“Many people do not fully understand the impact and importance of this position.”

Emma Balchin, chief executive of the National Governance Association (NGA), is reflecting on the fact that despite multi-academy trusts (MATs) existing for over a decade, many people outside education are unaware of the need for trustees to provide governance akin to an NHS trust or large corporation.

Nor is it widely known how extensive the role of trustee now is: yet, with MATs overseeing large budgets, being responsible for thousands of children’s education and having a large civic responsibility, this is an area where a battle for talent is very much underway.

“These days, if you want a strong board, you need people with skills and expertise in areas like finance, strategy, risk, HR and technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI),” says Claire Heald, chief executive of Cam Academy Trust and chair of trustees at Active Learning Trust.

• Tes’ new Trustee Essentials series: What does it mean to be a trustee?

Skills over location

Given this need, turning to the local community to find such people - as school governors often are - is not always feasible or indeed a requirement, says Leora Cruddas, CEO of the Confederation of School Trusts (CST).

“It is more important trustees [bring] the right expertise and experience to the table, rather than worrying that they live in a particular catchment area,” she argues.

Jenny Blunden, chief executive of Truro and Penwith Academy Trust (TPAT), which has 34 schools based across Cornwall, agrees: “If we had a board that was entirely Cornish-centric that would be a failing.”

She cites the recent appointment of Dr Anne-Marie Sim, the lead for the South-West Social Mobility Commission based at the University Exeter, as an example of this in action: “She’s out of county but she has the expertise we need.”

Matthew Shanks, CEO of Education South West, has a similar view: “We source people from across the country to be trustees based on skillset - whether local or national,” he says, noting that it recently appointed a trustee based in York.

Finding the right people

This shift to skills-based trustees is one Hayley Mintern, a partner in the education division at recruitment firm Anderson Quigley, which works to help find trustees for MATs, says she has seen, too - particularly as trusts grow.

She says: “Trusts are looking at their board more like a commercial business because many of them are operating on budgets of millions of pounds and need to be thinking at scale about HR, finance, growth and strategic development - and the central team can’t be over all that.”

This is exactly the strategy Becks Boomer-Clark, CEO of Lift Schools (formerly Academies Enterprise Trust), has adopted, with a recent skills audit used to identify gaps that need filling.

“We were clear we wanted people with experience leading large, complex, multi-site organisations and those working in the AI and digital space,” she says.

Boomer-Clark explains that skills audits are done yearly and usually lead to “two or three trustee appointments”, which she says is key to ensuring the board offers the right challenge and support - something that can be key to both day-to-day operations and strategic thinking.

For example, she says that when Lift Schools was procuring a new energy contract, a trustee from BP was “invaluable in helping us to determine the best course of action”, while the appointment of a senior leader from the NSPCC provides a “really useful sounding board” for safeguarding issues.

Similarly, Jo Coton, CEO of six-school NET Academies Trust, says bringing in a trustee with financial expertise gave the organisation insights into better ways to invest reserves to generate more returns - something she admits the trust had not thought about before.

“The challenge they put to us and the conversations it sparked had a really positive outcome,” she says.

Making connections

None of this is to say trustees should never have a local connection, of course - especially when that insight may be key to the expertise they offer.

For example, Blunden says a need to focus on the health of children across the trust meant a trustee with a connection to the main hospital in the county made perfect sense: “He provides a really interesting perspective on things we should be aware of.”

Furthermore, even if a trustee is not drawn from the local area, Boomer-Clark says it is vital trustees get to know the schools they serve so they “understand the different challenges communities are facing in different parts of the country”.

To do this at Lift Schools, each trustee is assigned a different region where schools are based and tasked with visiting them and forming relationships with the chairs of the school-based academy councils - Lift Schools’ equivalent of a maintained school’s board of governors.

Coton at NET has a similar model where there is a “link trustee” connected with each school’s governing board: “This gives them an intimate connection with the school and its challenges because all of our schools are different.”

While how trusts organise school-level governance is ultimately open to interpretation - and the terms used to define them are interchangeable - Cruddas at CST says what is key is trustees use any local governance structures to ensure they are “in touch with local concerns” to inform their work.

Heald agrees strong local governance remains important in the trust system because “there is just no way trustees can know them [schools] all well”.

Unearthing talent

However, Heald says trusts should be wary of local boards and trustees being too close - a situation under review at Cam Academy.

“We have a trust board [where] a number of trustees are chairs of local governing bodies, too. That worked up to now but may not be the right model going forward,” she says. “We know we need to diversify and add capacity to the board.”

How do you do that though?

