1) Phil Jones became Chair of Pontefract Academies Trust after connecting with Academy Ambassadors to get more involved in education governance. He brought his business experience and strategic vision to help raise standards across the trust's eight schools. 2) Andy Clarke also joined the trust board through Academy Ambassadors, using his risk management expertise from Lloyds Banking Group to improve how the trust handles data and distills information. 3) Both Phil and Andy believe that recruiting business professionals as trustees allows trusts to benefit from new skills and perspectives, with the goal of improving educational outcomes in both the short and long term.

1. ACADEMY AMBASSADORS | CASE STUDY FOR PONTEFRACT ACADEMIES TRUST
Pontefract Academies Trust
When Phil Jones – the Chief Executive of Yorkshire-based Northern Powergrid, and
Regional Chair of Yorkshire and Humber CBI – first engaged with Academy Ambassadors,
he was seeking an opportunity to get more involved in the education landscape.
Within a short period of time, Phil’s constructive challenge, leadership and strategic vision had led him to the Chair role
at Pontefract Academies Trust (PAT). He has introduced his business vision to the trust and is setting about raising
standards across its eight schools, with a strong board made up of both educationalists and those, like him, from
outside the sector.
Having come into contact with Academy Ambassadors through his role as the CBI regional Chair, Phil wasted no
time in seeking a position that would allow him to re-connect with governance and leadership of education in his
local community as a trustee – or non-executive director – of the multi-academy trust that incorporates schools in the
Pontefract area.
Helping to make a difference
With prior experience as a school governor on Local Governing Bodies (LGBs), Phil was drawn to Academy
Ambassadors due to the opportunity to use his business acumen to make a genuine difference in outcomes for young
people.
‘As a parent governor in a local authority school, it didn’t feel as though there was
scope for someone like me to make a real difference to the fundamentals of the
way the school ran - and ultimately the outcomes of the entire education of many
children and young people,’ Phil explained, adding that he felt he had a lot to offer
the running of a trust.
‘It wasn’t until relatively recently, when I engaged with Academy Ambassadors’
programme, that I found out there was a route for someone like me to use
hard-edged business skills - honed in the boardroom – to help make a difference in
an environment that has previously been considered a million miles away from the
corporate world.’
PHIL JONES, CHAIR,
PONTEFRACT ACADEMIES
TRUST
‘It wasn’t until I
engaged with Academy
Ambassadors that I found
out there was a route for
someone like me to use
business skills to help
make a difference.’

2. ACADEMY AMBASSADORS | CASE STUDY FOR PONTEFRACT ACADEMIES TRUST ACADEMY AMBASSADORS | CASE STUDY FOR PONTEFRACT ACADEMIES TRUST
Vertical cross section
One of Phil’s key drivers in change is the concept of drawing on a ‘vertical cross section’ from a business to
support a multi-academy trust. It starts with someone senior from the business taking up a role on the board, who
can then draw skills from within the business to support the trust, guiding the deployment to wherever those skills
are most useful at a given point in time.
‘It is about tapping into the potential that exists throughout a company, to add tailored support in the areas that
make most sense for that particular situation at that particular time,’ Phil explains.
‘I think having someone senior involved at board level provides a business leader with a great vantage point over
the opportunities that exist to target the effort.
‘My work with the CBI has given me the opportunity to get a much clearer sense of just how directly educational
outcomes impact on the competitiveness of our economy and the prosperity of our region’ Phil said, adding that
CBI research clearly demonstrates the impact of education on the economy:
‘The evidence shows that number one driver that best correlates with economic growth in regional economies is
secondary school outcomes.’
With a governance review coinciding with the time of Phil’s arrival on the board, its results highlighted the need for a fresh
approach and some restructuring to the existing trust board, as well as the Local Governing Bodies – smaller school
governing groups acting as sub-committees of the board, responsible for matters at each of the trust’s academies.
Employing approaches, best-practice and knowledge from his position at the helm of a large organisation, Phil was able
to quickly roll his sleeves up and help define the direction, even before taking on the Chair position in April, 2017.
‘I soon realised how much more responsibility rested with the trust board. I also came to appreciate just how much
benefit could be brought to trust boards by introducing skills, knowledge and practices that, often, we take for granted
in the business world.
‘I began to appreciate even more the simple things that could improve efficiency in everyday working, right through to
the routines that help to support making bigger, larger-scale decisions that have far-reaching effects on the whole trust.’
‘I realised that we are talking about different subjects, but our objectives as a trust align and match to what we are
trying to achieve at Lloyds Banking Group, in the business world. I started to appreciate and see exactly how I could
help make changes.’
With the benefit of over twenty years’ professional experience in the banking sector, Andy recognised how his
‘everyday’ areas of expertise were directly applicable in some key instances:
‘Something that has caused great anxiety at Pontefract Academies Trust
is preparing for the new regulations around data privacy. Some individuals
at the trust have done a great job in attempting to navigate this very
complex area, but I was able to utilise knowledge and expertise from my
day job and that helped to quickly and effectively land it safely.
‘Being able to use the knowledge from the kind of work we do daily
in the banking sector helped us get very quickly to a point where we
successfully delivered a project, in a far shorter time than the trust could
have managed without that input.’
Similarly, Andy’s vision and experience in distilling and simplifying extensive bodies of data was able to rapidly improve
the management of a lot of the information being handled by the trust.
When I joined the trust board, I found I was presented with hundreds of pages of data but there was no storyline or
consolidation of the overall view. Taking a step back, I couldn’t answer the key questions we needed to focus on.
‘Introducing ‘systems thinking’ – a method applied in my day to day role to understand all of the factors that contribute
to the end goal - gives us an opportunity to see how the information we receive at the board meeting aligns against our
core purpose to improve the educational performance for pupils within the trust. In turn, this allows us to start considering
what it is we are ultimately asking the teachers to do and whether all actions actually lead to our intended outcome.
‘This directly linked to the meeting of their performance measures and required us to map out what the core objectives
are that we trying to achieve, looking through and sifting the relevant information to ask “what can we manage through
lower level committees and what should be passed through to governance boards and trustees?”.
‘That piece of work is ongoing and I am confident will be a real success for the trust.’
‘Introducing ‘systems thinking’
... gives us an opportunity to
see how the information we
receive at the board meeting
aligns against our core purpose
to improve the educational
performance for pupils.’
ANDY CLARKE, RISK DIRECTOR,
LLOYDS BANKING GROUP & TRUSTEE
Aligning objectives, sharing knowledge
The Pontefract Academies Trust board was further strengthened in 2017 with the appointment of Andy Clarke – Risk
Director at Lloyds Banking Group and another trustee who arrived via Academy Ambassadors’ trustee recruitment process.
While admitting that his personal emergence into the education sector was initially daunting – ‘a seemingly
impenetrable world of jargon and deep-rooted knowledge’ - Andy said he soon realised the benefit his professional role
could, and would, have on Pontefract Academies Trust, both in terms of the trust board’s strategy and the outcomes
for the children:

