In one international school, minutes were compulsory for every leadership and department meeting. They were typed up, circulated and filed, and nobody opened them again. Staff regarded them as a bureaucratic requirement, something produced for inspectors and accreditation visits, and the people who wrote them did not expect them to be read.
The same is true of most schools, which keep minutes as a matter of routine and make almost no use of them. This is a missed opportunity for an owner or a board, because a year of minutes is a detailed record of what the leadership team discussed, what it decided and whether it followed through. The record already exists and costs nothing extra to produce. To become useful it has to follow a consistent format and be kept in one place, and somebody has to read it across a period of time.
Why minutes end up as a compliance exercise
Minutes are usually introduced because a regulator or an accrediting body expects to see them, and that origin shapes how they are written. The minute-taker records enough to show that the meeting happened and that the required topics were covered, and the document is then stored as evidence.
Nobody is asked to do anything with it afterwards. The head has usually attended the meeting and sees no reason to read an account of it. The board does not receive leadership minutes and would not have time to read them if it did. Without a reader, the quality of the minutes declines, and within a year or two they tend to become a list of headings with little underneath.
Use one format for every meeting
Minutes written in six different styles by six different people cannot be compared from one meeting to the next. A short standard format solves this, and it should be the same for the senior leadership team, for departments and for board committees.
The format needs only five fields. The first is who attended and who sent apologies. The second is the decisions that were made, each stated in a sentence. The third is the actions agreed, each with a named person and a completion date. The fourth is any data the meeting looked at, such as assessment results, attendance or enrolment figures. The fifth is the list of actions carried forward from the previous meeting, with a note on why each one is still open.
A record in this format rarely runs to more than a page. It takes less time to write than a narrative account of the discussion, and it is a good deal easier to read.
Keep them in one place, in date order
The second requirement is storage. In many schools minutes sit in the email accounts or personal folders of whoever took them, and they leave with that person. They should be kept in a single shared location, organised by type of meeting and by date, with access for the head and for whoever reports to the board.
Schools tend to regard this as a minor administrative matter, and in practice it is the step most of them miss. Minutes that cannot be found in sequence cannot be read as a series, which is the only way they become informative.
Read a term at a time
One set of minutes reveals little, whereas twelve consecutive sets from the same team give a fair picture of how that team works. The reading is best done once a term, by the head for department minutes and by the chair or the operator for leadership minutes, and it does not take long once the format is consistent.
The most useful thing to look for is the number of actions carried forward from meeting to meeting, particularly those that have lost their owner or their date along the way. It is also worth noting how much of each meeting concerns teaching and student progress, compared with transport, events, uniform and other operational matters, since a leadership team that rarely discusses learning is unlikely to be improving it. The same problem sometimes reappears every few weeks under a slightly different description, which usually means it was discussed and never resolved. Attendance patterns matter as well, especially when a member of the team stops coming or is no longer recorded as contributing. Finally, the reader should check whether decisions refer to any data, and whether topics that ought to come up regularly, such as staff retention or parent feedback, appear at all.
Two examples from real sets of minutes show the kind of thing a reader finds. In one school, the behaviour of the same three students was discussed at meeting after meeting across a term. Each discussion was recorded, and at no point did the minutes show an agreed strategy, a person responsible for it or a date to review whether it was working. Everyone at the meetings was aware of the problem, and responsibility for dealing with it had never been given to anyone. In another school, departments repeatedly asked for new resources that had not appeared in the budget submission made a few months earlier. Each request looked reasonable when it was made, and it was only when they were read together that they pointed to a budget prepared without enough thought about what the year would require. That is a planning weakness an owner would want to know about before the next budget round.
Check whether the mission appears in the decisions
A school’s vision and mission have integrity when they influence decisions throughout the organisation, and minutes are one of the few places where that can be checked. In schools where the mission is in active use, leaders usually turn it into a small number of guiding questions and put them to any significant proposal, whether it is a new idea, a change of strategy, a budget line or the response to a crisis. The answers help the team decide whether the proposal gets a green light or a red one.
Where that is happening, a reading of the minutes will show it. Decisions of any size will refer to the questions, and the record will include some proposals that were declined or changed because they did not fit. Those refusals are the most convincing evidence, since a mission that has never caused a leadership team to turn something down is probably not guiding very much. It is equally telling when a year of minutes contains no reference to the mission at all, or when it appears only as a routine phrase attached to every decision.
In this respect the minutes work like a mirror. They show the school how far its stated purpose is reflected in what its leaders actually decide. GSE has written separately about vision and mission integrity and how to close the gap between what a school says and what it does.
What the minutes will not show
Minutes are written by people who know they may be read, and they are more cautious than the conversation they describe. Disagreements are softened, and the most sensitive discussions often take place outside the meeting altogether. For that reason the content of any one entry should not be given too much weight.
Patterns across several meetings are more dependable than the wording of any single entry, because an action that has stayed open for four months remains open however it is described. Anything a reader takes from the minutes is best treated as a question to put to the head, since the minutes alone will seldom explain why something happened.
Leave safeguarding, staffing and disciplinary meetings out
Some meetings should never form part of this exercise. Safeguarding case discussions, individual staffing matters, disciplinary hearings and anything involving named students in difficulty need their own restricted records, kept according to the law and the school’s policies and seen only by those with a reason to see them. The termly reading applies to routine leadership, department and committee meetings.
Tell staff how the minutes are used
If minutes start to be read without explanation, staff will reasonably assume they are being monitored, and the minutes will become more guarded. It is better to explain the purpose from the start. The aim is to check that agreed actions are completed and that leadership time is going to the right subjects, and staff should be told plainly that nobody is keeping a record of who said what.
Heads generally find the practice useful once it is established. A clear record of decisions and actions protects a head when a board member later questions why something was or was not done, and it makes handover easier when a senior member of staff leaves.
What reaches the board
A short summary each term is all the board requires from this exercise. Prepared by the head or the operator, it should cover how many actions are open, how long the oldest has been open, which themes have recurred and what is being done about them, and it can usually be done in two or three paragraphs.
That summary sits alongside the other indicators an owner should see each month, which GSE covers in its article on the school dashboard. Where the summary raises a concern, the board’s response is the same as for any other early indicator: ask the head how they read it and what they intend to do, and follow up at the next meeting.
Read next
- The School Dashboard: What an Owner Should See Every Month. The other indicators that belong beside a termly reading of the minutes.
- Vision and Mission Integrity: Closing the Gap Between What Schools Say and What They Do. How to test whether a school’s stated purpose shows up in what it does.
- Governance Structures That Attract Education Investors. What the board is for, and where its oversight should stop.
- The 360-Degree School Review. How a combined education and financial review examines a school in depth.
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