In addition to forming a Trust, our partnership of five schools formed a Hard Federation with a single governing body across the schools.  If we were to consolidate our vision of an all-age school we needed to have governance which provided consistency, shared policies and procedures and, most important, a common vision across the partnership.  Decision making about spending, staffing structures, priorities for development, services and many other areas had to be the focus of a single governing body.

However, this meant that we were to reduce five governing bodies into one, leaving a lot of committed supporters of our school without a role.  It also meant that we had a group of governors who had a grasp of the big picture of the Trust and its future but were remote from the day to day life of each individual school.

We dealt with these issues by creating a new body – the School Advisory Group (SAG).  Each school now has a group (sub-committee) of governors, with significant delegated powers, to get close to the work of the school, to make a direct contribution to each school’s life, aspirations and development.  Ex-governors and other members of the community with something to offer were co-opted onto the SAGs.  Free from the constraints of the interminable termly governors’ meeting agenda, SAGs meet to discuss day to day school events, find ways of helping each school, hear presentations from pupils and staff, roll their sleeves up and get into the schools during the working day to find out what’s happening, lend a hand and offer encouragement.

There is another layer of governance between the full Governing Body and the SAGs.  Two groups, Quality and Strategy, incisively evaluate the work across the partnership and set its direction.  Trust wide, these groups are the real powerhouse behind the innovation this partnership has achieved.  It’s as a result of their ideas and challenge that the Trust now has its own Masters degree for staff and governors in conjunction with Northumbria University, new leadership structures, services run by the Trust itself instead of Local Authority Service Level Agreements and, as a result of increased purchasing power, six figure savings on the overall budget.