GUARDIANS OF RISK: Managing the risks that keep leaders up at night

If you sit on SLT, or you hold finance, estates, compliance and operations, risk is rarely theoretical.  It is the issues that keep leaders awake at night, safeguarding incidents, serious health and safety events, cyber breaches, sudden funding pressure, inherited contracts, weak controls, building failures and reputational flare-ups.

This session shows how to get those risks under control without creating a bureaucratic monster.  Using a lifting the bonnet view of internal scrutiny, we look at what scrutineers and auditors actually examine, where schools and trusts commonly cut corners, and the blind spots that keep recurring.  You will leave with a clearer way to set risk appetite, strengthen assurance, and maintain a live risk register that drives decisions, prioritisation and contingency planning.

In this session we explore 

• Setting a clear risk appetite and framework

• Mapping operational and strategic risks across finance, estates, data and compliance

• Communicating risk effectively with SLT, governors and trustees

• The risks most likely to escalate fast, and early warning signs

• Safeguarding assurance as a governance issue, not just a policy file

• People and capacity risk, key person dependency and continuity

• Building a live risk register, owners, review cadence, triggers and escalation

• Turning scenarios into mitigations and contingencies linked to budgets and cash planning

Take home points

• A clearer understanding of your role as a risk guardian

•  A usable structure for a live risk register

• A clearer view of what scrutiny expects and why

• Practical fixes for common weaknesses and blind spots

• Tools to embed risk ownership across teams and leadership

This session is for

School business leaders, CFOs, COOs, operations and estates leads, and governance professionals responsible for risk, assurance and organisational resilience.

Daryl Unitt