Committees
For the helpdesk teamCommittees
Section titled “Committees”The committees register is the catalogue of decision-making bodies in the trust — full board, finance & resources, audit & risk, standards, local governing bodies, ad-hoc working groups. Every meeting must reference a committee; this is where you maintain the list.
What’s on a committee
Section titled “What’s on a committee”- Name — “Finance & Resources Committee”. Full title; abbreviations live in
short_code. - Short code — short identifier used in meeting references. “F&R”, “AR”, “LGB-Highview”. Keep them stable; changing them rewrites how new meeting references look but doesn’t retroactively renumber.
- Parent committee — for nested structures (LGBs reporting to the trust board, sub-committees of a main committee). Self-references aren’t allowed.
- Description — one or two lines on remit.
- Display order — controls the order in the picker dropdown.
The index shows a meetings count column — useful for spotting committees that haven’t met all year (dormant working group → archive it) and committees that meet weekly (probably split into sub-committees).
When to add a committee vs not
Section titled “When to add a committee vs not”Add a committee when it’s a named body with a remit that meets on a defined cadence and keeps minutes.
Don’t add a committee for:
- Ad-hoc working sessions that don’t produce minutes — those are calendar events.
- One-off task groups for a single project — track them on a project, not as a permanent committee.
Gotchas
Section titled “Gotchas”- Committees can be soft-deleted. They retain their meetings, but disappear from the picker. Use this when a committee is wound up; don’t hard-delete (you’d orphan historical minutes).
- Short codes are not unique-constrained — two committees could in principle share one. The form warns. If you have two LGBs with the same short code, suffix with the school code: “LGB-HV”, “LGB-OB”.