My Chair's Handover

Automatically generated from the audio, so it may not be perfectly word-for-word.

Hi, welcome to the PTA podcast. My name is Yvonne, and I've been a PTA volunteer for a few years now. But I'm just one of thousands of volunteers up and down the country who all want to make a difference to their schools. PTAs are becoming even more crucial in UK schools to boost budgets, and I find it fascinating to talk to other volunteers about the different approaches they take. So please join me in this podcast to share information, generate ideas, debate issues, and celebrate success. And I hope that you can take something away for your PTA today. Hi and welcome back to the PTA podcast. It's great to have you here and happy new year. It's January 2025 and I'm back. I know it's been again a really, really long time since I recorded a new episode on this podcast. Please forgive me, it was um December, and uh that was a really crazy busy time in my house, and then it seems to have taken me quite a long time to really get back into the swing of going back to school after Christmas. Um I it seemed to take me a really long time to pack away my Christmas things this year. We did we did actually go on a holiday uh for the second half of the Christmas uh break. So we had the first week at home in our lovely house, um, using some of the new rooms from our extension, which was really nice, and um and then for the second week we um did go away and um so I wasn't really ready to take down any Christmas decorations when I got home. So the last two weeks I've been trying to gather everything from around the house that looks Christmassy and put it away. Uh, but just to make it harder for myself or to take longer, I decided to reorganise all of my uh Christmas storage boxes, the things that contain, you know, outside lights and tinsel and decorations and Christmas cards and wrapping paper and all the things that I need uh for Christmas time, which is quite a lot now, actually. I seem to have accumulated quite a few things, but I really do love Christmas and I do love decorating the house for Christmas. Um, it's really important to me, and and some of my Christmas decorations are actually some of the most precious things that I own. I have a fairy that goes on the top of our Christmas tree that I had when I was a child, and we all really love her because she is a fairy but also a star at the same time. Um, so she's a kind of like a fairy or angel, I suppose, stuck on the front of a star from the 1980s. Um, but because she's a two-in-one decoration, she's extra special, extra special. So she goes at the top of our Christmas tree. And then uh a lot of the decorations on my Christmas tree are have been made by my children over their time at primary school and preschool, and um I actually have a list of where they were all made when they were made, who made them, because I have three sons, and they're not always necessarily got their names on. So a lot of the things in my Christmas boxes are very special, and so I decided this year that I would just reorganise the boxes, make sure nothing was getting squashed at the bottom. I tried to do some repairs if that was necessary, so actually putting things away for Christmas has taken me ages this year, but I'm hoping that's gonna pay off for when I get the boxes out. Goodness me, in only 10 months' time I will be getting everything out again because we generally put our decorations up uh at the first weekend of December to make the most of all those beautiful twinkly lights, which is one of my favourite things about Christmas. So um, the last time I spoke to you, I regaled you with the uh what happened at um my AGM and the EGM that we had to organise because obviously I was stepping down as chair, and uh to my great relief, one of my friends decided to step up and become the new chair. So uh so that's but what's been happening, my PTA. So I'm now a general member of our PTA, which actually feels really nice, and I really appreciated it in December. I really noticed the difference. We did have a uh winter fair in December, which I wasn't in charge of organising, which I have to be honest, did feel a bit strange. Um, but I uh ran one of the stalls, I ran a craft stall, and it was really nice to kind of just be responsible for one stall and to enjoy the children coming to my stall. I did really like that. It's something I have missed about um being chair that I couldn't just do those things with the kids because I was generally the one running around making sure everything was going smoothly and I couldn't stay on a stall. So I'm looking forward to doing more of those things in the future. Uh but obviously now we have a new chair. I have had to work out how to do some sort of handover because I've never had to do this before. So this episode is actually going to be about how to do that PTA handover, or basically what what my experience was of trying to do that handover and some of the changes that we had to make to our PTA um records um and and basically what information I needed to share with the new chair. So if you are going through a similar thing, this might be useful, or if you are a chair who's thinking of stepping down, this is going to be coming your way when you step down and hand over to a new chair. So my PTA is a registered charity, so the most important thing for us to do was to make sure our details on the charity commission's register are up to date. Now I have a login as I am obviously a trustee, uh was a trustee for uh the charity. So I went into their new the charity commission's new electronic system to see how I added my new chair. So she's also becoming a trustee, obviously. I did have trouble in the past getting access to this new charity commission electronic system, but now it all works really well for me. Um so if you haven't organised that yet, if you are a charity, then I would say definitely get that sorted out because um you need to have that in place if you ever step down or need to make changes to