Governance

Swale Academies Trust is a company limited by guarantee and an exempt charity. Responsibility for the schools that make up the Trust and the funds granted by Parliament for providing education in those schools is entrusted to the Board of Trustees/Trust Board.

The Trust Board is an experienced group of Trustees/non-executive Directors who hold the executive to account through a process of robust challenge and support. Trustees/non-executive Directors have a variety of professional backgrounds and use this experience to ensure that we are a reflective, self-aware, and agile organisation.

The Trust's Governance Structure is set out in the following diagram:


Further details about the Members and Trustees can be found here.

Chairman of the Trust Board, Mr Paul Goodson


The Trust's Board, of which Paul is Chairman, is responsible for the governance of the Trust, for setting its strategy and objectives and for holding the executive team to account for the performance of the Trust and its schools.

Paul is an Oxford law graduate who worked in fund management for over twenty years before becoming Chairman of a logistics company which he sold in 2016.  His business and pecuniary interests can be found under Trustee Information.

Earned Autonomy

The Trust believes that the best outcomes will be achieved when each school’s Local Governing Body receives a level of responsibility and autonomy appropriate to its specific circumstances.

As a Trust we pursue the principle of intelligent accountability by providing ‘intervention in inverse proportion towards success’. Thus, where the school is in an Ofsted category, there will be close supervision of the school by Swale Academies Trust through the CEO. Where a school has shown the ability to move confidently and assuredly in terms of performance and overall standards there is a much greater emphasis on providing a soft touch approach that allows the individual leadership of the school to creatively move forward and innovate in a way that will further the overall provision and capacity of the Trust. This is very much in keeping with the current Ofsted framework and is driven by the principle that in order to take a school out of trouble, it is necessary to tighten up all areas of consistency, in contrast, to allow a school to become outstanding one has to let go a little more to allow innovation and excellence to flourish.

Where a school is Good or Outstanding and financially sound without any serious areas of concern, minimal day-to-day intervention by Swale Academies Trust is needed, and the Local Governing Body will operate with maximum autonomy. However, where the school is Good or Outstanding, the school will make a sizeable net contribution to the Trust in terms of leadership capacity and the sharing and development of good practice. It is essential that all Trust schools play an active role in the development of the Trust in a collegiate and supportive manner.