Friday morning, I had good coffee, a light breakfast, and a beautiful surprise.

I was at George Watson’s College in Edinburgh for a Board Immersion visit. We began in a newly renovated part of the school: a leadership suite designed to solve a problem most people hadn’t either noticed, or just not solved, since 1932.

In a 1932 building, senior leaders used to have to make their way through three or four doors just to have a quick conversation with each other. Now, they can do what leadership teams need to do in 2026: talk quickly and often, think together, and keep the work moving. Fewer meetings; more water-cooler moments.

That was the first lesson of the day. I didn’t get it from a Board paper or from a presentation. I understood the investment’s value instantly by being there.

Then we were thrown into a morning in the primary school.

We saw the impact of a coordinated effort to improve reading. We heard just how eloquent even the youngest learners can be when adults expect them to think clearly and speak with care. We saw evidence of real thinking in classrooms, shaped by whole-staff work on questioning and formative assessment.

Quality teachers doing quality work.

And it made far more sense in the seeing than it ever could in a Board paper.

The rest of the day gave governors the chance to hear directly from parents, students and staff. We didn’t get the polished version; it wasn’t the “everything is fine” version. The warts-and-all version helps Board members think about the close-up experience of students, staff and parents today, and bear it in mind with long-term decisions for the years to come.

All this led me to a simple question:

Why did this immersion day feel so innovative? Why is it not routine practice?

In many of the schools we work with at NoTosh, Board members care deeply about the school. But their experience of school life is often partial.

They hear bits and bobs from the parents who speak up. They rarely hear from the parents who are delighted. They attend events, performances and ceremonies, which offer intensive moments of school life, but not immersive ones.

They hear pruned reports from leadership, prepared speeches from students, and read detailed papers.

Then they have to stitch the story together for themselves.

The problem is not that any one of these things is wrong. It’s just that, on their own, they leave too many dots to connect.

An immersion day helps join up those dots so quickly and vividly.

It helps Board members understand why the literacy programme they approved the budget for matters so much. It helps them see the difference between a strategy written down and a strategy lived out. It helps them move beyond the blunt instrument of exam results alone and ask better questions about growth, progress, confidence, curiosity and the daily experience of learning.

Governance is not just about scrutiny, and I’m the first one to put up his hand and say it’s such an easy trap to fall into. Governance is also about deep understanding of how your school works. That understanding is hard to build from the plush seats in a meeting room.

There is nothing stopping your organisation from creating a Board Immersion Day in the next six weeks. It doesn’t need to be complicated.

Start with one question: what do we wish our Board understood more deeply about the lived experience of this school?

Then build a morning around that.

Let them see the work, help them ask the right questions so they hear quality responses from students. Let them sit with staff with the incredible Friday-morning homebakes they share. Let them hear from parents they don’t know.

Let them notice the spaces, systems, the small frictions, the untrumpeted brilliance, and the things that still need work.

Why is anything more important for a Board member than truly understanding what school feels like every day? It’s not enough for a perspective to be derived only through the eyes of their own child or, worse, through the memory of their own education. And they can’t be trying to understand everything on the days when there happens to be a Board meeting.

Board members and Governors need to see the school as it actually is.

Alive, complicated, thoughtful, imperfect, ambitious, human.

That is the school your Board is there to serve: so they should see it.