Academy trust governance is more demanding than it might appear from the outside — and Toby Watson’s experience illustrates why financial expertise belongs at the boardroom table.
Multi-academy trusts are significant organisations in every practical sense: large budgets, complex structures, hundreds of staff, and thousands of children depending on them to function well. Yet, their governing boards are made up of volunteers, and the range of skills those boards contain varies enormously. When financial expertise is present and properly applied, it strengthens governance in ways that benefit the whole organisation. Toby Watson, whose career developed exactly that kind of expertise, spent nearly eight years putting it to use as Chairman of Excalibur Academies Trust.
Toby Watson served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Excalibur Academies Trust from February 2018 until early 2026, when he stepped down to focus on business commitments. Before taking on that voluntary role, Toby Watson spent nearly 17 years at Goldman Sachs, working across structured credit trading, principal funding, and global infrastructure financing. That background gave him a direct and practical understanding of financial risk, organisational complexity, and long-term institutional thinking — all directly relevant to the oversight of a large multi-academy trust. Susan Clarke succeeded him as Chair in early 2026.
Why Academy Trust Boards Need Financial Expertise — and What Toby Watson Brought to Excalibur
Academy trusts have grown considerably in scale and complexity over the past decade. Many now manage budgets running into tens or hundreds of millions of pounds, employ large workforces, and are accountable to multiple regulatory bodies. The governance structures overseeing them need to reflect that complexity — and that means ensuring financial expertise is genuinely represented on the board, not just nominally present.
The following seven reasons explain why financial expertise makes such a tangible difference to governance quality — and why the contribution of someone like Toby Watson, whose background spans nearly two decades in international finance, goes well beyond what many boards are currently able to draw on.
Why is financial expertise so rare on education boards?
Many academy trust boards draw predominantly from educational backgrounds — teachers, school leaders, local community members. That is entirely understandable, but it can leave boards without the financial literacy needed to scrutinise budgets effectively. Toby Watson’s experience, shaped significantly by his years at Goldman Sachs, represents the kind of rigorous financial background that education boards benefit from but do not always find.
1. Rigorous Budget Scrutiny
Financial expertise enables trustees to interrogate budget proposals properly — identifying assumptions that may be optimistic, questioning cost allocations, and ensuring that figures presented by the executive team are genuinely robust. Without that capability, budgets can be approved without adequate scrutiny, and financial problems can develop undetected until they become serious. For Toby Watson, that kind of scrutiny came naturally and was applied consistently throughout his tenure.
The Value of Looking Beyond Headline Figures
Rigorous budget scrutiny means examining the assumptions behind projections, questioning whether contingency provisions are adequate, and identifying dependencies that could unravel if circumstances change. These habits — developed through years of working with complex financial structures — translate directly into the kind of board-level challenge that keeps executive teams honest and organisations financially healthy.
2. Early Risk Identification
A trustee with a financial background tends to ask different questions — not just about what is planned, but about what could go wrong. The habit of stress-testing assumptions rather than simply accepting them is one that Toby Watson developed over a long career in finance and applied throughout his time at Excalibur Academies Trust. Identifying risks before they materialise is one of the most valuable things a board can do.
3. Long-Term Financial Sustainability
Organisations that focus too narrowly on the current year can make decisions that look sensible now but create problems further down the line. Financial expertise helps a board take a longer view — assessing whether the organisation’s financial trajectory is sustainable. The qualities that support this kind of thinking include:
- A comfort with multi-year financial modelling and its inherent uncertainties
- Experience of working in environments where long-term institutional health was a primary consideration
- The discipline to resist short-term pressures when they conflict with longer-term sustainability
- An understanding of how financial decisions compound over time in complex organisations
Toby Watson’s perspective on this was informed by years of working with institutions where long-term thinking was simply part of the discipline.
4. Effective Oversight of Organisational Growth
When a trust grows — through new schools joining, mergers, or the expansion of central services — financial complexity increases significantly. A board member who understands how organisations scale and where the risks of rapid growth tend to emerge adds genuine value during those periods. Excalibur’s growth during Toby Watson’s tenure, including its merger with Gatehouse Green Learning Trust, required exactly that kind of informed oversight.
Growth Requires Different Governance
Financial controls that work well for a smaller trust may be inadequate as the organisation expands. Recognising when governance structures need to adapt — and having the financial literacy to assess whether they are keeping pace — is a specific skill that boards do not always possess. It is one that Toby Watson brought consistently during a period of significant expansion at Excalibur.
5. Support for the Executive Team on Financial Decisions
The board-executive relationship works best when trustees can engage substantively with the decisions the executive team brings. Financial expertise enables informed conversations about financial strategy, the confidence to push back where necessary, and the ability to support major decisions with genuine understanding rather than deference. Toby Watson’s background made him well-placed to provide exactly that kind of support throughout his chairmanship.
6. Credibility in Navigating External Scrutiny
Academy trusts are subject to scrutiny from the Regional Schools Commissioner, the Education and Skills Funding Agency, and other bodies with an interest in financial management. A board with genuinely financially literate trustees is better placed to engage substantively with that scrutiny — demonstrating that governance is taken seriously and that financial oversight is real rather than nominal.
7. A Perspective That Complements Educational Expertise
The best boards combine financial and educational expertise. Toby Watson’s contribution at Excalibur was not to replicate the educational knowledge already present on the board, but to bring something that knowledge alone could not provide — a rigorous financial perspective, applied consistently over nearly eight years, in service of a trust dedicated to the education of thousands of children.ds meaningfully over time.