your trustees. It's very simple and very logical once you get in there, and I think much much better than that other system. For some reason, it just took me a long time to get my login sorted out. I'm not quite sure what the problem was, but anyway, um, it's all okay now, and uh it's yeah, seems to be working well. So I added my new chair as a trustee, and I to do that I only needed her address and date of birth, which really surprised me because I thought I was gonna have to get access to some sort of identification document like her passport or her driving licence or something to put her on as a trustee, but no, I could add her because I was already a trustee. Then that generated an email to her from the website, and now she can make an account and gain access to the website. I also made her um a super administrator on on our charity, which means that she can um, as well as editing her own details, she can edit the details of other trustees and in general um make changes to our charity details on there. So um so that was really important because the second thing that happened at our our EGM in November was that we adopted a new constitution or a new governing document, which was the parent-kind model constitution, because our existing constitution was incredibly out of date, I think dating from 2002 or something, and it was even referencing laws that are now themselves out of date, so it really was time to get a new one. So we have a record in our EGM minutes that we had unanimous vote to adopt the new constitution, and we have the new constitution. So, looking at the charity commission website, there's a section on there once you've logged in to your charity called Edit Governing Document. And I had a look in there. Um, this is something we haven't actually completed yet, but there are some questions to answer about the changes to the governing document, and I'm hoping that by answering those questions, it will then lead on to us just uploading the document for them to review, possibly. Um, I'm not quite sure. I I thought it was best that I went through that with the new chair so that we did it together. So we're going to have um a get together just to progress that. Um I did have a look on the charity commission website about changing the governing document of your charity, and I found the advice really confusing. So if we can't upload our new constitution via this um edit system, then we will just get in touch with them and and ask what we should do because yeah, sometimes the advice is just really confusing, um, and it's just better to ask a person. And then, of course, the other important thing to do is to get our new chair as a signatory on the bank account. We have an online community account with Barclays, which needs two signatories. That's why we picked Barclays because we wanted a dual signatory aspect to the account. And at the moment, the two signatories on there are the chair and the treasurer. Um, so we've decided to keep that the same, except we're going to add on our school finance administrator. So there's going to be three people to approve payments, which should make things a bit easier if um, for example, somebody is away or the payment is particularly urgent, so it's not just relying on two people, but obviously um it's it's always going to involve one member of the PTA um with every transaction because there's only one member of the school on there, so that that keeps it um safe for us. Um we when we set up our account, which was a couple of years ago now, we had huge delays in getting it set up, and um I'm really hoping that adding two new signatories won't take too long. Uh obviously, I'm I need to stay on the account, otherwise we won't be able to use it at all. Um, so that's why I'm hoping it's not going to take too long so that my name can come off, and then um the new people can can get started on that. My PTA is a member of Parent Kind, which is an organisation in the UK that provides um insurance for PTAs, so we get our insurance from them. They also provide helpful advice to PTAs. Uh, so I also needed to update details on the ParentKind website. That was super easy. I just used my login to add the new chair as a new committee member, and then that generated an email to all the existing committee members registered for our PTA so everybody could see that a new person was added, and there was a link in that email to help her set up an account on the ParentKind website. So a lot of these new systems which rely on all these logins, which are sometimes a real pain to set up. Actually, now I've come to use them to make changes, seem to be working. Do I should I touch wood? I'm gonna touch wood, seem to be working uh quite well, quite smoothly. Um so yeah, hope hopefully it was worth all the pain of the um of the difficulties previously. Um and then I had to make sure I had shared various different logins with her. So, for example, our PTA account on just giving and many, many other websites um that we have accounts on that we've purchased things from or that we've used a service. Um, there's also our PTA generic email address um that we use, that that kind of thing. So uh I was thinking actually, it's really strange that I can share all these login details with her um that we've already set up, but I don't have a folder, like a physical folder with loads of paper in to pass on to her from my time being chair, which feels really strange. It's almost like I've done no work at all in seven years. Um, but basically all of our stuff is electronic. Uh, obviously, our treasurer does have a file, and a signed copy of our constitution will be living in that physical folder, which will get passed from treasurer to treasurer. But all the things I've done over the years are just saved on my laptop. Um sometimes we do reuse items, but more often than not we create new posters or certificates now. As uh one of my friends has access to Canva, which is just so good at generating really amazing eye-catching posters, and so the stuff that we used five