their compliance.

Is E-ACT still growing? What do you do in governance to support trust growth?

Governance is part of it from the get-go. When we're thinking about risk appetite and our appetite for growth, and looking at due diligence, we're reflecting on lessons learned from previous onboarding: what could we do differently, what could we do better.

We've thought more about how consistent approaches, like Robin, help us onboard a new school leadership team, or bring local governors into our governance structure. We're involved throughout the process, always asking: this works for 37 schools, will it work for 50? If it won't, it's not right for now or the future.

Growth is part of our wider strategy too. It's not just about our influence on the children and communities we serve, it's our influence on the sector. The bigger we are, the greater that influence, and if the system thrives, everybody in it thrives.

Finally, what excites you most about the future of trust governance?

This is the one I really thought about. For me, it's governance at scale, and we're already seeing this shift across the sector: compliance is a starting point, not an end goal. Governance at scale is a chance for governance to be more than oversight, to actually be a driver of improvement.

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