One of GALTI’s great strengths is that it brings Heads and Board members together to learn alongside one another. The conversations go beyond governance structures, policies and responsibilities and into what governance actually looks like in practice, including the difficult and sometimes uncomfortable parts. Experiences are shared openly, assumptions challenged and there is a genuine willingness to learn from one another.
At the heart of this year’s programme was Rami Madani’s Governance as Partnership framework. Rami’s sessions were excellent and gave us a common language to keep returning to: Identity Stewardship, Boundary Fluency, Coherence Under Pressure and Foresight Capacity. What I particularly appreciated was the way the framework moved the conversation beyond structures and responsibilities and into the quality of the partnership itself.
That connected closely with the perspective I brought to GALTI.
Much of my work over many years has placed me alongside Boards and school leaders at some of the most consequential moments in the life of a school: appointing a new Head, managing leadership transition, considering succession and navigating decisions that can shape an institution well beyond the people currently around the table.
Through that work, I have had the privilege of working with some exceptional Boards, Board members and school leaders. Many Board members give an extraordinary amount of time, expertise and care to their schools, often voluntarily, and some of the strongest Heads I know actively welcome a Board that asks good questions and challenges their thinking. I have seen partnerships where there is real trust, clarity and respect, and where challenge strengthens rather than threatens the relationship.
I have also seen what happens when those same ingredients begin to shift. Often there is no bad intent on either side. A Board asks a legitimate question and the Head hears a lack of confidence. A Head believes sufficient information has been provided while the Board feels it still cannot see enough. Two entirely reasonable people can look at the same situation and interpret it very differently.
What interests me is not simply why governance relationships go wrong, but what enables some partnerships to navigate these tensions well while others begin to struggle.
One of my sessions focused on trust. We often associate a strong Board–Head relationship with harmony, yet some of the strongest partnerships I have seen contain considerable challenge and disagreement. Trust is not about agreeing all the time. It is about whether the relationship can hold legitimate disagreement and scrutiny when it comes.
Not every difficult Board–Head relationship is fundamentally a trust problem. Sometimes the issue is performance, role clarity, poor information flow or an expectation that has never been made explicit. A Board that avoids legitimate scrutiny because it is worried about damaging the relationship is no more effective than one that scrutinises everything because trust has disappeared. Equally, a Head cannot expect trust to mean freedom from challenge.
At the same time, trust rarely breaks. It drifts. A question is interpreted as doubt. An explanation starts to sound defensive. A conversation that needs to happen is postponed. People begin making assumptions about intent and, once those assumptions take hold, subsequent actions are viewed through them.
This is why I think we need to pay attention to what happens before a relationship reaches the point of fracture, while also learning from partnerships that handle these moments well. In the strongest I have seen, there is enough confidence to disagree, ask another question, admit uncertainty and occasionally change position. The quality of the partnership is not demonstrated by how little challenge exists, but by what happens when challenge arrives.
Another question we explored was how much a Board needs to know about a school it does not run.
Boards govern an institution they can never experience in full. The Head and leadership team are living and working in the school every day; Board members are not. At the same time, the Board cannot govern well without understanding the school it governs.
The answer cannot simply be more information. More does not automatically result in better governance, just as greater visibility does not give a Board greater operational authority. Board members hear from parents, attend events and may be approached by staff. They receive reports, data and context from the Head and leadership team. Each perspective can tell us something, but no single perspective tells us everything.
The challenge is to have sufficient, proportionate and triangulated visibility to exercise good judgement without creating another layer of management. If the Board relies entirely on what the Head chooses to bring forward, it risks governing through a single lens. If individual Board members create their own routes into the organisation to find out what is “really happening”, they risk establishing a parallel management structure.
This is a shared responsibility. Strong Heads understand that enabling the Board to govern well is part of their leadership. They bring forward uncomfortable information, acknowledge uncertainty and create appropriate opportunities for the Board to understand the school. Strong Boards know the difference between seeking assurance and seeking to manage. They ask good questions, respect agreed channels and recognise that hearing one perspective does not necessarily make it the whole picture.
