Takeaways from our 2026 Big Trustee Breakfast

The theme of this year’s event, Turning Insight into Impact, focused on how charity boards can translate knowledge, reflection and good intentions into meaningful outcomes for the organisations and beneficiaries they serve. Across the morning, speakers explored how trustees can move beyond simply gathering information to making better decisions, strengthening board effectiveness and aligning resources with mission.

We were delighted that the event was fully booked again, and to be supported by our four event sponsors, Barclays Private Bank, Reliance Bank, Sage Intacct and Troy Asset Management.

Following a welcome by ICAEW’s Deputy President Caroline Smale, our opening panel session tackled board succession planning and trustee recruitment, and heard from two young finance trustees, Morgan McArthur and George Tennent, about why it’s not only critical for boards to attract and develop the next generation of finance trustees, but why they – and their employers – will benefit from their voluntary role.

Research by the Charity Commission for England and Wales in its report Trusteeship – a positive opportunity revealed several concerning findings about who currently serves as charity trustees.

While trusteeship is widely valued, the data highlights structural gaps in age, skills and workforce participation that could create future governance challenges:

• The median age of charity trustees is between 65 and 69, highlighting how governance leadership in the sector is concentrated among people close to or beyond retirement age.
• Only 1% of trustees are aged 30 or under, suggesting very limited engagement with younger professionals. Just 8% of trustees are aged 44 or younger, meaning early- and mid-career professionals are significantly under-represented on charity boards.
• More than half of trustees are retired (54%), compared with just 22% of the wider population, suggesting boards may rely heavily on people later in their careers and may struggle to replace them over time.
• More than one in five trustees are aged 75 or over, reinforcing concerns about succession planning and long-term board sustainability.
• Some boards lack core professional expertise: for example, 7% of trustees report no finance or accounting skills on their board.
• A significant proportion of trustees have very long tenures, with 22% serving more than 10 years, highlighting the importance of succession planning and refreshing skills on boards.

Together, these findings show a clear need to encourage more finance professionals, particularly those earlier in their careers, to consider trusteeship. Strengthening the pipeline of finance trustees will help ensure charity boards continue to benefit from strong financial oversight, diverse perspectives and sustainable leadership for the future.

The research also highlights a persistent gender imbalance in key governance positions. While the proportion of female trustees has increased in recent years, women still make up 43% of trustees overall, compared with 57% men. The imbalance becomes even more pronounced in senior board roles: 63% of charity treasurers and 65% of charity chairs are male. This suggests that, although women are increasingly represented on boards, they are still less likely to occupy officer roles that shape financial oversight and strategic decision-making. Addressing this gap, by encouraging more women to take on finance and treasurer roles, could help strengthen both the diversity and resilience of charity governance.

In this session, Nigel Kippax from Charity Leaders explored how charity boards can assess and improve their effectiveness in a way that is practical and proportionate. He challenged the idea that there is a single definition of ‘good governance,’ arguing instead that boards should focus on ‘appropriate governance’ that reflects the size, maturity and complexity of their organisation.

The session emphasised that governance is not only about control and compliance but also about enabling impact, creativity and growth, with boards needing to balance risk management with strategic leadership. Kippax outlined different approaches to conducting a governance review, including frameworks such as the Compass Cass Governance Model and the Charity Governance Code. However, he encouraged charities to design tailored review processes that ask the right questions for their needs. A key takeaway was the importance of focusing on two fundamentals:

1. Trustees understanding their role, and
2. Trustees making good, beneficiary-focused decisions collectively as a board.

This session featured Alex Hayes from NPC and Trupti Reddy from Tender Education and Arts, who discussed how charities can make clearer strategic choices to maximise their impact. Hayes introduced the idea of the ‘strategy triangle,’ explaining that effective strategy sits at the intersection of a charity’s core purpose, available resources and capabilities, and the external environment. Strategy should be seen as a continuous and adaptive process rather than a fixed multi-year plan, enabling organisations to respond to new information and changing needs.

Reddy then shared practical insights from her charity, describing how the organisation reviewed its strategy to avoid mission drift, clarify its vision and align programmes, partnerships and funding with its long-term goals. The process involved engaging staff, beneficiaries and trustees, using tools such as theory of change and systems mapping, and making deliberate ‘stop, start, continue’ decisions to ensure resources and fundraising approaches were aligned with the charity’s mission and impact ambitions.

We filmed all sessions of the Big Trustee Breakfast and will publish them later in the year – we will let you know in an upcoming newsletter. In the meantime, you can explore resources for board effectiveness reviews and strategy development.

Resources for governance effectiveness reviews:

• Charity Governance reviews
• Compass Cass Governance Mode
• DSC’s Governance App

 NPC resources for strategy development:

• Strategy for impact: framework for thinking about the strategy process
• Theory of change: a ten-step handbook to creating a theory of change
• Unlocking support: an example of system mapping for youth mental health services