• We are nearly there!

    This page sets out information to help with the discussion at Working Group 5.

     

    It covers:

    1. A summary of WG 5 decisions
    2. Fellow and Member feedback on the Charter
    3. Update on the Laws (including explanation of how Regulations would work)
    4. Suggestion to remove the year's break after six/seven years
    5. Council feedback on Transition and Implementation, split into:
      1. how to stagger first terms of the new structure
      2. other feedback
    6. Recommendation for a decision on length of the first term
    7. Next steps

     

    (if you need a reminder, the proposals put to Council are all here and here)

     

     

  • Summary of WG5

    Laws

    1. WG happy with the list of amendments below, in the section on the Laws
    2. Discipline should be a separate policy, not in the Laws
    3. Senior OBs will be: President, VPs, Deans, Secretary, Treasurer, Heritage Trustee. Decide who "non senior OBs" are at a later date!
    4. Lucy and Kenneth will now prepare the next version, with those amendments, to send to Council with a cover note explaining all the things that the WG asked questions about
    5. Lucy will do one more check of how big Council might be.
    6. Grateful thanks to everyone for taking the time to comment!

    A year's break or not?

    Agreed:

    Remove the requirement for a year's break after someone has done two Terms, as long as they are going into a different role. (So you CAN go Regional Rep to Secretary without a break... you CAN'T stay as Secretary continuously for ever!)

     

    Guidance for Appointment Panels will include the a requirement to consider the need to enable fresh talent to come through

     

    No attempt to set up a "lifetime max" or "you can do this many years on Council but only this many years as a Trustee" - the drafting complexity just isn't worth it, considering how low the risk is of someone trying and succeeding to stay on for decades

     

    Acknowledged:

    In theory, this could mean someone being (for example) Secretary then Heritage then Treasurer then Dean then VP then President....but this is very unlikely, and the Appointment Panel should stop this happening if it is about to get ridiculous

     

    Action:

    Draft of the Laws to be amended

    Lucy to re-work the Transitional arrangements spreadsheet

     

     

     

    First term in the new structure

    Agreed:

    This will be the new three year term, taking into account previous time served.

    The only elections in 2025 will be

     

    Noted:

    The six year (or seven with an extension of one year) maximum to be taken into account will only kick in as described above. So, for example:

    • Mark's first term as Heritage Trustee will be three years. He will then be eligible for re-election for another three years in 2027.
    • Hamish will have done six years in the Autumn of 2025 - so he won't be eligible for re-election as a Regional Rep (unless he gets a one-year extension for some reason) but he COULD be a Dean, VP, etc etc (whatever is available)

    Action:

    Lucy to update Transition spreadsheet

    Lucy to write a note for Council

    Next steps and Privy Council

    All agreed as set out below

     

    Privy Council - Kenneth feels reasonably confident that they will be content, but will draft the motion so that it is "subject to PC approval".

     

    The motion will refer to the new Laws coming into effect at the same time as the new Charter - hopefully with very little delay after the AGM.

     

    If there is a substantial delay, the College could run with a "shadow Board of Trustees"

  • New draft of the Charter

    Feedback from Fellows and Members

     

    We only had two pieces of feedback and they were both very positive.
    One was from a Senior Fellow who has given a lot of feedback during this process, who said:
    "Congratulations on what must have been a very time-consuming and tiresome piece of work in simplification and clarification. It was obviously necessary - well done.”

  •  

    New draft of the Laws

    What is the request to the WG?

    There is no expectation that you will have the time or the inclination to go through the draft line by line - please just let us know if you see anything that jumps out at you as being wrong or unexpected. Please read the notes below first - they give helpful context.

     

    What's changed?

    1. All re-formatted to be easier to read, with live cross-references
    2. Sections ordered to make more sense
    3. Some detail moved to Annexes (but not lost)
    4. Content that will be superseded or duplicated by the changes removed

     

    What's left to do?

    1. Resolve outstanding questions
      1. eg Disciplinary Procedures - who holds this and is it ready to slot in?
      2. eg Office Bearers? - not defined anywhere in the current Laws - but there seems to be a huge list of them in other documents
    2. Proof reading, simplify numbering if possible
    3. Check and update cross-references, make the non-live (ie non-clickable) ones live/clickable
    4. Add in Transitional arrangements
    5. Add in Conflicts
    6. Add in Proxy voting processes

    Two possible surprises

     

    Board Size

    • There is no longer a reference to the Board's maximum total size.
    • There is a limit. The size is controlled by the maximum of each group of Trustees, eg "up to five Lay Trustees"
    • But...the maximum possible size, ie if every group was at its largest, and all the Deans were job shares, and there were extra co-opts, would be so big that it would be terrible optics - and it would be hugely unlikely to actually happen in real life. So we advise that it's better to leave it out.  

