Tips for writing your Trustee's and Governance Reports

In your annual accounts, these reports are absolutely key to communicating to wider stakeholders what has happened in the year and your achievements. They can however be lengthy documents, including a lot of statutory information too and so it can be hard to ensure that all the information is received.

The ESFA release guidance that is included in the Annual Accounts Direction as to the content and headers required, and also importantly guidance notes for completion of the disclosures. Some of the disclosures and information required to be disclosed will take some time to collate, calculate, and prepare and so it’s important to start looking at it early.

Our top tips for writing good reports are:

• Start it early – identify where information will need to be gather and make a start on it early – in particular some of the disclosures that will require information to be gathered from across the Trust such as the Energy and Carbon Reporting requirements.
• Share it with Trustees early, get their input and agreement for not just the content of the report, but the tone and style.
• Review each section, especially if just rolling forward standard wording from previous years. Does it really reflect your Trust?

A key element is the financial section of the report. The sector can come in for criticism around the finances, so use it to explain the financial position of the Trust. Explain your key income and expenditure items, but explain the elements of your accounts that can confuse users. For instance if you have a school joining in the year, you may have a very large capital donation. You want to be able to explain the impact of revenue funds, and what you have available to spend on the pupils for education. This disclosure in turn takes us the Reserves Policy.

We often see a lot of Trusts targeting 1 months of reserves, but ask yourself is it right for you? What are the risks that your Trust faces? Do you need to hold greater funds as a result of known pupil demographic changes? Are your buildings going to need significant investment in the coming years that you need to be saving for now? If there are known one off expenditure items coming up, you can consider designating some funds. For more information on writing a reserves policy please see our additional blog Writing a reserves policy | Insights | Bishop Fleming.