Date updated: Monday 21st October 2024

We were delighted to hold a webinar on Wednesday 9 October 2024, during which governance professionals and governors had the opportunity to hear how colleges are enhancing their governance. The speakers drew on a range of experiences, including what we have all learned from the first full round of external governance reviews across the sector. Delegates were able to offer their own reflections, ask questions and contribute ideas.

The webinar began with a presentation from Stone King’s Head of Further Education and Joint Head of the wider Education Sector, Tom Morrison, on twelve emerging themes that Stone King have identified through conducting governance reviews at colleges. These included the need for productive discussions to produce actions and decisions; varying approaches to monitoring a college’s performance against the strategic plan and the risks to that; the importance of succession planning, including for the Vice Chair; turning a desire for greater diversity of board membership into reality; and the clear influence of governance professionals when they are well supported and empowered in their role in order to support others.

Lorna Lloyd-Williams of LTE Group, along with Stone King Consultant Dr Ron Hill, then used LTE Group as a case study, taking delegates through the Group’s governance framework and highlighting particular areas of interest from a recent external board review (EBR), conducted by Stone King.

Lorna shared how she and colleagues at LTE Group have used the review as a tool to further optimise the Group’s governance processes.  The importance of utilising meeting time to its full effect was discussed, along with optimising connectivity between the work of a Board and of its committees.  Ron highlighted that good succession planning did not just mean thinking about who is going to be the next Chair of the Board, but it involves constantly thinking about the next stage of an organisation. He also explored the importance of succession, recruitment, and diversity planning being linked and treated as such.

At the end of the session, Tom, Lorna and Ron took questions from the delegates, touching on issues such as how to optimise student governor input and the best ways for link governors to feed back to the board.

Would you like to find out more? You can watch the recorded webinar in its entirety below.