Governors and the Governing Body

1. THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS

The composition of the Board of Governors at October 2018 is set out below.

Following the reconstitution of the Board in 2015, we have 14 Governors. This allows us to bring together a strong and focused Board, with the necessary skills, experience and passion for Springfield to support the school in its expansion to the 3-form entry across all year groups. We have one new Governor this year.

Our Board meets four times a year, once as an Annual General Meeting in October and three times as normal business meetings. The AGM deals with procedural matters: review of the committee remits and their membership, agreement to financial delegations and review of our code of conduct. The business meetings focus on progressing strategic matters, including discussion of a termly report from the Head teacher. We also consider reports from Trafford such as admissions, SLAs and government guidance. Much of our day-to-day business is delegated to the individual Committees, which allows governors to discuss and analyse trends, policies, issues and developments in more detail. These are reported formally to the full Board via their minutes.

To support our work, we have an annual meeting of the Chair, Vice Chair, the Committee Chairs and Mrs Chard to discuss progress, areas for improvement and succession planning. This discussion feed into the annual Governor Action Plan, approved at the AGM. The Chair and head teacher also meet formally once a month to retain a high-level overview of developments across School and Governor Committees.

As Governors, we are actively involved in the school outside the Committees and the Board. We have a long-standing tradition of link governors, governor involvement in working parties and participation in many, if not all, school events. We also report back to the wider school community via the Monthly Mention, the School Newsletter.  

All Governors’ personal profiles are on the School website as part of the dedicated governor section.

2. CHAIR’S STATEMENT

For 2018-19, we agreed our annual Action Plan at the AGM and have used this as our tool to measure progress on governance priorities through the year. As this year saw a refresh of our Board, we agreed to carry out a skills needs analysis and 360 degree interviews with all governors. This was led by the Vice Chair and means that we have clarity on governor development needs and clear priorities in relation to succession planning and governor recruitment.

We take development and training of governors seriously, and held two whole Board training sessions on safe guarding and on Raise On-Line. The safeguarding session was delivered jointly to all staff and governors, providing us with valuable insights in direct implications for Springfield.

We also set priorities for each committee at their first meetings, reporting back on these via committee minutes to the whole Board. This has focused the work of the committees and also led us to a discussion on how we better use the Link Governor role to embed and secure continuity of knowledge within the Board. From 2017/18 we will pair Link Governors to ensure knowledge is better embedded within the Board. This new approach also reflects our emphasis on good governance.

For 2018-19, we have now agreed the following specific priorities