years ago is just it just doesn't compare to what she can create now. There might be some times when we might uh reuse some wording from a similar fundraising event, or we might check how we ran a previous fundraising event. We have done that in the past, but that's probably it, really. So a lot of the things saved on my computer um from past events are probably not really going to be much help to um the new chair. We do have a PTA email address that the school set up for us many years ago, um, which is our PTA name, then followed by um the school name. Um, and we use Microsoft Office to log into that. And I have to say, that is the it's so handy to have an official email address. I think it makes our little PTA seem you know proper and more official, and it can really help when asking for donations, etc. Obviously, much better than you know using our personal email addresses. Um and as it's Microsoft Office that we use, we can also upload documents to be stored on that kind of uh website system. So what I'm going to do is to make sure all the important stuff for my laptop is uploaded into there just in case. Uh, so that's an action I need to follow up actually over the next couple of weeks. So that would be definitely things like our AGM uh agendas and our AGM minutes, um, the minutes from the EGM. I need to make sure there's an electronic copy of the new constitution on there, and then I was just going to really scan through my documents and just see if there was anything else that might be particularly helpful. Um I'll let you know what I discover in my in my laptop. There's all sorts of things in there, uh, including ideas for fundraisers that we never even did. So I don't think I'll probably bother with those, but anyway, I'll I'll see what I can find that that possibly might be useful. And at the moment, I think that is all the official stuff that I need to hand over to her. Uh, the new chair also emailed all the parents to introduce herself last November, which was really nice and I think actually a really important thing to do as well. Um, and uh so so just a little recap there. What we did was we updated the the legal information on the charity commission's register about our charity. We have we are going to update the bank account details, we have updated parent kind, and we have updated the parents at the school, and then I have tried to share the logins, which I feel are the most useful at the moment, um, and of course the email address. So our handover has been pretty straightforward, really. Um, when she was voted in as chair about a week after that, we met for coffee and just went over a few things, like how it how it all works, and how um I uh communicated with the school, um, that sort of thing. And I was very conscious that I didn't want her to feel she had to do everything the way that I did, so I did sort of keep mentioning that to her because I I feel that when you are chair of a group of people, everybody has a different way of doing it, and everybody has different ideas to everyone else. And I certainly don't think that I am the best PTA chair that there has ever been, and I definitely welcome new ways of approaching things and new ideas from other people because often they can think of things that you know I would never think of, um, which is really nice to have all those ideas thrown in. So I did kind of try and say that you know, just just because we've had some affair in the past doesn't mean you have to have a sum affair this year, or um, you know, you can think of something different, or you or if it's helpful to follow, you know, what we've done recently, then I guess that would be quite helpful if you've just started and you just need a bit of a like a a scaffolding to help you get through and and see how everything goes. So um she's she's really lovely and really friendly, and um I did ask her if it was well, I put her in a bit of a difficult position, I think, because I did I wanted to say to her, is it okay if I uh stick around? Because I just did not want to walk away from the PTA. I wasn't ready, I'm not ready to just walk away from it just yet. Um, and I wanted to see if she was alright with me hanging around as a general member. Um I didn't want her to feel like I was going to be judging what she was doing or or was saying how I'd done it or something like that. I didn't want her to feel uncomfortable with me being there, so we had a bit of a chat about that, and that was okay. She said it was fine. I don't know if she could have said anything else, but I felt it was important to sort of raise the question. I don't know if I handled that well. Anyway, um we do get on well, so I'm hoping that's a sign. And so now I am a general member, so I'm not a committee member, which means I'm not going to be a trustee and I won't be on the bank account. Um, but and I wasn't sure to start with in December or whether I'd made the right decision about stepping down. I was sort of thinking, oh, maybe I should have, I don't know, stayed on a little bit longer. But then when it came to December and all the crazy of December, and I didn't have to have the winter fair all over my shoulders, I decided actually, yeah, this is actually really nice for for a change in December. Because for the past, you know, however many years, um, I've always had a PTA event to organise in December, and sometimes I think one December, I had like three things I was doing, and it was on top of all the family um Christmas activities and then um Christmas activities at my older son's schools, it was just a bit too much. I don't know how I managed to do that, quite frankly. So this year it was nice to take a break and just be a volunteer on a stall and not to have the whole thing hanging on my shoulders. Um so yeah, to start with, it felt really hard not to be the chair, but now I've got used to it a bit more, and I'm hoping that um it will actually give me more time to do this podcast because I'm not organising all my PTA stuff. Um, and I'm also hoping that it