The Academy trust handbook 2026 took effect on 1 October 2026, and it asks every multi-academy trust (MAT) to take a clear, trust-wide approach to inclusion. For trusts supporting growing numbers of pupils with English as an additional language (EAL), that raises a practical question for boards and leaders: can you see how multilingual learners are getting on in every one of your schools?
In this article, we look at what the new handbook says, where EAL learners fit within it and how trust leaders can build a consistent, evidence-led approach to EAL across their schools.
Estimated reading time: 10 minutes
For a new trustee taking on oversight of inclusion for their trust, they need to be able to quickly build a picture of how multilingual learners are getting on.
One school in the trust might share a spreadsheet of baseline scores from September while another describes a successful intervention group but has little data to show its impact. A third has recently lost its EAL lead and isn’t sure which pupils have been assessed this year. This can make it a challenge to build a trust-wide picture of provision.
There are good reasons why this situation is so familiar. The DfE withdrew its requirement for schools to record pupils’ proficiency in English after 2018 so schools and trusts now need to build their own picture and schools and local authorities vary in how they assess proficiency. As trusts grow, these differences compound, making it harder for leaders to see where support is working and where resource should be directed.
The Department for Education (DfE) published the handbook on 15 July 2026, with the new requirements taking effect from 1 October 2026. Compliance with the handbook is a condition of every academy trust’s funding agreement.
Many of the headline changes concern executive pay, procurement and the qualifications expected of chief financial officers. Several others are directly relevant to how trusts support pupils with additional needs:
The handbook defines inclusion as making sure all pupils, particularly those with SEND, those who are disadvantaged and those known to social care, are identified early where they have additional needs, can access high-quality teaching and appropriate support and are supported to participate fully in school life. EAL learners aren’t explicitly named in that definition.
However, there are strong reasons for trusts to build them into their approach all the same. EAL learners make up 21% of the school population in England and language acquisition can be mistaken for a learning difficulty, so a trust that wants to identify SEND accurately needs a clear picture of each pupil’s English proficiency as well.
Proficiency makes a measurable difference to how pupils achieve. Research by Strand and Hessel found that proficiency in English can explain 22% of the variation in EAL pupils’ achievement, compared with the typical 3 to 4% explained by gender, free school meal status and ethnicity.
Inspection expectations point the same way. Ofsted’s state-funded schools inspection toolkit includes a dedicated section on pupils in the early stages of learning English and expects teachers to assess their English language proficiency accurately and regularly.
When a trust includes EAL in its inclusion strategy, it reflects the spirit of the handbook at board level and supports its schools with what inspectors look for in the classroom. Our article on what Ofsted’s renewed framework means for EAL learners covers this in more detail.
The handbook sets out four elements of a trust-wide approach to inclusion. Each one translates naturally to EAL provision. Veejay Lingiah’s article provides a wider view of why trusts benefit from a clear EAL strategy.
When each school uses its own assessment, a learner described as a beginner in one school may be at quite a different stage from a beginner in another, and trust leaders can’t compare like with like. A shared assessment of listening, speaking, reading and writing, reported against a common framework such as the DfE’s A to E proficiency bands, gives every school the same starting point and the same language for talking about need.
In many schools, EAL provision relies heavily on the expertise and limited capacity of individual staff. If a key member of staff leaves, or is stretched across several sites, provision can quickly stall. Trusts can spread expertise more widely by giving subject teachers the data and next steps they need, sharing CPD across schools and using trust-wide data to decide where specialist support will make the biggest difference.
Monitoring depends on data that is collected regularly and in the same way across every school. Reassessing learners at set points through the year shows whether they are progressing from their starting points, and comparable data helps leaders spot schools, year groups or cohorts where progress has slowed.
Evaluation asks whether the support in place is working. Leaders need evidence that links provision to progress, so they can build on effective practice, adjust support where needed and report to trustees with confidence. Our CEO’s blog, Can you prove EAL progress?, explores what good evidence looks like in more detail.
If you’ve been given responsibility for inclusion oversight, these questions can help you understand where your trust currently stands on EAL:
If answering these means gathering spreadsheets from each school and piecing them together, that’s a useful sign of where a more joined-up approach would help.
The handbook’s move towards integrated curriculum and financial planning means boards should be able to connect what they spend on provision with the outcomes it achieves. For EAL, that can be difficult when each school buys its own resources and measures progress in its own way.
Trusts must also record how they reach purchasing decisions. A trust-wide approach to EAL makes both expectations easier to meet, with one set of costs to review, one set of outcome data to compare and a clear record of why a particular solution was chosen.
Teacher time deserves a place in that calculation too. When assessment, marking and record-keeping take up hours of staff time across several schools, the true cost of EAL provision can be considerably higher than the budget line suggests.
FlashAcademy® supports every EAL learner’s progress from first assessment to fluency, giving every school in your trust one connected, award-winning platform to assess, learn and evidence progress.
Every school uses the same digital assessment framework. With every school reporting against the same bands, trust leaders have a consistent basis for comparison. The teacher dashboard shows progress across individuals, classes and cohorts in real time and exportable reports help each school evidence learner progress to leaders, inspectors and wider stakeholders.
AI-assisted marking saves an average of 150 hours per year while teachers remain in control of the final grade. Unlimited teacher logins mean subject teachers can support multilingual learners in their own lessons, so expertise is shared across the whole staff team. Staff can also build their confidence and CPD with a programme of free events, webinars and free resources.
FlashAcademy® connects to your schools’ MIS system via Wonde. Pupils are imported automatically without manual entry and schools control which data is shared.
The learning app offers proficiency tagged lessons for learners from new-to-English through to more advanced stages across Key Stages 1 to 4, helping every school target learning at the right level. Learners are supported across 48 home languages.
With a shared approach to assessment and data built up term by term, the trustee responsible for inclusion can feel confident and prepared. Every school can show where its multilingual learners started, how they’re progressing and where support is being adjusted, using a shared framework for comparison.
The Academy trust handbook 2026 gives trusts a timely reason to build that picture. Doing so helps boards meet their new responsibilities for inclusion while giving every EAL learner across the trust access to the curriculum.
To see how FlashAcademy® helps every school in your trust assess, learn and evidence EAL progress, explore our EAL solution for UK schools.
If you’d like to talk through how a phased rollout might work for your trust, book a discovery meeting with our team, or get your free quote by clicking the button below.
The handbook asks trusts to embed inclusion across their provision. That means consistent approaches to identifying and meeting need, effective use of expertise and resources, systems to monitor access, participation and outcomes and arrangements to evaluate impact. Trusts should also designate a trustee, or set up a committee, to support oversight of inclusion, including SEND.
The definition highlights pupils with SEND, disadvantaged pupils and those known to social care. EAL learners aren’t named explicitly. Trusts can still include them and there are good reasons to do so: English proficiency shapes how pupils access the curriculum and Ofsted expects teachers to assess it accurately and regularly.
The handbook took effect on 1 October 2026 and applies to all academy trusts in England, including single academy trusts and trusts with multiple academies. Compliance is a condition of each trust’s funding agreement. Some requirements, such as moving MIS contracts to the DfE’s new framework, follow from 2027.
Useful starting questions include whether every school assesses English proficiency in the same way, how often learners are reassessed, which schools or groups of learners are progressing more slowly and where EAL expertise sits in each school.
