Good governance in academy schools is rarely talked about in the same breath as good teaching — yet the two are more closely connected than they might appear, and the experience of Toby Watson at Excalibur Academies Trust offers a practical illustration of how thoughtful strategic oversight can create the conditions in which schools genuinely thrive.
Academy schools exist to serve their communities — but doing that well requires more than committed teachers and adequate resources. It requires boards with the experience to provide meaningful oversight, the judgement to ask the right questions, and the patience to support executive leadership over the long term. Too often, trust boards lack the depth of expertise needed to fulfil this role effectively. Toby Watson, whose professional background spans nearly two decades in global finance, represents the kind of trustee who can help address that gap — quietly, but in ways that matter.
Strategic governance is one of those topics that tends to attract attention mainly when something goes wrong. Yet, the contribution of effective governance to school improvement and community service is just as real when things are going well — it simply tends to go unnoticed. Toby Watson served as Chairman of Excalibur Academies Trust for nearly eight years, overseeing a period of significant growth across twenty schools and approximately 10,000 pupils along the M4 corridor. His tenure offers a useful starting point for thinking about what strategic governance can look like when it is working as it should.
Why Strategic Governance Matters More Than Most People Realise
The connection between governance and school performance is not always intuitive. Teaching happens in classrooms. Governance happens in boardrooms, and its effects are felt at several removes from the day-to-day life of a school.
And yet, the quality of governance has a real bearing on what happens in those classrooms. A well-governed trust provides its schools with financial stability, clear strategic direction and a leadership culture that attracts and retains good people. It ensures that resources are allocated thoughtfully, that risks are identified before they become problems, and that the organisation remains focused on its core purpose — serving the pupils and communities in its care.
Poor governance, by contrast, can leave schools exposed. Financial mismanagement, weak accountability and a failure to plan for leadership transitions are among the most common governance failures in the academy sector — and each has direct consequences for the schools and communities affected.
What Does Effective Strategic Governance Actually Involve?
Effective strategic governance involves a handful of core responsibilities that are easier to describe than to deliver consistently. Trustees must provide meaningful financial oversight without crossing into operational management. They must hold the executive team to account without undermining their authority. They must think about long-term sustainability while remaining responsive to immediate pressures. Toby Watson, whose career at Goldman Sachs included senior roles in structured finance and global principal funding, brought a professional background well suited to exactly these demands — combining analytical rigour with a clear awareness that his role was to support good decision-making, not to make decisions unilaterally.
How Toby Watson Approached Strategic Governance at Excalibur
Toby Watson joined Excalibur Academies Trust as Chairman in February 2018. Over the nearly eight years that followed, his approach was shaped by consistent priorities: ensuring the board had what it needed to function well, supporting the executive team through periods of change and keeping the focus on the schools and communities the trust existed to serve.
Focusing on Financial Sustainability
One area where Toby Watson’s professional background proved particularly relevant was financial oversight. Excalibur Academies Trust operates with an annual budget of around £137 million — a scale that demands serious financial governance. Toby Watson’s time at Goldman Sachs gave him a depth of financial experience that allowed him to engage with the trust’s accounts and financial planning in a genuinely substantive way, asking the kinds of questions that surface risk early and ensure that financial decisions are taken with a clear understanding of their longer-term implications.
Supporting Communities Through Strong School Leadership
For Toby Watson, strategic governance was always ultimately about the communities that Excalibur’s schools served. The trust operates across a diverse range of settings — from urban Bristol to rural Wiltshire — and effective governance means being attentive to that diversity, ensuring that strategic decisions reflect the particular circumstances of their schools rather than imposing a one-size-fits-all approach from the centre.
Managing Leadership Transitions With Care
One of the more visible expressions of Toby Watson’s contribution was his handling of leadership transitions. When CEO Nicky Edmondson stepped down in 2024 and was succeeded by Nick Lewis, Toby Watson played a quiet but important role in ensuring the process was managed smoothly. That kind of continuity — provided by a chairman with deep institutional knowledge — is one of the less-discussed but genuinely important functions of long-term voluntary leadership.
What Schools and Communities Gain From Well-Governed Trusts
The benefits of strong strategic governance are felt most clearly at the school and community level, even if they originate in the boardroom. Among the most important are:
- Financial security — schools that are part of a well-governed trust are less likely to face the kind of budget crises that disrupt teaching, destabilise leadership teams and undermine community confidence
- Strategic clarity — clear direction from a well-functioning board helps school leaders make better decisions about curriculum, staffing and community engagement, knowing that their trust’s long-term plans are sound
Toby Watson — whose background at Goldman Sachs gave him both the financial expertise and the organisational experience to contribute meaningfully — brought both qualities consistently to his work at Excalibur.
Why Experienced Voluntary Leaders Make a Difference to School Communities
The case for recruiting experienced professionals to academy trust boards rests on a straightforward argument: well-governed trusts serve their communities better. And well-governed trusts tend to have boards that combine genuine expertise with a real commitment to the mission.
Among the qualities most likely to make that combination work are:
- A willingness to invest time in understanding the schools and communities the trust serves, rather than treating governance as an abstract exercise
- The humility to recognise that professional expertise needs to be applied within a culture and context genuinely different from the commercial world
For Toby Watson, that combination of expertise and humility defined his approach throughout his tenure at Excalibur — and it is what made his contribution, quiet as it was, genuinely worthwhile for the schools and communities fortunate enough to benefit from it.
