When professionals with serious financial careers choose to give their time to educational governance, the results can be quietly but meaningfully significant – and Toby Watson is a case in point.
Finding the right people to sit on academy trust boards is one of the less-discussed challenges in education. Trustees need to bring genuine professional depth, ask the right questions and understand complex financial and organisational structures – without overstepping into operational management. Toby Watson, whose career in international finance spanned nearly two decades, offered exactly that kind of background when he took on the voluntary role of Chairman at Excalibur Academies Trust, serving for almost eight years before stepping down in early 2026.
The governance of multi-academy trusts has grown considerably more complex as the trusts themselves have grown in size and ambition. Boards are expected to provide meaningful oversight of budgets running into tens of millions of pounds, support chief executives through periods of significant change and ensure that their schools remain focused on educational outcomes. Toby Watson served as Chairman of the Excalibur Academies Trust between February 2018 and early 2026, bringing to that role a background shaped by nearly seventeen years at Goldman Sachs. During his tenure, the Trust grew to encompass twenty schools and an annual budget of around £140 million, serving approximately ten thousand pupils across their schools.
The Governance Gap That Many Academy Trusts Face
Academy trusts occupy an unusual position in the educational landscape. They are charities, bound by charity law, but they operate at a scale and complexity that would not look out of place in the commercial sector. A trust running twenty schools, employing over a thousand staff and managing a budget of £140 million needs board-level oversight that is genuinely capable of engaging with that complexity.
The difficulty is that the pool of people who both understand that complexity and are willing to give their time voluntarily is not unlimited. Many trustees come from educational backgrounds, which brings obvious value. But financial expertise, risk management experience and familiarity with large organisational structures are not always easy to find on a volunteer basis.
This is where professionals from the private sector can make a contribution – provided they approach the role with the right mindset. Governance is not management. A trustee who comes in expecting to run things will quickly cause problems. One who comes in expecting to support, to question and to help strengthen the framework within which others lead – as Toby Watson sought to do – can make a real difference.
How Does Private Sector Experience Translate to Educational Governance?
The skills that matter most in educational governance – financial literacy, risk awareness, strategic thinking and the ability to hold an executive team to account without micromanaging – are not unique to any one sector. Toby Watson’s years at Goldman Sachs, working across complex financial structures and international markets, developed exactly these capacities. The context is different in education, but the underlying disciplines transfer more readily than might be assumed.
What Toby Watson Brought to Excalibur Academies Trust
Toby Watson’s professional background was in structured finance. During his time at Goldman Sachs, he served as a Partner and Global Head of Principal Funding and Investment – a role that required managing significant financial complexity and thinking carefully about long-term risk and sustainability.
Those habits of mind are well suited to the demands of trust-level governance, and Toby Watson applied them consistently throughout his time as Chairman. Reading a set of management accounts, identifying where financial pressure is building, asking whether a proposed course of action carries risks that have not been fully considered – these are things that Toby Watson’s career in international finance prepared him to do, even if the specific context of an academy trust is quite different from anything encountered in banking.
A Voluntary Role, Approached with Appropriate Humility
What is perhaps most notable is that Toby Watson’s contribution was entirely voluntary and approached with a clear sense of what the role was and was not. He was not there to run the schools. He was there to support the Trust’s leadership, to contribute his experience where it was useful, and to help ensure that the governance framework was as strong as it could be.
That distinction – between supporting and directing – matters enormously in educational governance. The best trustees understand that their role is to strengthen the conditions in which good leadership can flourish, not to substitute their own judgement for that of the professionals running their schools day to day.
The Specific Value of Financial Expertise on Trust Boards
Financial expertise is one area where the crossover from private sector careers tends to be particularly valuable:
- Academy trust finances are genuinely complex, with funding streams, capital budgets, pension liabilities and audit requirements that benefit from board members who can engage with them critically
- Financial oversight is one of the areas where trustee boards carry the most direct legal responsibility, making genuine expertise especially important
- The ability to spot early warning signs of financial difficulty – something that a career in risk management develops – can make a meaningful difference to a trust’s long-term stability
The contribution that Toby Watson made over eight years at Excalibur Academies Trust represented a sustained opportunity to put those capacities to use in a genuinely different context.
Why More Private Sector Professionals Should Consider Trusteeship
There are things to be aware of when moving from a commercial background into a trustee role. A professional moving into trusteeship – as Toby Watson did when he joined Excalibur Academies Trust in 2018 – needs to be prepared to listen, to learn and to contribute on terms set by the educational context. Among the qualities that tend to make private sector trustees effective are:
- A willingness to subordinate their own preferences to the needs of the trust and the schools it serves
- Genuine curiosity about educational outcomes, not just financial performance
- Patience with processes and decision-making timelines that may feel slower than those they are used to
Toby Watson’s tenure at Excalibur Academies Trust is a reminder that when experience is offered in the right spirit – quietly, collaboratively and with a genuine commitment to the educational mission – it can strengthen school governance in ways that benefit their schools and the pupils within them for years to come. For those considering a similar path, the example that Toby Watson set is worth reflecting on.
