We all like an opportunity to start anew. There’s something cathartic about getting a new pencil case for the beginning of the academic year, writing a list of ins and outs and a few new year’s resolution posts.
While these may focus on an object or activity, what they represent is a change in behaviour and approach. The new notebook that changes everything will be neat and immaculately journaled. My 5km runs each morning represent a desire for cleaner living and fewer late night Netflix binges – I’m not that sort of person anymore.
But just as much as we like new starts, we also like easy wins.
In governance terms, the “new notebook that changes everything” is the tweak to a committee structure which means we’ll now be effective after never being quite right. However, we should probably be looking at the behaviours or culture of the committee first of all.
Work like the hierarchy of governance from Hudson & Ashworth has been telling us this for years. Our starting point to solving problems should be understanding them which means revelation over quick resolution.
A new opportunity
I was pleased that the updated 2025 charity governance code gives a much higher prominence to behaviours when reviewing trustee practice. Each of the seven areas asks the board to consider not only what they should be doing and how this could be evidenced but what behaviours the board displays in relation to their work.
This is important for value led organisations in general and, in my view, students’ unions in particular.
Much of our governance is based on the idea of giving people a voice because of their lived experience as well as particular areas of skills. Lots of what we do in SUs would not be considered “best practice” elsewhere (electing trustees and paying some of them, delegating large areas of responsibility to inexperienced volunteers, choosing to publicly criticise our major funder) but are appropriate for a SU context with a little consideration.
Our boards are geared around being teams of shared knowledge rather than “superstars” who hold a particular area of work on behalf of others. The work on stewardship from Taylor, Law & Farrell is a great example of this.
There are challenges though and my experience is that the reason most disputes occur on any board, but especially SUs, is that this interaction between values or behaviours and what this means in practice has not been properly discussed and so conflict occurs.
Poor governance is bound to follow any organisation that relies solely on process and rules rather than the people interpreting them and the culture of the team they apply to.
Putting it into practice
One of the recommendations from the 2025 code is that trustees have a set of clearly defined values and an agreement. In this resource, I’ve pulled together these but also added in areas for SU spin. In some areas these are well established requirements that apply to us and not other charities – like the legal requirements to be. For other sections I’ve tried to note out loud areas that may apply more often to SUs than others – like having multiple roles in an organisation.
This resource is free for SU trustee boards to use as they start to apply the new governance code to their practice. Ideally they would discuss if any areas do not apply to them or if there are areas missing that they think their strategy, values or risk assessments would require them to add.
One thing they shouldn’t do is take it as “off the peg” – like the new notebook it solves no problems on its own. They will need to talk through what are the areas of potential conflicts and what that means for them. How should a student trustee be an ambassador for the SU’s work while not representing students which is an officer role? How do you discuss risks of campaigning action against your major funder? Different boards will have different views on what each behaviour means in practice and perhaps if some are relevant to them at all.
A shared set of values, discussed annually and considered practically, will help reduce conflicts on the board and allow all trustees to get on with improving students’ education.
Better to have one
Something I also strongly recommend is a mechanism for trustees to discuss when one of the trustees doesn’t meet the expected behaviours.
If a sabbatical officer is concentrating on their faculty rather than the general student body when helping set the budget, how is it dealt with? If a lay trustee never attends development sessions and is behind the curve for board conversations, who confronts this?
In the same way that we agree the process for conflict resolution for officer teams before they start (and before they need it) we should do the same for trustee boards, even if that’s as simple as saying the chair or vice-chair will have a conversation first and it can be escalated from that point.
As trustee boards use their six month away day to assess their work, make sure there’s at least some time on behaviours rather than the equivalent of a new piece of stationery.
