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Governance

The governance structure of our Trust comprises Members, the Trust Board and Local Governing Boards, all of whom are committed to ensuring educational excellence every day for the children and young people in our schools.

All of the volunteers involved in the governance of our Trust play a vital role and we are extremely grateful to them for providing their time and expertise in order to support our schools and the wider running of the Trust. 

Further details are available in our Scheme of Delegation which is available here.

Trustees

Our Trust Board consists of trustees with skills and experience in a number of areas, including school and education leadership, legal experience and communications.

Trustees focus on three core functions:

  • Ensuring clarity of vision, ethos and strategic direction
  • Holding Executive Leaders to account for the educational performance of the organisation and its pupils, and the performance management of staff
  • Overseeing and ensuring financial performance.

Our trustees are:

Ian Wiggins

Chair of Trustees
Martyn Sibley

Martyn Sibley

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Donna Smith

Vice Chair of Trustees
Image of Natalie Wong

Natalie Wong

Francesca Haynes

Members

The Members are responsible for holding the Trust Board to account for the effective governance of the trust, but have minimal involvement in running the trust.

Our members are:

Ian Wiggins

Chair of Trustees

Jill Donaldson Hodges

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Tracy Lightfoot

The trust board has a number of subcommittees, including the Finance, Audit and Risk Committee, the Education and Standards Committee and the Local Governing Boards of the trust’s schools. The trust board delegates a number of its functions to these subcommittees as follows.

Education and Standards Committee

The Education and Standards Committee is responsible for monitoring and evaluating the performance of schools and the effectiveness and efficiency of the leadership and management. They hold leaders to account by reviewing and scrutinising the quality of the curriculum, attendance, behaviour, exclusion, SEND and safeguarding.

Ian Wiggins

Chair of Trustees
Martyn Sibley

Martyn Sibley

Image of Natalie Wong

Natalie Wong

Vanessa Huws-Jones

Finance, Audit and Risk Committee

The Finance, Audit and Risk Committee is responsible for providing assurance to trustees over the suitability of, and compliance with, its financial systems and operational controls. It ensures the adequacy and effectiveness of systems of internal control, risk management, informing the statement of internal control of the Trust, and agreeing a programme of internal audit work, to provide assurance to the external audit process.

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Trevor Charlton

Image of Donna Smith

Donna Smith

Vice Chair of Trustees

Francesca Haynes

Local Governing Boards

Local Governing Boards play a crucial role in both supporting and challenging their schools, in particular the Senior Leadership Team. LGBs will hold a shared vision for their school, which is clear, understood and well communicated to all stakeholders. They should understand the school’s performance data and have an accurate overview of how all pupils are achieving, as well as how different groups of pupils within the school are performing. LGBs should also have a good understanding of the barriers to learning, including attendance and behaviour issues and what the school is doing to overcome these. They will also act as the Pupil Discipline Committee for permanent exclusions and suspensions, and be involved in hearing complaints at Stage 3 of the Trust’s procedure, as part of a panel. 

 

The below graphic depicts the function of the LGBs within Excel Learning Trust and more information about each school’s LGB can be found on the individual school’s websites.

A range of governance meetings and activities take place across the academic year, and as well as the formal meetings of the Trust Board and its subcommittees, also include governor drop in events, an annual governance evening and meetings for the chairs of the LGBs. Please see the below graphic for an overview of governance interactions across the academic year.

If you are interested in getting involved in the governance of our Trust, at any level, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact central.services@elt.org.uk for further information on any opportunities we may have available.