A GUIDE TO CHARITY GOVERNANCE IN ENGLAND AND WALES

Making governance navigable – in under 10 minutes

A map of charity governance in England and Wales for £10,000-£500,000 annual income charities, drawn from practitioner experience across five charities as trustee, governance manager, consultant, and in senior leadership.

Read it on day one to understand what governance is. Revisit it to check whether you’re practicing it. Return to it as chair to check where the board has drifted. The same ten panels – three different conversations, transformed by what you have learned between them.

Download the one-pager here for free:

At the Festival of Trusteeship, someone from a small charity asked me a question I’ve been asked many times since in a small charity context: what does good governance actually look like?

The 10Ps is my answer. It’s a map – not a checklist – for small charities in England and Wales thinking about how to govern well. Whether you’re building your governance from scratch, strengthening what’s already in place, or reviewing how far you’ve come, it gives you a structure for the conversation.

We know the Charity Commission publishes approximately 50 pieces of core guidance and over 100 supplementary documents. As small charity trustees – volunteers without professional governance training – we are legally accountable to understand and apply relevant guidance, often alone, often at midnight before a board meeting. The 10 P’s is the framework I built because of the earlier question and from me having lived that problem as a trustee and wishing I had had a tool like this to help me navigate those early stages. It helps you navigate that accessibility problem.

It was developed from direct practitioner experience across five charities, as a trustee, governance manager, consultancy and in charity senior leadership, and builds upon my existing 6P model. It is scoped to charities with £10k-£500k income in England and Wales. The framework scales with organisational complexity – apply it proportionately to your context.

Use the 10 Ps to build governance foundations and help you navigate the Charity Commission guidance, then use the Charity Governance Code, which sets best practice, as your ceiling for continuous improvement.

Priortisation – more on how to use it for Boards

A one-pager that explains governance across a charity’s key areas in 10 minutes. Hand it to a trustee to give them a starting point map.

P1 Principles sits above everything else as the legal foundation – it highlights the six core trustee duties that all nine remaining Ps put into practice.

The remaining nine Ps can fall into three groups, which is primarily to assist Boards undertaking cyclical governance reviews without urgent governance issues:

Foundation – how you are constituted and who you are

P2 Purpose · P3 Platform · P4 People

Operation – how you govern day to day

P5 Policies · P6 Practice · P7 Protection

Accountability – how you demonstrate you’re governing well

P8 Prudence · P9 Public Accountability · P10 Performance

The framework moves clockwise from P1 through to P10 and back to P2 Purpose – because good governance is a continuous cycle of evaluation and return, not a destination you reach once and file away.

Each P includes a board question. Use these questions, or vary them to your own context, in a board meeting, a governance review, or a trustee away day to help move from asking what good governance looks like to asking whether yours is working.

The unspoken 11th P of the 10P’s Framework – Politics, and navigating it in charities

*Published version 4, April 2026. The framework is iterated as practice and sector guidance evolve as and when necessary. I welcome and collate feedback for periodic updates- if you have any feedback please do Contact Us.