Induction must match the weight of school governance

Andrew Johnson CFInstD estimates it takes up to two years for a new trustee to understand the school they govern. Trustees, however, don’t get two years’ grace.

Governance responsibility begins from the first meeting – including for public money, staff and student safety – and some trustees arrive with a deep connection to their school but little understanding of the role.

Johnson, founder and Managing Director of technology investment company LondonGreen, joined the Waikato Anglican College Trust board in 2011 and has chaired it since 2018.

Speaking at an IoD Public Sector Governance Shared Interest Group webinar, he said new trustees need to understand a school’s history as well as its operations, including legacy financial and organisational debt.

Facilitator Judene Edgar MNZM, CMInstD, Principal Governance Adviser with the IoD’s Governance Leadership Centre, said trustees are governing from the moment they join a board.

Meredith Kennett CMInstD has more than 30 years’ governance experience, including service on two school boards, and recently completed a 16-month term as President of the New Zealand School Boards Association.

She said she had seen people stand for election to change a particular issue, oppose someone or gain an advantage for their own child. “They very quickly discover that’s not the role.”

New trustees need to understand where authority is exercised: decisions belong to the board collectively and no individual trustee can act on its behalf.  

Kennett recalled people approaching her in supermarkets with complaints; knowing the complaints procedure meant she could redirect them quickly.

Speakers at the webinar (left to right): Andrew Johnson CFInstD, Meredith Kennett CMInstD, Judene Edgar MNZM, CMInstD, Denise Johnson

Johnson takes a similar approach, asking whether people raising issues are speaking to him as a friend, a parent or the board chair.  

“Let’s be really clear about what hat I’m actually wearing,” he said.

The board’s relationship with the principal needs particular care. The principal is the school’s chief executive, a board member and the board’s main source of information. Trustees can mistake that access for licence to become involved in daily decisions.

Denise Johnson, Principal of Hutt Valley High School, holds governance and regional leadership roles through the Wellington Loop and Awhi Attendance Services Team. She said the board chair is the most important person in her working life.

“If I have a strong chair who knows what governance is, knows how to run a board meeting, is really clear about roles and responsibilities and will hold people accountable, we have a really smooth-sailing ship,” she said.

Without that discipline, trustees can stray into operational matters and meetings can stretch to four hours after a full school day.

Denise Johnson said she welcomes her board questioning what she tells them and gives an honest account of how decisions affect achievement and wellbeing.

Trustees need enough knowledge to spot gaps in the information. At his school, Andrew Johnson said the board gives little weight to overall pass rates, which he calls potential “vanity marks”.

A student who arrives well behind and completes NCEA Levels 1–3 represents as valuable an outcome as a well-supported student who gains a scholarship. An “unexplained absence” can mean a family taking a child on a holiday and missing key learning, or a student travelling to a university open day our of region or abroad.

Denise Johnson presents academic, attendance, wellbeing and attitude-to-learning data together, so one figure does not stand alone.

At the private school where Andrew Johnson chairs the trust board, trustees receive the raw results of an annual culture survey alongside management’s interpretation. They can examine the responses themselves and track changes over time.

“There’s no hiding from the data,” he said.

Health and safety requires close scrutiny without drawing trustees into administration. Andrew Johnson looks for evidence staff feel able to say no – a check against groupthink and the assumption something must proceed simply because it was planned.

At Hutt Valley High School, a proposal for a student trip to Chile said students would be billeted but did not specify they would be placed in pairs. A trustee spotted the gap.

“To me, that’s the board’s job – to check the rigour of what we’re doing,” Denise Johnson said.

Kennett said induction should also prepare trustees for public accountability, alongside boardroom responsibility. She warned boards that put as little as possible in their public minutes can fuel suspicion: “What that creates is a culture of, why are they hiding stuff from us.”

She pointed to the value of trustees being visible at events such as community barbecues instead of appearing only at prizegiving.

Kennett said trustee development must continue after induction. She recommended mentoring, further training and election arrangements that avoid replacing an entire board at once, even though boards can be reluctant to spend operational funding on their own development.

“If you want the school run properly, then you’ve got to be doing your job properly as a board,” she said.

She also urged boards to review their own performance rather than simply carry on as the previous board did.

“One of the traps that schools fall into is they just do what the last board did,” Kennett said. “If that has never been correct, then you’re just going to continue a poor-performing cycle.”