Life as an Academy Clerk

I have been asked to jot down a few words on the joys, trials and tribulations of being a clerk for an Academy. I have been a clerk within a further education college, a secondary school and now an Academy for about six years.

I think we all experience the same trials and tribulations of getting agendas out on time, begging and pleading for the appropriate papers to go with them and then arriving at a meeting and being asked if you’ve got a spare set!! I try to read everything that I send out to governors and I find it frustrating to watch governors shuffling through their papers looking for information and it being quite obvious that they haven’t read the papers before the meeting – “Why do I bother?” I ask myself. The answer is simple: it gives me satisfaction to pull everything together in time and in an orderly fashion, and also to know what’s going on in the school (academy) from the top downwards. Being an Academy Clerk is just the same as being a School Clerk but made slightly more difficult by the fact that most of the governors are not local to the school as they are appointed by the sponsor - our Chair of Governors lives in Birmingham!

There are of course some funny times as well – over the years I have heard quite a range of reasons for governors not attending meetings, but I think the funniest was when one governor phoned me about an hour before a meeting to tell me she couldn’t attend because she had just put a cake in the oven!

And then there was another governor who left a message overnight on my voicemail to say she had missed the meeting because she was waiting in for someone to come round about the snail in her house.

Can anyone beat those excuses??