A Board needs to know enough to govern well while knowing where its authority ends. A Head needs the space and authority to lead while accepting that genuine accountability sometimes means being questioned, challenged and asked for more. This was one place where Rami’s Boundary Fluency particularly resonated, while questions of institutional interest, pressure and longer-term consequences brought the other lenses into play.
Leadership search gives me another window into governance, and perhaps one of the clearest.
I have spent many years working with Boards to appoint school leaders, and a search tells you a great deal about a school before an appointment is ever made. We understandably spend enormous energy assessing candidates: their experience, leadership, values and whether they are the right match for this school, at this moment, with this mandate. Strong candidates, however, are assessing the school every bit as carefully.
They listen to how Board members talk about the current or previous Head. They notice whether people tell a consistent story. They listen for clarity about the mandate and challenges ahead, and notice how difficult questions are answered.
I have worked with Boards that are remarkably open during a search. They talk honestly about what is working, what is not, what previous leadership experiences have taught them and where they themselves need to develop. Candidates notice that. Candour does not weaken a school’s proposition to a strong candidate. Very often, it strengthens it.
This is why I asked participants at GALTI a deliberately uncomfortable question: Would you apply to lead your own school?
A leadership search holds up a mirror. It can expose whether the Board is genuinely aligned around what the school needs next, whether expectations are realistic and whether the school is ready for the type of leader it says it wants.
Boards often use words such as “courageous”, “strategic” and “transformational” to describe the leader they are seeking. The more interesting question is what happens when that person arrives and starts behaving courageously, challenges established thinking or asks for the authority to deliver the transformation they were recruited to lead. Being ready for the leader you say you want is very different from being able to describe them.
There is also a stewardship and foresight question here. Are we choosing the person who feels most comfortable to us, or the leader the institution genuinely needs next? Are we recruiting for the school we have today, or thinking far enough ahead about the school we need to become? In my experience, some of the most important work in a leadership search happens before anybody starts searching.
Throughout GALTI, I kept coming back to the human dynamics sitting underneath all of this. We have rightly invested a great deal in the mechanics of good governance: structures, policies, roles, fiduciary responsibilities, strategic oversight and accountability. These matter enormously, but they are not where governance ends.
Those structures have to be lived by people. People bring experience, judgement, assumptions and blind spots into the Boardroom. They also bring enormous expertise, commitment, institutional knowledge, courage and care. At their best, Heads and Boards can make one another better. A thoughtful Board can broaden a Head’s perspective and strengthen decision making. A strong Head can help a Board understand the institution more deeply and govern with greater confidence.
People also operate under pressure, misunderstand one another and sometimes see the same situation very differently. Good governance does not remove those human dynamics. It creates the conditions in which people can work with them.
Perhaps mature governance is not governance in which tension disappears or everyone agrees. It is governance where the partnership is strong enough to hold different perspectives, serious scrutiny, uncertainty and change without allowing them to distort roles, relationships or judgement.
This is where Rami’s Governance as Partnership framework added real value to the conversations at GALTI. Identity Stewardship, Boundary Fluency, Coherence Under Pressure and Foresight Capacity gave us useful lenses through which to examine situations many of us recognise from our own experience. They do not remove the complexity, nor should they. The judgement still has to come from the people around the table.
GALTI created the space to have those conversations properly. It was thoughtful, challenging, practical and candid, with a great deal of experience in the room and a willingness to share it openly.
As GALTI marked its tenth anniversary, it felt fitting that we were not only looking at how governance has developed, but also at where it needs to go next. I returned from Hanoi energised and with plenty still turning over in my head.
I came away thinking that perhaps we need to pay as much attention to the human dynamics of governance as we do to its structures. We spend a great deal of time making sure those structures are strong. Perhaps we should spend just as much time asking what makes the partnerships within them strong enough to hold challenge, disagreement, uncertainty and change.
That, for me, is where governance gets real.