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3 minute read
This year is a landmark one for the National Governance Association as we celebrate our twenty-year anniversary. Those twenty years span the development of the academy programme from the handful created under New Labour to the current system which serves the majority of pupils in this country. In recent years, NGA have spoken about the Mature MAT Model, with the rapid growth and well-documented challenges of the trust system’s early years increasingly replaced by a more cohesive and collaborative system. The Schools and Academies Show has evolved alongside this changing system, and we are excited to support November’s show in Birmingham once again.
At this year’s show, we are particularly proud to be discussing our latest trust policy paper – Governing in 4D. This report builds on over a decade of research and first-hand experience to reflect on the state of trust governance and make suggestions for trusts and policymakers alike. At its core is the suggestion that, like the trust system as a whole, trust governance has matured. From the diversity of models and practice in the early days of the MAT system, there is now increasing consolidation behind particular approaches which have been proven to work. The evidence is now there to justify policymakers taking a more active role in ensuring quality trust governance is present in every MAT, so no child or community is left behind.
In our experience, trust governance has four dimensions, all of which are integral:
- A local tier rooted in and empowered by the community it serves - to hold trust-wide decisions to account locally, bring community insight into trust-level decision making, and provide a visible face of governance for pupils, families and staff.
- Trust executives with specialist professional expertise who enable and deliver effective governance – the executive dimension strengthens governance when it supports the other dimensions and weakens it when it crowds out local challenge or replaces volunteer governance.
- Trustees who deliver strategic leadership while delegating intelligently - centralisation and localisation work together, combining scale, expertise and targeted support with adaptation to each school’s unique identity, challenges and community.
- Members who understand and act on their constitutional role as guardians of the trust’s charitable purpose - members are the final safeguard when governance fails, yet they are the least supported dimension.
An effective governance architecture must then bring these four dimensions together by defining remit, ensuring effective information flows, and evolving alongside the trust.
The existence of these four dimensions is not contested – they are visible in every trust – but conceptualising trust governance in this way is new and offers exciting opportunities. It emphasises the unique value offered by these different dimensions and the individuals who form them. By doing so, it makes the fundamental argument that effective trust governance relies on valuing and empowering all four dimensions, because each has a specialist contribution to make.
For example, the local tier is the closest dimension to the communities served by the trust. It is best placed to connect the trust to its communities – using stakeholder voice to enhance scrutiny; bring the local community inside trust governance as board members themselves; and adapt trust-wide approaches to the specific local context. Following a white paper which emphasised the importance of a trust’s community roots, the importance of the local tier cannot be underestimated.
The other dimensions also add their own unique value. The executives, as the only dimension made up of professionals, have a dual-faceted role. They must both enable effective volunteer governance, for example by providing appropriate data and supporting processes like volunteer recruitment, while also enhancing scrutiny by bringing the unique perspective and expertise of skilled professionals.
As the ultimately accountable body, trustees must agree the trust’s overall strategic direction and its governance arrangements. At the heart of their role is balancing centralisation and localisation by recognising the value of both scale and place and building an organisation which is capable of harnessing the benefits of both. As we have reflected over the years, nothing is more integral to the success of the trust model. The power and attractiveness of the trust system is the benefits of group-based collaboration, such as economies of scale and the sharing of expertise and capacity. But the danger of that scale is the loss of connection to the specific places served by a trust – the physical location where families and pupils encounter and experience the trust. Trustees must ultimately drive their trusts to harness the power of scale whilst ensuring the crucial connection to place is retained.
The final dimension is the Members, the guardians of community-centred governance. They must use their powers with restraint, giving the trustees the space to manage the trust’s resources and fulfil its mission, but maintaining sufficient attention to be ready to intervene if they fail in doing so. Their role is in many ways a dichotomy: on the one hand, they are by far the least involved in the trust’s routine governance, but on the other they are the final line of defence against governance failure.
As our understanding of effective trust governance grows, we are asking policymakers to ensure this is reflected in the Department’s accountability arrangements. There must still be significant room for innovation and diversity – this is how the trust model has improved over time and different contexts require different solutions. But we now know enough to define particular non-negotiables and monitor whether trusts are complying. This is necessary to ensure strong governance in every trust and to give policymakers a basis to intervene where it is not. By doing so, we can fulfill the vision of the white paper in ensuring no child or community is left behind.
At this November’s show (Thursday, 11 am at the NGA Governance Conference), our chief executive and trust chief executives will come together to discuss the report and give practical tips for how delegates can deliver it in practice. We are calling the session the “Panoptic Eye”, a term coming from the Greek word panoptēs, meaning "all-seeing". That concept is the essence of Governing in 4D, a holistic and comprehensive approach to trust governance which can capture everything of value without blind spots. We hope you can join us.
