Keeping up-to-date with legal and regulatory compliance can feel like a full-time job as the changes to the Academy Trust Handbook (ATH) can seem never-ending. While it’s a relief to be able to say, “We’re compliant”, is that really enough?
Why being compliant matters
Compliance takes many forms. It covers aspects from regulations around providing parents with information on what you are teaching their children, to reporting how money is being spent and the health and safety laws that apply to a school setting.
Some of the rules and regulations are meant to assist your stakeholders such as the DfE, ESFA and trustees, in holding the trust accountable. As a public service, the regulations assist you in being transparent, providing pertinent information to those stakeholders and publicly holding you accountable to the Nolan Principals. The ‘Seven Principles of Public Life’ are selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.
There are some ‘absolutes’ when it comes to compliance set out in the ATH, including publishing any possible conflicts of interests that trustees or governors may have on your website. While this may seem like added ‘red tape’, it is important that the public can trust the people who run their schools – reporting on the number of staff who earn over £100,000 may seem intrusive, but it improves transparency.
Safeguarding practices are an obvious example of regulations that are designed to keep your pupils/students, staff and visitors safe. Safer recruitment, reporting processes and procedures, and regular staff training all help to create a safe environment for children and adults alike.
The laws, rules and regulations with which a school or trust must comply help the school system run fairly, efficiently and safely – however, being compliant should, arguably, be the minimum standard, rather than the end goal.
Going above and beyond compliance
Being compliant with the latest rules and regulations is undoubtedly essential, but is it always enough? In our personal lives we’re surrounded by messages encouraging us to better ourselves; there is an almost constant pressure to strive for healthier bodies, expanded minds, and financially secure futures.
Compliance, at its most basic level, is simply following directions. In a school or trust, it’s meeting the minimum expected standards to ensure transparency and safety. Compliance should be the beginning of the process, not the end. Continuous improvement in our careers means looking for the ‘art of the possible’ and working towards the top, rather than accepting the minimum needed; best practice means putting children first and giving them the best possible outcomes.
Take the example of publishing the conflict of interest report. What if it’s not just about being transparent with stakeholders? What if it also aids trustees and governors in really considering where their conflicts of interest lie, and how this might affect the decisions they make, allowing them to put the children at the heart of the decision-making process?
What if making public the number of staff members earning over £100,000 isn’t just about public transparency? What if it might also prompt the trust to consider the value for money, they are getting from investing in these resources?
What if we move beyond benchmarking financial compliance ‘because we have to’ and consider integrated curriculum and financial planning as the basis for delivering better educational outcomes?
Some of these examples are small things in the grand scheme of compliance, but they demonstrate how school and trust management can be improved by going beyond ‘It’s on the website, so we’re compliant.’
Doing the right thing
As education providers we wouldn’t accept a pupil or student producing the minimum standard in their work; we keep pushing, supporting, and helping them to progress to be the best that they can be. So why should we accept minimum standards in the management of our schools and trusts? By going above and beyond compliance we push ourselves to always do better, to not accept ‘We’re compliant’ as the best we can do and maximise more of our resources to benefit our children’s education.
Although the focus of schools is to educate, and foster a lifelong love of learning, there are still aspects of running a school that are similar to running a business. Adopting standards that are already common in other sectors allows schools to squeeze the most out of their budgets and shore up their futures through tough times ahead.
There is something to be said for reframing how we view the regulations we comply with. We should be raising our eyes from the day-to-day compliance work and looking to the art of the possible and what best practice looks like.
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