During my childhood days I would occasionally leave the safety of South London and head to Dartford in Kent.
During the late 90s there was “Britain’s answer to Disneyland” – a swimming baths known as Fantaseas.
Let me be your Fantaseas
You could use one of several flumes or slides to enter the main pool. Some would do so almost by accident – having meant to enjoy the lazy river and floated on into another area.
There were those who used the “Bermuda Triangle” to get swiftly to their destination and others who ran in when they heard the siren for the wave machine.
However they got there, the truth is that everyone was doing the same thing (swimming) and it didn’t really matter how they arrived. They weren’t treated into homogenous groups based on the point of entry.
Enough childhood reminiscing – what does this have to do with the clickbait title of the article? You are probably asking where the inevitable bait and switch is coming in.
Repeated effectiveness reviews and research pieces into charity boards emphasise the importance of a cohesive team approach to their work. The excellent Cardiff Metropolitan research into a “stewardship” approach discussed this in a students’ union board context.
High performing boards do whatever they can to reduce barriers amongst their trustees, governors or directors. A mindset that says “group x will want to improve their CV” or “group y are here because they get finance” is bound to reinforce boundaries and minimise performance.
Step back in time
The creation of trustee boards with different entry points is about 20 years old. Before then the only trustees of students’ unions were the elected executive committee – appointed to fight for better library opening hours and then spending their time analysing risk registers with no training on how to do so.
The best inclusion of non-students and students without a representative mandate to join officers was based on the idea of having a more focused trustee board with a breadth of beneficiary voice and non-student perspectives to build strength.
Any disruptive change brings concerns and opposition. This was something new that broke decades long moulds. In particular, people were wary of non-students on these bodies.
The adjective “external” was added to suggest a difference and a distance either to those who thought there was an army of people waiting to volunteer their time to take students’ unions down from the inside, or to university officials who wanted to see some “independence”.
But suggesting that someone with the same legal and moral duties, the same charitable aims and engaging in the same activities of CEO appraisal or safeguarding as officers are in some way “external” is a fiction.
The label was useful 2 decades ago to explain the new model but misleading now. Many unions thankfully use “lay” instead.
Jump around
The problem with these artificial distinctions goes deeper than labels – it shapes how different trustees approach their role.
Research into governance effectiveness suggests that boards often fall into predictable patterns – with lay trustees gravitating toward fiduciary oversight like checking compliance, and reviewing budgets.
This inadvertent specialisation weakens the board as a whole, creating silos that mirror the very divisions we’re trying to overcome.
What high-performing boards recognise is that all trustees – regardless of how they arrived – need to engage in “generative thinking.” This means moving beyond asking “what’s wrong?” or “what’s the plan?” to exploring deeper questions like “what does declining election turnout reveal about student relationships with democracy?” or “if we were founding this organisation today, would it look like what we have?”
These aren’t questions that can be answered by one subset of trustees while others focus on spreadsheets – they require the full board’s collective intelligence.
25 years and my life is still
That there are different points of entry on to the board (election / appointment) shouldn’t define trustees once they’re on the body.
As individuals they’ll have particular development needs and desires, but it’s clearly a nonsense that these can be split into 3 distinct groups.
City St George SU appointed a student trustee a few years ago with 25 years experience working in finance for a shipping company. A London SU I know elected a young trustee with 3 years board experience.
We’d be rightly outraged if a university thought all students were the same – we can’t make the same mistake with student, or lay, trustees.
As we enter induction season and boards shift as part of the annual cosmic dance we should be:
- Building social capital amongst all trustees rather than within a subset of them
- Sharing values and goals and getting to know each other
- Working out group strengths and mitigating weaknesses
- Doing training based on an individual’s need not on the label we’ve assigned them in a constitution.
A strong team needs a strong perspective – we’re failing if we only look to a third of our boards for advice and guidance rather than nurturing them as a whole.
Nothing in the last few years has diminished my belief that we need the perspectives of students, non-students and officers.
Let’s not drop the model – but let’s drop the labels and a mindset that can hold us back.
