Every charity, including academy trusts, has a duty to fulfil the charitable objects listed in its articles of association (as detailed in Principle 1 of the Academy Trust Governance Code).

These make sure the board is clear about its aims and how they are to be delivered. But how exactly should trustees go about ensuring that happens?

We spoke to experts from the Confederation of School Trusts and Co-op Academies Trust to find out how they do it.

The expert view:

The Co-op Academies Trust has two charitable objectives: the first is the standard object for academy trusts, which is to “advance, for the public benefit, education in the United Kingdom”, while the second is to “promote, for the benefit of the inhabitants of the areas in which the academies are situated, the provision of facilities for recreation or other leisure time occupation of individuals who have need for such facilities”.

“If you read the charitable objects, they sound very dry but I hope people can see beyond those words on the page,” says Ruth Agnew, chief governance and people officerat Co-op Academies. “It is an opportunity to make a difference for children, their families and their communities. And the discussions they get involved in as trustees really are critical and key in those areas, which make a difference to children’s life chances in the long term.”

This means, she continues, that the board is very explicitly driven by a sense of serving and supporting the communities that its schools are in, particularly around school improvement. And so the board has a “clear community plan”, including the trust’s dedicated community development team and “academy community pioneers”, who are selected from within the community to create purposeful, authentic links with the trust. And part of the board’s role, Agnew explains, is to monitor the progress of these groups.

“The board looks at various projects we’ve been involved with, around, for example, student attendance and engagement. And our community councils work with our appointed academy pioneers to feed back and make sure the trust is up to date with the success of particular projects within the different communities.”

Samira Sadeghi, director of trust governance at the Confederation of School Trusts, says she’s increasingly seeing academy trusts set up dedicated teams to focus on community work.

“This is something that’s really picking up steam across the sector,” she says. “People are realising that if you build relationships with communities, it pays back in so many ways; it makes the whole thing stronger. It’s interesting to see so many people starting to go in the same direction with community work.”

Sarah Lay is head of governance at Co-op Academies and says that the relationship to Co-op, the corporate sponsor, is also “so important” in fulfilling the charitable objects.

“Such a significant part of our identity is the values, principles and ways of being that we share with our corporate sponsor,” she says. “If you sat down with any one of our students, they would do a better job than me explaining about how they reflect those in their day-to-day lives and how those operate in their communities.

“There’s a huge history there around the provision of education for the public benefit and community development, dating back to the back to [Co-op founders] the Rochdale pioneers in the 1800s, and those values are so entrenched and so widely understood and well-articulated, not just by our staff, but by our children.”

The view from the ground:

Russell Gill, chair of the Co-op Academies Trust board, says the most important initial move for any trustee around the charitable objects is to “take a step back and think about the intent behind them”.

“First and foremost, of course, it is about ensuring that the children get a great education,” he says. “The intent, also, I believe, is around the fact that these are publicly-funded civic institutions, not private enterprises. And therefore the relationship with the community, the commitment to making a difference for the people that you serve, has to be at the absolute heart of it.”

And so, he continues, that means conversations at board level need to keep sight of that broad perspective.

“If somebody’s worried about whether or not it stops them from letting their sports hall, then they’re starting at the wrong end,” he explains. “They should be thinking about what the big picture is, which is making that difference to the kids who attend the schools and the communities we serve.

“When I first got involved in education, I was struck by how the success of faith-based schools seemed to be driven by a common ethos, and in many respects, the Co-op values and principles are like a secular equivalent. If we can have that line of sight both on what we’re trying to achieve corporately, all the way through to what’s taught in the classroom, then that contributes towards the school improvement model, as well as the governance model.”

So how does the board help encourage progress towards these perhaps big-picture aims?

“We set objectives at the start of the year, which filter through to everybody’s professional development, performance management and so on, which is really important,” says Chris Tomlinson, CEO of Co-op Academies Trust. “Those objectives are set by me and then discussed and agreed at the trust board. And obviously we track and monitor those.

“It all comes from our strategic plan. Every year we set trust-wide objectives, and then we collect loads and loads of data to see if we’re meeting them, and we feed back to trustees about the progress towards those.”

Meanwhile, Russell Gill highlights the value of getting input from those outside of the board.

“It’s the responsibility of trustees to ensure that we’re operating in line with our charitable objects, but we engage with other stakeholders within the trust, as a trust board, to tell them how we’re doing.”

That means regular updates in board meetings from those working in the community development team, for example, as well as events like a recent governor conference, where the key theme was around how the trust is focusing its attention on community.

This, he says, is “a very prominent part of the new strategic plan that is being written”, which will take the trust to 2030 with that charitable object front and centre in its mission.

But, ultimately, Tomlinson concludes, meeting the charitable objects effectively means never losing sight of the humans behind the numbers.

“That’s behind every figure that we look at, behind every report we read. You need to remember that it’s not pounds and pence, it’s children.”

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