After all, bringing in experts to offer useful advice for free is a fantastic idea but how do you find the right people and convince them to take on a time-consuming and, at times, stressful role?

It’s certainly a concern, with a 2023 CST National School Trust Survey finding that while recruitment of trustees was a top priority, 70 per cent expected it to be quite or very difficult to find people.

The NGA has found this, too, with a recent report finding approximately 30,000 vacancies across school and trust boards - something Balchin says shows why the closure of the Department for Education-funded Academy Ambassadors programme in 2022, which was designed to help MATs “recruit board members with relevant business experience”, was so “disappointing”.

“We would ask for DfE reinvestment in governance recruitment specifically,” she adds.

Without that help, though, many trusts are turning to headhunting firms to help them find trustees - something Heald says she did as chair of Active Learning.

Balchin says: “You’ve got to take the recruitment really seriously...at Active Learning we used a search company to do a proper skills audit and say ‘we need people in these areas’ and they have found some really great people.”

Volunteer days

Boomer-Clark says Lift Schools uses a similar approach - although she cautions trusts must ensure when they engage such firms that they don’t end up with a “London-centric board”.

For the firms involved in this hiring work, though, things are not straightforward, with Mintern of Anderson Quigley echoing Balchin’s earlier point that although MATs have been around for many years, awareness of the need for skilled trustees is often unknown.

She says: “If you look at other public sector organisations, such as the NHS or higher education, they have for a long time articulated the need for diversity on the boards whereas for MATs it’s still quite an unknown thing.”

Mintern says despite this - or indeed because of it - trusts should consider reaching out to large companies directly for trustees, noting many firms have corporate social responsibility initiatives that allow staff to engage in such activities.

“They often provide volunteering days and if MATs can say to businesses: ‘Governance and school trustee roles tick your volunteering days, would you promote these opportunities?’ It can be a great way to find people,” she adds.

Given an NGA report last year noted over half of governors and trustees are over 60, Andrew Thraves, associate partner at Anderson Quigley and a trustee at Lift Schools, says this can be a great way to get younger voices in the sector, too.

“We’re really struggling with people in their mid-30s to early 40s who are at that middle management level because they often have family commitments,” he says. “[But if we can use those volunteering days], we could see a shift to younger trustees.”

Heald adds, too, that this can also make it possible for people to attend meetings in person - something she says is key for effective governance and that she made a requirement at Active Learning when she became chair.

“Some of the trustees had never met each other so I was clear we had to go back to being in the same room,” she says.

She admits this change did cause one person to step down as they could not commit to the travel required, but for others, it remained possible due to time being given by employees.

Coton at NET agrees with Heald that in-person, full board meetings are preferable because it “brings that collective collaboration and relationship building to our trustees” - but she says using technology for those that can’t attend in person each time is a sensible workaround, a point also made by Blunden at TPAT.

“I think if we were insistent on everybody being there in person it would really shrink the pool of people able to participate,” Blunden adds.

Should we pay the chair?

Ensuring the best people can participate in MAT governance opens up one final, and big, question: should the chair of trustees be paid for their time?

Mintern of Anderson Quigley notes how in other public sector areas like health and higher education paying the chair is standard practice, and she believes it might have to become the norm in education, too.

“The chair role for MATs is huge and if we want a diversity of thought in governance, we may need to consider this because otherwise you are limiting [the chair role] to a certain demographic with the time to be a chair.”

It’s an issue the sector has debated before with an NGA report in 2020 surveying 98 MAT chairs and finding around a third supporting the idea of paying the chair in recognition of the time commitment it requires and boosting diversity - a point made clear by the fact 53.7 per cent of survey respondents were either semi-retired or retired.

So, will we see trusts starting to pay chairs? TPAT’s Blunden says there is “merit” in the idea given the “scale and responsibility of the role and the time, dedication and commitment needed”.

However, she no doubt echoes the view of many others when she says they could not afford to do this from existing budgets - and both Boomer-Clark and Heald say they have no plans to consider it either.

Balchin, meanwhile, says there is “little, if any, evidence to show this would make a positive impact” - and says some research has shown it can make things worse.

For now, then, it seems clear the role of a MAT trustee and chair is one that will still be done by dedicated volunteers - just like the school governor role has been for years before.

But the nature of those volunteers, how they are found and the work they are required to do is increasingly a long way from the traditional governor role.

As such, it seems trusts cannot sit still when it comes to seeking out the best people possible to sit on their boards: “We’re entering the next generation of MATs and with that needs to come the next generation of MAT governance,” says Heald.

Dan Worth is senior editor at Tes

For the latest education news and analysis delivered every weekday morning, sign up for the Tes Daily newsletter