School & Trust Clerking Services

If you have noticed the job title shifting, you are not imagining it.

The Department for Education published separate governance guides for maintained schools and academy trusts in March 2024, replacing the previous Governance Handbook. The maintained schools guide refers to the governance professional, also known as the clerk. The academy version has moved to the term governance professional throughout.

The change is not cosmetic. It reflects a view of the role that has been developing for years, from note-taker and diary manager to independent professional adviser to the board. A governance professional is expected to advise on legal and regulatory compliance, not simply record what was decided.

We think that is the right direction, and it is the standard we work to. If your current arrangement is essentially minute-taking, you are paying for a fraction of what the role can offer.

Yes, in both sectors, though the route differs.

Maintained school governing boards must appoint a governance professional, or clerk, under the School Governance (Roles, Procedures and Allowances) (England) Regulations 2013. That person must not be a governor or the headteacher.

Academy trusts must appoint a governance professional to support the board of trustees, and the Academy Trust Handbook is explicit that this must be someone other than a trustee, the principal, or the chief executive of the trust.

The reasoning behind both requirements is the same. The board needs advice from someone independent of the executive. A clerk who reports to the person whose performance the board is scrutinising cannot give that advice freely.

Governance failures are rarely caused by bad intentions. They are usually caused by process. A decision taken without the right delegation. A conflict of interest that was declared but never recorded. A meeting that went ahead without quoracy. A policy that lapsed because nobody was tracking the review date.

Every one of those is preventable, and every one of them is prevented by the same thing. Someone whose job it is to know.

We often see boards where the chair has quietly absorbed the clerking role because the arrangement was not working. It is understandable, and it is a false economy. A chair spending their evenings formatting agendas is not spending them thinking about the strategic questions only the board can answer.

Trust governance has more layers than maintained school governance, and that is where inconsistency creeps in.

A trust board may be clerked well while its local governing bodies are clerked by whoever was available. Minutes vary in quality. Delegation is understood differently in different schools. The board receives assurance from local level that it cannot quite rely on.

We clerk trust boards, committees, and local governing bodies to the same standard, using consistent templates and a shared understanding of your scheme of delegation. That consistency is what turns local governance from a collection of meetings into something the trust board can actually use.

We also clerk panels, including complaints panels, appeals, and exclusion review meetings, where an experienced and genuinely independent clerk protects the fairness of the process and the school’s position afterwards.

The direction of travel across the sector is towards greater accountability at board level, not less.

Trust-level inspection has been placed on a statutory footing, with the Department for Education indicating that it will focus on leadership, governance, and impact. The framework is still being developed and inspections are not expected to begin before the 2027 to 2028 academic year, but the emphasis is clear enough to plan around.

When governance is examined, the evidence is largely documentary. Minutes, agendas, registers, terms of reference, and the record of challenge. A board that has been well clerked for three years can demonstrate its work without doing anything special. A board that has not will find the gaps at precisely the wrong moment.

This is not a reason to panic, and we would not frame it as one. It is a good reason to make sure the machinery of your governance is in capable hands.

A clerk, or governance professional, prepares and circulates agendas and papers, records accurate minutes, tracks actions, maintains governance records and registers, advises the board on procedure and statutory duties, and keeps the annual cycle of governance business on schedule. The advisory part of the role is the part most often underused.

Yes. Maintained school governing boards must appoint a governance professional under the School Governance (Roles, Procedures and Allowances) (England) Regulations 2013. Academy trusts must appoint a governance professional to support the board of trustees under the Academy Trust Handbook.

No. In a maintained school the governance professional must not be a governor or the headteacher. In a trust, they must not be a trustee, the principal, or the chief executive. The restriction exists to protect the board’s access to independent advice.

The board, not the headteacher or the chief executive. That distinction matters most on the rare occasions when it is tested, which is precisely why it needs to be clear from the start rather than negotiated in the moment.

A great deal. Chasing actions, drafting the next agenda with the chair, maintaining registers, monitoring terms of office and vacancies, updating published governance information, keeping the statutory schedule moving, and answering procedural questions as they arise. Boards that only pay for meeting attendance tend to find the between-meetings work lands on the chair.

There is no single mandatory qualification, though the Department for Education signposts the Chartered Governance Institute’s competency framework for governance professionals following the withdrawal of its own clerking competency framework in March 2024. What matters in practice is current knowledge of the relevant governance guide, familiarity with your type of setting, and ongoing training.

Our standard is a draft to the chair within a short and agreed window after the meeting, while the discussion is fresh and actions can still be acted on. Minutes that arrive a fortnight before the next meeting have already lost most of their usefulness.

Yes, and we would usually encourage it. Consistency across levels is what allows a trust board to rely on the assurance it receives from local governance. Mixed arrangements tend to produce mixed quality.

Yes. These meetings benefit particularly from an experienced, independent clerk, because the quality of the record and the fairness of the procedure both matter a great deal if a decision is later challenged.

Yes. Emergency and interim cover is one of the most common reasons boards contact us. We would far rather step in for one meeting than watch a board postpone and fall behind its statutory schedule.

It depends on the number of meetings, the committee and local governing body structure, and how much between-meetings support you want. We agree a clear arrangement in writing before starting, so there are no surprises and your board knows exactly what it is receiving.