Resources for trustees

School trusts are complex and agile organisations. The proposition of governance should therefore be a live conversation and boards should monitor and improve their performance continually. This updated toolkit outlines our 20-element assurance framework including guiding questions to consider and descriptors of what strong and weak assurance would look like in a trust at board level.
The new September 2023 version can be either completed electronically or printed out.

A summary report of headline findings and a supplementary report on benefits packages for executive leaders in school trusts.

This guidance is intended to support trust boards with an evidence-based process to set executive pay and should be read in conjunction with the CST Code of Principles for Setting Executive Pay and the Academy Trust Handbook.

This guidance, in partnership with Stone King LLP, sets out the strategic and operational considerations around trust growth for the trustees and executive leaders, with particular focus on how trusts can grow through academy conversion and academy transfers.

This guidance offers a process or framework for auditing organisational culture. It is designed to meet the requirement in the Competency Framework for Governance in relation to the responsibility of the trust board to determine, embed and monitor the culture, values and ethos of an organisation. It will help trust boards to answer the question: how do you know?