Governance Scenario
Standard 6.1 · Leadership Capacity Building
The Board That Wanted to Help
By Synnovate · Published 2026 · Governance Scenario
The Situation
The board had recruited well. Among its twelve trustees were a former finance director, two experienced HR professionals, a marketing specialist, and a lawyer with education sector experience. The chair had been deliberate about this - she wanted a board that could actively contribute to the school's development, not just provide oversight.
By the second year, the head was spending a significant proportion of her time fielding requests from individual trustees who wanted to help. The HR trustees had suggestions about the performance management process. The marketing specialist had opinions about the school's communications. The finance director wanted more detailed access to management accounts.
The head described it at a coaching session as being managed by the people she was meant to be leading.
Provocations
- "A board recruited for its skills and deployed as a management resource is no longer a board."
- "When trustees use their expertise to advise the head individually, they are acting as consultants, not governors."
- "A head who spends time managing trustee contributions cannot focus on leading the school. Both the governance and the management are poorer for it."
- "Wanting to help is not the same as helping. Sometimes the most supportive thing a skilled trustee can do is govern, not consult."
Considerations
Boards with significant professional expertise face a governance challenge that boards with more limited expertise do not: the temptation to deploy that expertise operationally. When a trustee with HR experience sits on a board where staff management decisions are being made, they have opinions. This is natural. It is also a governance problem when it becomes the primary mode of trustee engagement.
The distinction between governance and management is not about knowledge - it is about authority and accountability. Trustees govern; the head manages. When trustees use their expertise to advise on operational decisions, they are exercising influence without formal authority. They are also making the head's job harder: she must now manage upward, explaining and defending operational decisions to people who have views about how they should be made.
The board's committee structure is the appropriate channel for trustee expertise. The finance director's interest in management accounts is legitimate as a member of the finance committee, where it is channelled through a governance structure with clear terms of reference. Individual advisory relationships, where trustees work directly with operational staff or the head outside committee structures, are a different matter.
The chair in this scenario has recruited a capable board. The missing piece is a clear framework for how trustee expertise is channelled - when it is in scope as a governance contribution and when it tips into management. This conversation is easier to have before it becomes a problem.
Platforms like Loom support this by providing a structured governance environment where trustees engage with the school through defined channels - committees, board papers, governance decisions - rather than through informal direct access to operations.