When the Board Meets Three Times a Year

Some boards meet monthly. Some meet six times a year. Some meet three times — once a term, roughly aligned with the academic calendar.

And some meet once a year.

The structure varies. An annual general meeting plus two or three board sessions is common in certain international school models. A termly schedule is standard in many UK independent schools. The frequency is usually set by the constitution or articles of association, and changing it requires more effort than most boards are willing to invest.

Whatever the frequency, the gap between meetings is where governance actually happens. Or does not.

A board that meets three times a year has perhaps nine hours of formal governance time. Nine hours to approve the budget, review safeguarding, oversee the strategic plan, evaluate the head, approve policies, consider major expenditure, receive committee reports, and address whatever has arisen since the last meeting. The agenda is always too full. Everything is compressed. The discussions that deserve space do not get it because the discussions that demand urgency take it.

What fills the gap between meetings depends on the chair. A strong chair maintains communication with the head between meetings. Decisions that cannot wait are handled through informal channels — phone calls, emails, WhatsApp messages. Committee work continues on its own schedule. The school keeps running. Governance keeps happening. But it happens without the formality, the record, or the collective authority of the board.

This is the structural problem with low-frequency meetings. Governance migrates from the board to the chair. The chair becomes the de facto governing body between meetings, making judgement calls about what needs the board's attention and what can be handled bilaterally. Most chairs do this well. But it concentrates authority in a way that no governance framework would endorse if it were stated explicitly.

There is also a preparation problem. When meetings are infrequent, board packs tend to be large. The volume of material that needs to be covered in a single session produces documents that are comprehensive but overwhelming. Board members who receive a ninety-page pack for a meeting that happens once a term are less likely to read all of it than board members who receive twenty pages every month. The preparation burden is not distributed. It is deferred and compounded.

The question is not whether boards should meet more often. Some schools have perfectly valid reasons for the frequency they have chosen. The question is whether the governance structure between meetings is designed to hold what needs to be held — or whether it relies on the chair and the head to fill the gap informally.

Platforms like Loom address this directly. Between meetings, decisions can be taken formally through structured votes. Board members can engage with governance material on their own schedule. The chair can see engagement levels before the meeting, not after. The record is continuous, not episodic.

Because meeting frequency is a proxy for engagement, not a measure of it. A board that meets three times a year with a structure that holds governance between meetings may govern more effectively than a board that meets monthly and treats each session as a standalone event.

The question is not how often the board meets. It is what happens when it does not.