Governance
We are a company limited by guarantee and an exempt charity. Responsibility for the schools that make up our trust and the funds granted by Parliament for providing education in our schools is entrusted to our Board of Trustees/Trust Board.
Our Trust Board is an experienced group of trustees/non-executive Directors who hold the executive to account through a process of robust challenge and support. Trustees/non-executive Directors have a variety of professional backgrounds and use this experience to ensure that we are a reflective, self-aware, and agile organisation.
Our trust's governance structure is set out in the following diagram:
Further details about the members and trustees can be found here.
Chairman of our Trust Board, Mr Paul Goodson
Our Trust's Board, of which Paul Goodson is Chairman, is responsible for the governance of our trust, for setting its strategy and objectives and for holding the executive team to account for the performance of our trust as a whole and all of our schools.
Paul is an Oxford law graduate who worked in fund management for over twenty years before becoming Chairman of a logistics company which he sold in 2016. His business and pecuniary interests can be found under Trustee Information.
Earned Autonomy
We believe that the best outcomes will be achieved when each school’s Local Governing Body receives a level of responsibility and autonomy appropriate to its specific circumstances.
As a trust, we pursue the principle of intelligent accountability by providing ‘intervention in inverse proportion towards success’. Thus, where one of our schools is in an Ofsted category, there will be close supervision of the school by Swale Academies Trust through the CEO. Where a school has shown the ability to move confidently and assuredly in terms of performance and overall standards, there is a much greater emphasis on providing a soft touch approach that allows the individual leadership of the school to creatively move forward.
This is very much in keeping with the current Ofsted framework and is driven by the principle that in order to take a school out of trouble, it is necessary to tighten up all areas of consistency. In contrast, to allow a school to become 'Outstanding', we encourage more freedom in order to embolden innovation and allow excellence to flourish.
Where one of our school's is 'Good' or 'Outstanding' and financially sound without any serious areas of concern, minimal day-to-day intervention by our trust is needed, and the Local Governing Body will operate with maximum autonomy. However, where one of our school's is 'Good' or 'Outstanding', the school will make a sizeable net contribution to our trust in terms of leadership capacity and the sharing and development of good practice. It is essential that all our schools play an active role, collaboratively and supportively, in the development of our trust as a whole.