Update from the Governors (Spring Term 2018)
Date: 22nd Apr 2018 @ 3:45pm
Spring term was another busy term for the Governing Body. Having agreed a School Development Plan during the Winter term, we spent some time in our committee meetings looking in detail at the various actions and their impact. We also continued to review and approve a number of new school policies and the completion of action plans in connection with health and safety and finance procedure audits. The finance committee continued to monitor the school’s finances against the budget.
In full governing body we reviewed the constitution of the governing body and in particular the number of governors. This was prompted by the resignation of one of our governors, Dave Stewart, who left us after become an LSA at the school. Our old constitution required 18 governors which is an unnecessarily large number for a school of our size. We therefore agreed to reduce our size to 14 governors, which hopefully means we have a more focused governing body where everyone has a role and is fully engaged.
Another area we have been looking at this year is our system of Link Governors. This involves assigning individual governors to specific priority areas, such as Reading, SEND and Safeguarding. Link Governors help us build links with the school staff, encourages governors to spend time in school and ensures that the governing body as a whole has the benefit of the in-depth knowledge Link Governors will gain. During the Spring term we assigned individual governors to their areas and agreed a reporting template for governors to complete following visits to the school. The list of Link Governors can be found on the Governor page of the website: http://www.chestnutsprimary.com/page/meet-the-governors/36587
The finance committee also started work on the budget for the new financial year (which bizarrely runs April – March, rather than the school year). Although the Government’s revised National Funding Formula means that our budget won’t be hit as hard as was previously feared, our finances are still under considerable pressure. The committee looked at various options to both increase our income and reduce our expenditure with the aim of agreeing a balance budget during the Summer term.
Finally, we started the process of developing a new School Development Plan for the next two years. As I mentioned in my last blog, this is an important document which is developed between the school's leadership team and the governing body and sets out the priorities for the school going forward. We started this process by reviewing the draft self-evaluation of the strong and weak points of the school which the senior leadership team had produced. The self-evaluation will be supplemented by surveys which we are planning to carry out with parents, children and staff in the next half term. We will use all this information as the basis to agree the priorities for the new School Development Plan.
If you have any questions about the governing body then you can contact me via email at: [email protected] or leave a note with the school office who will pass it on.
Hugh Merritt (Chair of Governors)