As Trustees' Week 2026 comes to an end, we caught up with Claire Stibbon, one of our external trustees, to explain her role (and why external trustees are so important for us).
A transcript can be found underneath the video.
What do I do as a trustee?
Hi, I'm Claire Stibbon – I'm one of the external trustees for Open SU.
The role of a trustee covers probably six main elements:
1. Making sure that Open SU is carrying out its stated purpose.
2. Making sure that we comply with governing documents and the law.
3. Acting in the best interests of Open SU. That means we have to weigh up our decisions quite carefully because you could make a decision that feels as if it works very well in the short-term – so it might solve a problem that you've got this week – but you have to think what the consequences of that are for long term, and obviously it's the long-term future of the organisation that we're looking to protect. So I think that's a bit of a balancing act for trustees often.
We also can't have a conflict of interest, so I can't be making decisions for the organisation that serve me. So I have to be quite clean when I come into the organisation. And if there any conflicts I become aware of, I need to be really open about the fact that might happen, and perhaps recuse myself from a conversation.
4. We have to manage the resources of Open SU responsibly, and spend money on the things that take the organisation's purpose further. But we also can't take excessive risk with resources because that might affect the future of the organisation.
5. We have to act with reasonable care and skill, so that means we need to put thought into the decisions that we make, and we need to give adequate time to prepare for the Board meetings and the like that we go to. And we need to use what our technical or professional background or insight is, where that's appropriate, to help us make really good and solid decisions that protect the organisation for the long term, and enable it to keep doing what it exists to do.
6. We have to make sure that the organisation is accountable – is it well-run, is it effective and is it complying with the law?
So that includes some stuff that might feel quite boring but is quite important about making sure that the way decisions are made is documented - that we're really clear on what some of the processes for making decisions are – that we vote when it's appropriate to vote on decisions, so it's not on a whim. So there's quite a lot of process that sits behind being a trustee.
Why is it so important to have external trustees (and not just OU people)?
I think the benefit of having external trustees and not just Open University people is that we do bring independence. And again, that's a balancing act because we need to get familiar enough with Open SU to be able to know what the organisation's there to do and to be thinking about that – but there's something about being able to be objective and step back and not be perhaps personally concerned or involved in what might happen next. So I would describe this as being disinterested, which is not the same as being uninterested but that's the balance I would strike.
What would happen to Open SU if we didn't have trustees?
If you didn't have any trustees, Open SU wouldn't be able to run without any trustees, so legally trustees need to be in place. But if for some reason we didn't have any trustees, then actually there is the risk that money could be spent for the wrong purposes, that excessive risks could be taken with the resources of the organisation, and it just might not be able to continue and to represent and accommodate the needs of all of the students at the Open University, which obviously is a huge number – around 200,000 people – so if there weren't trustees, the Open SU couldn't exist.