What a chair actually needs before the spring meeting
Six pages beat twenty if the agenda only names the leaving cohort, winter attendance, and one subject. The rest can wait for the departmental meeting.
Spring meetings in Tbilisi schools tend to arrive with too much paper. The clerk has been asked to “put the results in,” which often means last year’s examination file, a photocopied attendance summary, and a subject head’s comments that were written for staff, not for trustees.
The chair does not need the full extract. The chair needs to know which year is on the table, whether the previous year is beside it, and which decision — if any — the director is asking for. A leaving cohort pictured without its size in the caption will launch a staffing argument the figures cannot finish.
If the agenda has three items, the pack should have three pictures plus a one-page note. The other pages from a full briefing belong with the senior team. Mixing them in “so governors see everything” usually means they see nothing before item four.
We have started asking clerks to mark, on the proof, the page that supports each agenda line. Pages with no mark come out. That habit has shortened more meetings than a denser chart ever did.