3. ACADEMY AMBASSADORS | CASE STUDY FOR PONTEFRACT ACADEMIES TRUST
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As the education element of the government’s Social Mobility Action Plan focuses one of its core elements on raising
standards for every pupil, with the Northern Powerhouse Strategy continuing to target a reduction in the north-south
divide, Andy Clarke concludes that strong leadership from the Chair, allied to a culture of ‘everyone on board’ and key
short term objectives will add up to longer term raising of standards – at Pontefract Academies Trust, and others like it:
‘Undertaking the trustee role has been incredibly rewarding and I think Phil has developed a brilliant culture around the
trust board. It has been rewarding and challenging but we have so much more to do.’
And having already moved rapidly to the Chair role, Phil concludes that the process of recruiting to trust boards can
be a fluid one, with changes in make-up of a board meaning the ongoing enrolment of new trustees is vital to a trust’s
success. He believes the business world will continue to supply high-calibre individuals capable of improving standards
of governance:
‘Often, gaps occur in trust boards, where people have left and not been replaced, or a requirement emerges for a
particular set of skills as a result of growth - skills that were perhaps never previously needed, or deemed appropriate
by the trust board.
Meeting the northern challenge
For more information on Academy Ambassadors, or to find out more about recruiting to your trust
board, please visit www.academyambassadors.org
‘In my time as Chair at Pontefract Academies Trust, it’s already obvious that there are
opportunities for business professionals to add value in support of a board’s activities – maybe on
an Academy Governance Committee, or in a specialist area of support activity like HR or IT.’
PHIL JONES, CHAIR, PONTEFRACT ACADEMIES TRUST
‘In my time as Chair at Pontefract Academies Trust, it’s already obvious that there are opportunities for business
professionals to add value in support of a board’s activities – maybe on an Academy Governance Committee, or in a
specialist area of support activity like HR or IT.’
Looking to the future, Andy Clarke believes that the marginal gains and fundamental improvements the trust board
has been able to effect will add up to longer-term prosperity:
‘My objective is to improve standards and educational attainment in the schools in the trust. We have a long way to
go, but in the short term, the goal is around making immediate steps forward: we have to improve those schools who
are not currently meeting standards.
‘It might take a little while longer to see the benefit of the changes we are making, in terms of an overall uptick in
educational attainment, but all objectives have to be set around the short-term goal of establishing the trust and
strength of schools within.
‘We believe we will see that translated through to all of the schools of Pontefract Academies Trust consistently
over-achieving, and that translating to increased educational attainment.’
Imagery credit: Pontefract Academies Trust