Within higher education, September is a time for planning and also for remembering – and it’s dangerous for both author and reader to start an article reminiscing about the past, because for the reader it quickly becomes boring and irrelevant, and for the author it can quickly become self-indulgent.
Conscious of this, while I cast my mind back to my time as a sabbatical officer I won’t be mentioning the top chart singles of 2006, Italy winning the men’s football World Cup, or the introduction of Daniel Craig as James Bond. Instead I remember a huge change for SU governance.
Those were the days my friend
I was at Reading Students’ Union at the time, and I remember the excitement of getting the Wednesday newspaper one spring because it included the charity supplement’s jobs page – and among the adverts was something we’d never seen before at RUSU, a call for three external trustees.
Twenty years is a long time in student politics, as my knees will attest, so it’s hard to remember or visualise what things were like at the time.
Many SUs were facing financial hardship after years of reliance on commercial services and on the SU being the centre of student life, and rather than meeting for a drink before heading into town, folks could now just text their mates or arrange it on social media – Facebook being a very new invention at the time.
When times were good and profit margins were high, it wasn’t so risky leaving student members’ money in the hands of officers alone, but things were looking tight.
Several readers will be officers who have spent at least some of the summer meeting counterparts from other SUs at training events. I recall doing the same, only to find when we caught up at the end of term that they’d spent the last three months dealing with internal issues rather than changing students’ lives – there wasn’t the breadth or capacity among the officer team for what they were facing.
Reading was one of the first SUs where non-student trustees were added to the governance make-up to bring in additional knowledge on key areas. Never meant to be more important than other voices, they have enriched the type and depth of conversation on SU trustee boards, bringing an external perspective to decisions that complements the knowledge of elected officers and the lived experience of student beneficiaries.
Getting trusteeship down to a T
Anyone who has spent more than 30 seconds in one of my trustee inductions will know that I’m always saying boards are teams and not freelancers. I’ve warned against seeing a different route onto the board as meaning a different type of trustee, and it got me thinking about the weaknesses that lay trustees have.
I’m a big fan of the T-shaped leadership model, which suggests that each person has a depth of their own knowledge and experience – what it’s like to live on a satellite campus, qualifications in accounting, a career in business, or experience of lobbying the university for change.
As well as this, though, there’s the crossbar – not as deep, and covering everything else a trustee board may consider, where someone might be able to budget a student loan or might have been a student 15 years ago – and that requires both collaboration with other board members and development.
I have never met a trustee who didn’t need some induction and training. We rightly offer one-to-one discussions with the head of HR for new student trustees, or meetings with the auditors on financial duties, but what are we doing to support lay members to get their breadth?
“We do it like that?”
A casual application of most charity governance recommendations to an SU board would make the average lay trustee nervous. The election of beneficiaries to the board, chairs who have a paid role within the union, and CEO appraisals led by people who have never had their own line manager, let alone appraised one – all of these would be ridiculous elsewhere.
Lay members may not know the decades of support and practice that make these things possible – and desirable – and they may not understand how we support the dual representative and leadership roles of sabbatical officers, or how officers can move from a piece of operational project work to strategic thinking.
More than once I’ve had a student trustee ask what an accrual is five minutes into a finance report, and more than once I’ve had a lay trustee get to the elections report and ask what on earth a returning officer is.
Outside of governance we have some wonderful and purposeful quirks. I’ve seen HR professionals pleasantly bemused by the high level of benefits staff have compared to other charities, or by the relaxed response to staff turnover during the summer “transfer window”, and then there’s a fundraising model that ties your fortunes to the organisation you most want to change, and commercial services that aren’t just focused on commerce.
Filling in the crossbar
As always I have loved my summer of training and development with student and officer trustees, and I’m now looking forward to a new course for lay members of SU boards that will help them develop the breadth they need to be full team members.
The online course is split over two days and introduces these trustees to the wonderful oddness we operate in – through scenarios and networking we’ll go through SUs’ financial models, staffing approaches, and the importance of democracy sitting alongside strategy.
There’s no I in trustee, but there are clearly two Ts. What are we doing to expand the breadth of the whole board?
