As a company limited by guarantee, and a charitable trust, our trustees are responsible for the 42 academies that make up the trust including the public funds granted by the Education Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) under our funding agreement.
OAT trustees are appointed to challenge and scrutinise the strategic direction and day to day running of the company with most company responsibilities managed by the trust board or under delegated authority to the trust board committees. Each trustee also sits on at least one the committees, allowing deep and robust scrutiny on:
- Setting the strategic direction
- Holding the leadership to account
- Upholding financial probity
Our governance structure is additionally supported by a local layer, where each academy has its own local governing body (LGB) with a chair of governors sourced and appointed by the trust in line with the OAT Articles of Association and Scheme of Delegation.
We strongly believe that excellent schools have excellent leadership and management from within, and a key component of this is governance. Being a governor is a voluntary position and we are incredibly grateful to the highly skilled group of people who commit their time and expertise to our children and academies. On joining OAT our governors receive a comprehensive induction which is just the first stage in a regular and extensive training offer, combining face-to-face bespoke events with on-demand e-learning modules and webinars. All governance business is embedded within the specialised platform GovernorHub, for easy facilitation of meetings, resource sharing and communications.
Trustees and governors are strongly supported by a central governance team and kept abreast of OAT-wide strategy, key performance indicators and sector-wide developments through briefings with the National Leadership Group, forums and a regular governance newsletter.
Our governors are important to us as it is through their strong commitment, and expert skills and knowledge that the trust is able to monitor academy improvement, review budget recommendations and manage areas such as ICT, HR and the many legal requirements.