Governance
The Local Governing Body
The Academy has a Local Governing Body (LGB) to ensure that the school has the capacity to improve and raise overall standards. Ofsted considers the governing body to be part of the leadership and management of the Academy, providing ‘a critical friend’ to the Principal and the Academy, to promote high standards of educational achievement and to ensure efficient leadership.
Governors’ duties include:
- Ensuring clarity of vision, ethos and strategic direction
- Holding the Principal to account for the educational performance of the school and its pupils, and the performance management of staff
- Overseeing the financial performance of the school to make sure its money is well spent
They also carry out a number of other important duties, which include:
- Determining how the school’s budget is spent
- The appointing and dismissing of staff
- Hearing appeals and grievances
- Forming policy on the school’s curriculum and collective worship
- Setting standards for pupils’ behaviour and discipline
- Making sure school buildings are welcoming and safe
- Setting and monitoring the school’s aims and policies
Hunnyhill Ormiston Academy Chairman of Governors.
Acting COG – Jill Wareham – Email: [email protected]
Clerk to the Governors – Tina Jarvis – Email: [email protected]
Click on the links below to access the documents:
Governance and scheme of delegation
As a company limited by guarantee, and a charitable trust, our trustees are responsible for the 44 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.