still is okay for me to volunteer as a general member because I know how hard it is to get volunteers to stand behind a stall or to help. Set up things and I want to be a person that does that, even though I'm not the chair anymore. Um, and uh I I don't think that's going to change until my younger son leaves um primary school. And that's all I really wanted to cover in this episode. Uh I've found the handover to be very straightforward, so if you are um going through that at the moment or you are anticipating that um perhaps in the next few months or the next year, then um anything you can do now to maybe get those um online systems up to date is going to help you when it comes to passing that new information onto your onto the next team that takes over from you. And if you had, you know, a spare amount of time to maybe gather your documents together or make sure you have everything gathered together. And if you don't have everything and you're you are going to be stepping down in a few months' time, then there's still time to get um documents voted in or decisions made before you then step down. So if you know you're going to be stepping down, it might be good to have a think about those things that you want to do before you leave or think about the person that's going to be taking over from you. What are they going to need? Because if your handover is smooth handover, then that makes you feel good about um stepping away. It definitely takes the stress out of it. Um, so yeah, let me know if you have been through this or are going to be going through it. Um, would you have any other tips that I could perhaps pass on to the listeners? Um, do drop me an email. It's hello at ptapodcast.com. And uh if you like my podcasts, I'd be incredibly grateful if you could perhaps tell a friend about them. You must know other people in your PTA, or perhaps you have friends who are in PTAs elsewhere around the country, or indeed the world, or anybody involved in charity fundraising might find some of this information interesting and useful. So do spread the word about this podcast. I would be very grateful. I just wanted to finish on a positive note that my son, my elder son, is actually going on a school, they call it an expedition, um, to Malaysia in the summer, and part of their um preparation for this trip is to do some fundraising for the trip. And at Christmas time he and a friend booked a table at our at a local um Christmas fair where they tried to sell some things and and organise some games. And what was really lovely about that is he um asked me for some tips, which I was so touched by. He's 16 and you know when you do things on the PTA, and sometimes it feels like people don't either know what you're doing or don't see you doing the things. Um, you can feel a bit invisible, or your efforts can feel a bit invisible, but they've clearly not been invisible to my son, my eldest son. And uh I was so touched when he he wanted to talk about it with me and asked me for advice about what to do, and we had a really nice conversation about it. Um, his friend actually came up with a really cool idea which I'll share with you. He ordered a box of Christmas themed socks, I think it was from Amazon, and I think you got 12 socks in a box, and what they did was they mixed all the socks up so they had odd pairs of socks, but they're all Christmas themed, so they kind of go together. Um, and then they wrapped up one pair of socks, which you in Christmas wrapping paper, so and sold them for I think it was three pounds. Um, so then the customers came along and bought a pair of socks which was already wrapped up, so it was going to be a surprise when they opened it as to which socks they got in their little pair of socks. Um, and that sold really well, and I thought that was a really excellent idea. Um, instead of just selling Christmas novelty socks, selling an odd pair of Christmas novelty socks. Um so that was really cool. Um, they also sold some um books that they'd sorted out, both of them from their childhood. They had a little box of books there and some old toys. Um, in fact, they sold some things that I had um bought for my kids or for, you know, other kids' birthday presents that in the end I didn't end up gifting to them, so they're still new, unopened. So I donated those to my son so that he could sell those as well. Um, but I think they had a really nice time sitting behind the stall and talking to the people that came to the fair. The fair was three hours long, so that was quite a long time for him to hang around and uh and chat to lots of people. But what a great experience for him to do that. I was so proud of him and his friend that they took the initiative and organised it all themselves. Obviously, got a bit of advice. I had to mention, or have you thought about how people are going to pay for the things on your stall? You know, all those things that if you've never run a little stall before, you just wouldn't have thought of. Um, and so um we also talked about putting signs of how much things cost, that sort of thing. So it was, yeah, it was just a really lovely moment, and I was so incredibly grateful for the fact that I could I could take part in that a little bit with him and just give him some tips. Um, you know, based on the fact that I have been a volunteer myself and I have stood behind those stalls and organised those stalls, so there are things that I could help him with. So uh so yeah, look at all these amazing positive things that can come out of being a volunteer on your PTA. I'm sure there are loads of other things that we could come up with, um, loads of little stories like that. So um, anyway, until next time, uh, I do hope whatever you're working on your PTA goes well, and whatever your plans are for term three um are doing well. Is anybody thinking about their summer events yet? Maybe you are if you've got a particularly big event, do let me know. And yes, until next time, uh good luck with whatever you're working on, and I'll chat to you soon. Bye.