     

    Three Special Trustees

    Now called "Council Member Trustees" as "Three Special Trustees" seemed too informal for the Laws.

    Amendments resulting from your feedback...

     

    1. Changing how the "year's break" works (assuming this is a yes)
    2. Mentioning Associates earlier
    3. Chair of AGM or EGM - make provision for if they are conflicted
    4. Details on polls, and on re-arranging meetings
    5. Term of office of President - refer to "term" not three years
    6. correct mistake - restriction on P and VP terms that shouldn't have been there
    7. correct mistake - mix-up about Council / BoT in the process for removing Council member and similarly for removing a Trustee
    8. correct mistake - mix-up about Council/BoT in the section on how decisions made are still valid even if there was a mistake along the way with who can vote
    9. correct mistake - that if a Council Member Trustee resigns the Board does not have to fill the place mid-year (because this will make the terms impossibly complex) - current draft says Term not Year
    10. Five Lay Trustees - clarify that this includes the Chair of the LAC
    11. Soften "termination of Members" - Kerri has pointed us to the standard text from elsewhere on how speeding fines don't count

     

  •  

    Maximum terms and/or a year’s break before coming back

    Background and suggestion from Andy and Mark

     

    What Council has currently agreed to (and which has gone to F&M) is this:

     

    The "default setting" is that this will be two terms of three years. A person is not eligible to stand for election or appointment for any role if the completion of the normal length of the term would take them over this maximum of six years. Instead, the person must have a break of a year before starting another term on Council… but you don’t need a break before being VP or P. Also, there is always the option of the year's extension to a term - and there is no “lifetime maximum:”.

     

     

    However, Mark and Andy have been thinking about this and suggest that the exception currently just for VP and P should also apply to any role appointed by interview panel, ie Secretary, the Deans and the Heritage and Library Trustee. This would be for two main reasons:

    It is getting harder to recruit to these challenging roles, so the College needs to be able to keep talent

    People may do a better job if they move from one role to another without a break, as they will have continuity and knowledge

    They would prefer that there is no maximum term in these situations, ie a person could (if they had the energy!) go from being a Regional Rep to Dean to Secretary etc etc. Deciding whether or not a person had been around too long could safely be left to the group/panel interviewing and making the appointment, ie they could give the role to a newer person if they thought that would be better for the College.

     

     

    My advice

     

     

    I should note that current governance good practice (not a rule) is that there is either a break of a year or a maximum term, for all the reasons this group discussed over the last year. There may be a small perception risk here, ie “But the appointments panel will also be people who have been around for ages, and they will just stick with who they know - the Old Boys’ Club rearing its head again”. But you know your Fellows and Members way better than I do, of course, and it may be that this just isn’t an issue at all.

     

    A halfway house might be that you can do one “different” role, eg go from Regional Rep for six years to Secretary for six years, but call it a day at that point? (With the normal exceptions of P and VP, and the one year extension)

     

    This kind of thing is always tricky and always an imperfect compromise - there’s never a perfect solution, especially when it’s so hard to get good people. There’s also no rule or law about this - OSCR leaves it up to you to decide.

     

    What do you all think?

    It’s completely up to you (and then we’d need to run it past Council again, and also highlight the change to F&M) but as Mark says, people probably hadn’t thought it through in great detail anyway - it wouldn’t be a huge change, like deciding not to have a Board of Trustees after all.

  • Feedback from Council on Transition and Implementation

  • Recommendation for how long everyone's first term in the new structure should be

    Members of the Working Group are all now familiar with the fact that sometimes, minor issues are more complicated than the big decisions. This is yet another example! But hopefully, it will be the last one.

     

    UPDATE - THE TABLES BELOW WILL CHANGE IF THE YEAR BREAK RULES ARE CHANGED

     

    Recommendation - go straight to three years

    As noted in the proposals to Council, there are pros and cons for both options - and no governance rule that says "You should definitely move straight to three-year terms" or "You should definitely do one more round of one-year terms"

     

    On the grounds that Council's feedback was strongly in favour of moving straight to three-year terms, this is what I recommend.

