Policy Register & Governance Review

Full policy register

All 38 documents, grouped by the school's own category headings, with our assessment of review currency as of 25 July 2026. Click any title to open the school's own published copy.

What stands out, across the whole suite

Nine specific findings recur across the four batches below — some are minor documentation slips, one or two are worth a school-improvement conversation. None amount to a missing statutory policy: EMS publishes a complete, current suite by the standards that matter most (safeguarding, SEND, Prevent, equalities, finance, admissions all have live, in-cycle documents). The pattern below is about internal consistency and currency, not coverage gaps.

Safeguarding & Welfare:

• SEND Policy and Student Behaviour Management Policy both state in their own body text that they're reviewed “annually,” while their header tables show 2–3-year gaps to next review.
• Two documents — the Prevent Statement and the Student Code of Conduct — carry no document-control table (reviewer, governor, dates) at all, unlike every other policy in the suite.
• The Provider Access Policy's published sign-off table contains a literal unfilled placeholder, “xx/xx/25,” and sits on an outlier 4-year review cycle against a 2-year norm elsewhere.

Admissions & Values:

• The Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Policy (May 2023) sits on a ~4-year review cycle, far slower than Admissions (annual) or Transition (biennial) — yet a fresh Equality Objectives note is produced under it every year without the parent policy itself being refreshed at the same pace.
• Both Admissions Policy versions reuse identical 2021 census catchment proportions and an identical “30% female” comparison statistic, carried forward unrefreshed between the 2026 and 2027 editions.

Governance & Constitution:

• The published Register of Business & Pecuniary Interests (April 2025) is now over a year old and predates several since-confirmed Board changes — due a refresh under the Academies Financial Handbook's expectation that it stay current.
• Three governors' terms of office were due to expire within about five weeks of this review (late August 2026), requiring imminent reappointment or replacement decisions.

Finance & Funding:

• The Charging and Remissions Policy states it will be “reviewed annually,” but its own header shows a two-year gap between sign-off (June 2025) and next review (June 2027).
• The Boarding Bursary's 100%-support income threshold (£30,805) and the 16-19 Bursary's equivalent threshold (£26,000) are different, unreconciled scales, despite likely overlap between boarding and day bursary applicants.

Safeguarding & student welfare

This is the most thorough part of the suite: 13 documents citing specific, current guidance — Keeping Children Safe in Education 2025, Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023, the SEND Code of Practice, the Prevent Duty — rather than generic template language. Yasmin Trevelyan, Assistant Headteacher (Pastoral), is the named thread running through almost the entire batch: Designated Safeguarding Lead, Prevent lead, mental-health lead, designated teacher for Looked After Children, and SENDCo, and the named staff reviewer on 8 of the 13 documents. Five Deputy DSLs are separately named in the Child Protection and Safeguarding Policy, which gives reasonable resilience against any single point of failure, but the sheer number of statutory roles concentrated in one post is worth noting on its own terms.

11 of the 13 policies have clear, unexpired, internally-consistent review dates. The Child Protection and Safeguarding Policy's own next review (August 2026) falls within about a month of this analysis, so it's fair to call it due imminently rather than overdue. No pupil-identifiable content or case detail was found anywhere in the batch — the one document with a health-data-shaped section (Supporting Students with Medical Conditions Policy, Appendix 1) is a blank template, not populated records.

Admissions, transition & values

EMS publishes unusually explicit admissions mechanics for a UK school — specific GCSE grade thresholds, a scored written aptitude test, and numeric interview-shortlist and scoring thresholds, plus a full Equality Act 2010 impact analysis bundled into the policy itself. Comparing the current two live versions (entry 2026 and entry 2027) shows a school mid-expansion: the 2026 edition was the substantive rewrite (catchment widened to add Bristol, Gloucestershire and Wiltshire; a closed-catchment rule; intake raised from 64 to 75 places), while 2027 is a lighter maintenance update mostly reflecting the resulting capacity growth.

2026 was the substantive rewrite — catchment expansion, a closed-catchment rule, the PAN rise from 64→75, a larger interview shortlist, and new Free School Meals admissions support. 2027 is a lighter maintenance update, mainly reflecting the resulting capacity growth, with the same 2021 census figures carried forward unrefreshed in both versions.

The Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Policy (May 2023) is candid about EMS being too small — around 30 staff — to be demographically representative of the community it serves. The accompanying, much fresher Equality Objectives 2026/27 note is unusually direct for a school-published document: it names a live problem (an oversubscribed outreach programme currently turning away STEM-underrepresented applicants, and a travel bursary it says is misallocated) rather than only stating aspirations.

Executive pay

Published separately under the "Our Values"/finance disclosure requirement to report staff benefits above £100,000 in £10,000 bands (anonymised headcount, not named pay):

EMS publishes headcount-by-band, not named individual pay — standard academy trust practice. Staff earning £100k+ in total benefits rose from 1 to 3 between the two years shown.

Governance & constitution

EMS is a standard DfE-model academy trust: a private company limited by guarantee (no. 08515877, DfE number 878/4008) incorporated 3 May 2013, jointly sponsored by the University of Exeter and Exeter College. The Articles of Association read as the unmodified DfE model articles for a 16-19 Academy trust — no bespoke clauses were found in the sections reviewed.

Members (the trust's ultimate constitutional authority, roughly equivalent to shareholders): The University of Exeter, Exeter College, John Laramy (Exeter College Principal), Professor Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova (University of Exeter Deputy Vice-Chancellor), and the sitting Chair of Governors, Sarah Turvill (an ex officio Member).

Governing Board: 17 members: the Headteacher (ex officio), 5 Exeter College nominees, 4 University of Exeter nominees, 4 co-opted governors, 1 staff governor, 2 parent governors. Sarah Turvill chairs; Nathan Harvey is Vice Chair.

A further layer assigns 14 named governors a personal “link” portfolio (Safeguarding, Finance, Premises/Health & Safety, SEND, Outreach, etc.), each scrutinising a specific set of roughly 30 policies — about a third of them statutory — before they reach committee or full Board.

Register of interests & meeting attendance, in aggregate

The April 2025 Register of Business & Pecuniary Interests covers 23 people (governors, the Headteacher, senior staff, and the two non-institutional Members). About half declared an interest — almost all of them simple employment by one of the two sponsoring institutions (University of Exeter or Exeter College) or by EMS itself, plus a handful of trusteeships at other education-sector charities. One declared a spouse's employer. Nothing in the pattern looks improperly undeclared or managed — it's a largely mechanical product of EMS's sponsor-appointment model, where most governors are by design employees of its two sponsors.

Governors' Meeting Attendance 2024/25 shows strong engagement in aggregate: roughly 86% attendance across Full Board meetings, ~93% across the four standing committees combined, and an overall combined rate of about 90%. The one annual strategy day had lower turnout (~59%), though with a single sitting a year that figure is statistically thin. Consistent with treating this as a published-but-personal record, we're reporting the aggregate rate rather than a per-governor breakdown.

Finance & funding

The 2026 Finance Policy is EMS's internal financial-controls document — 39 pages setting out a full Scheme of Financial Delegation from the Board down to individual budget-holders. A sample of the headline thresholds:

Selected figures from the 39-page Scheme of Financial Delegation inside the 2026 Finance Policy — not the full schedule. Reserves policy targets £250,000–£600,000 held in reserve, citing lagged bursary funding as boarding numbers grow as one of four named risks.

EMS's Monday–Thursday boarding provision — unusual for a state-funded free school — is means-tested through its own Boarding Bursary, separate from the standard national 16-19 Bursary Fund:

Covers accommodation only — food is separately offset through Free School Meals entitlement. The separate national 16-19 Bursary Fund uses a lower, unaligned 100%-support threshold of £26,000, so a boarding family's support level can differ materially between the two funds even though many boarders apply to both.

The school's founding Funding Agreement with the Secretary of State for Education is dated 22 May 2014 — the only version on file at the current policies page — setting out grant terms, conditions and land clauses under the Academies Act 2010. It's a large scanned legal document; we sampled its cover and contents pages rather than the full text.

This is an independent analysis, not affiliated with Exeter Mathematics School. Compiled by AI-assisted research, directed and reviewed by a human editor, 25 July 2026 — see sources & methodology for this site's general standards.