School House Trust
A proposed review of the scheme and governance
of this charity
One of the charities in our parish is called the ‘Fletching School House Trust’. The Trust owns the building to the left of the school (School House) and the site of the school. Income from renting School House to the Education Authority is used for broadly educational purposes in the parish. It’s a good charity and quite a few local people have benefitted from it. However, it needs some updating for two reasons:
First, when it was set up in the nineteenth century the village was quite a different place than it is now. The original object was, “education benefitting the labouring, manufacturing and other poorer classes”. We’d like to adapt the scheme of the charity to reflect the village as it is now and make it more about supporting general educational needs and, as a secondary object, ‘general pastoral purposes’.
Second, when it was set up in 1825, the Trust was purely about supporting Fletching School. However, again the village has changed, and so has education. At the time children finished schooling when they left the village school, whereas nowadays children are in education till they are at least 16 and attend secondary school for some years. Obviously, the main focus will continue to be Fletching School, but the trustees would like the opportunity to help other children too when needed, when they get to secondary school, if they are going to a school to meet particular educational needs, or indeed if they are being home schooled.
There’s another change that the Trustees would like to make too, and this time about democratic accountability. When the charity was set up the Trustees were established as ‘the Vicar and Churchwardens’. This reflected the normal customs of the time. However, there should now be greater democratic accountability. The Parochial Church Council is elected each year and we’d like to put these elected officers, or a proportion of them, in charge of the charity. Please get in touch with me if you’d like to make any comments or have a good idea. The deadline for responses is the end of April (this year).
You can contact me on fletching.vicar@gmail.com
One last thing to note is that anything we do has to be approved by the Charity Commission. They will not allow us to do anything which is too different from the original principles of the Trust. What we are suggesting here is a modest set of proposals to reflect the current situation and which we believe the Commission will approve.
Rev Dr David Knight