     

    It's important to note that this does NOT mean everyone gets three years without having to stand again for election - the proposal is to take into account time served already, so that some people would only get one year of this three years, some would get two and some would get the whole three. And some people would be then eligible for another term, and some wouldn't.

     

    Lindsay has kindly dug out all the information she has on how long people have served already, and I have used this to work out two sets of figures: how long everyone would have left of a three-year term, and how many people could then be eligible to stand again for another three year term. I've attached this at the bottom of the page as a picture, and I can also email the spreadsheet if anyone is super interested.

     

    Happily, this all works out nicely, with a really helpful natural cycle of turnover - with the years people have served already, we would have:

     

    Number of people with one year left = 10

    Number of people with two years left = 9

    Number of people with three years left = 7

    Number of people where this does not apply (eg Faculty reps) = 6

     

    And for those people who we know will be Trustees (we still don't know about the Lay Trustees and the Three Special Trustees) we would have:

     

    Number of Trustees with one year left = 3

    Number of Trustees with two years left = 4

    Number of Trustees with three years left = 4

    Number of Trustees where this does not apply = 1

     

     

    Alert - I had to make some assumptions

    This has not been a straightforward calcuation. Over the last few years, there have been:

    1. Mid-year resignations and returns
    2. Moving from three-year terms to annual terms
    3. People graduating from one Council role to another Council role
    4. Extensions of terms because someone's expertise was so valued

    So there hasn't always been a nice easy "This person has done X years so they have Y years left" statement for everyone. In the interests of pragmatism and keeping this issue in proportion, I've made the following assumptions:

    1. if someone resigned and came back (eg Mark and Andy) I haven't counted the pre-resignation years served
    2. if someone was a Regional Rep and then an Office Bearer, I haven't counted the Regional Rep years served

    Please feel warmly welcome to suggest doing this differently - it's your College.

     

     

    Things to bear in mind

    It might be reassuring to remember that:

     

    1. there is always the possibility of the one-year extension to people's terms, which has already been agreed (although Andy won't be eligible for this, as his next year as President will take him up to four consecutive years)
    2. it has already been agreed that anyone can apply to be Vice President or P, no matter how long they have served on Council already

    What will Fellows and Members think?

    Two people were concerned that this would be breaking a commitment made to the electorate that the recent elections only covered one-year terms.

     

    Mitigation here could be transparency: drawing Fellows and Members' attention to these Transitional proposals, and asking their views. This would be part of sharing the Laws on the consultation website and being open - the message could be "You have already given positive feedback on three-year terms, so we plan to do this sooner rather than later" .

    The communications could demonstrate that this would provide a sensible turnover, maintaining institutional memory - it wouldn't mean that everyone suddenly had three years extra.

     

    If there is a strong pushback from F&M, there would be time to change the proposals before the proposals go to the AGM.

     

     

     

    Table showing much time people would have in their first time, grouped by role

    broken image

     

     

    And this time, in order of years left...

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  • Next steps up to September 3rd - proposal

    September 3rd is the date for sending out papers to the Fellows and Members

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    Week beginning July 29th

    1. Email Council to alert them to the imminent arrival of the draft of the Laws (Lucy to draft for Andy to send)
    2. Working Group 5 takes place
    3. Lucy and Kenneth make final amends to the first draft of the Laws after WG5

     

     

    broken image

    Week beginning August 5th

     

     

    Laws given to Council for their comments, with a cover note (drafted by Lucy) explaining:

    1. No surprises: the draft only codifies what they have already agreed
    2. As above, they are not expected to go through the draft line by line
    3. How we have blended the new text (eg about the Board of Trustees, term lengths, conflicts etc) with the old text
    4. How the Transitional arrangements will work

     

    broken image

    Week beginning August 12th

     

    1. Email to F&M highlighting that the Laws will soon be available for them to see on the consultation website (Lucy to draft)
    2. Deal with any comments from Council - hopefully not requiring too many revisions (Kenneth and Lucy)
    3. Upload Laws to the consultation website and alert F&M. (Lucy)
    4. Start drafting the cover paper to accompany the documents in the AGM send out (Lucy)
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    Week beginning August 19th

    1. Deal with comments from F&M, if there are any (Lucy
    2. Finalise draft of cover paper for the AGM pack (Lucy
    3. WG to clear the cover paper
    4. Draft the resolution for the AGM (Kenneth)

     

    broken image

    Week beginning August 26th, up to Sept 3rd

     

    Final tweaks - and do Council need to give a final sign-off?

     

  • Feedback

    You can fill this in or just email Lucy

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