Governors

‘Staff and governors have rapidly improved the school into a place where pupils thrive.’

Ofsted 2024

Governing Body for Corpus Christi Catholic High School:

The governing body has the following core strategic functions: 

• Establishing the strategic direction, by: setting the vision, values, and objectives for the school, agreeing the school improvement strategy with priorities and targets, meeting statutory duties.
• Ensuring accountability, by: appointing the headteacher, monitoring the educational performance of the school and progress towards agreed targets, performance managing the headteacher, engaging with stakeholders, contributing to school self-evaluation.
• Ensuring financial probity, by: setting the budget, monitoring spending against the budget, ensuring money is well spent and value for money is obtained, ensuring risks to the organisation are managed.

The Governing Body meets once per term. To assist in carrying out these functions the governing body has established two effective committees with clearly defined delegated powers, which meet on a termly basis: Standard & Effectiveness and Staffing & Resources.

The committee structure:

• assists in effective decision making by providing opportunities for individual governors to develop skills and knowledge in specific areas;
• enables the governing body to deploy/exploit governors’ skills;
• provides for more informed discussion and decision making;
• assists in the development, monitoring, evaluation and review of policies;
• provides an opportunity for an equitable share of the workload between governors;
• creates a greater sense of ownership through the apportionment of clearly defined responsibility;
• allows, with the agreement of the whole governing body, for the involvement of non-governors and associate members;
• provides a mechanism for relevant matters to be dealt with between full governing body meetings.

There are other ad hoc committees which are essential to the effective discharge of the governing body’s legal responsibilities for:

• staffing appointments, grievance, conduct and discipline, capability, suspension or dismissal of individual school staff members;
• staff grievance;
• admissions;
• pupil discipline (exclusions);
• complaints.

As a school we recognise that a diversity of thought, voices and perspectives is essential to good governance and the effective running of any organisation. We regularly collect diversity information from our governors and, depending on current data, can use this to:

• target recruitment to address gaps in experience and diversity
• apply positive action where possible to ensure the board reflects the local community/ diversity
• develop and adapt board practices to ensure full participation
• prioritise training and awareness-raising in identified areas
• address potential ‘blind spots’ through seeking wider advice and perspectives on current and upcoming opportunities, challenges and risks

However, we are unable to publish this information as it would mean that individual members of our governing body are identifiable.

There are no relevant business and pecuniary interests (as recorded in the register of interests) including governance roles in other educational institutions by any Governors apart from the interests listed below:

Mr J. McGeoghan: AQA Senior Examiner.

Miss J. Ashurst: Senior Examiner.

The material interests arising from relationships between governors or relationships between governors and school staff (including spouses, partners and close relatives) are:

Mrs Lucy Slater: parent of a member of staff.

Mr Vincent McGeoghan and Mr John McGeoghan: siblings.