How do we work out what skills our trustee board is missing?

England and Wales: This page sets out the position in full. Scotland: covered, with its own code rather than the England and Wales one — the Scottish Governance Code says much the same about skills, recruitment and succession, and a recruitment conversation in Scotland has to cover one extra thing; see below. Northern Ireland: partly covered — the Northern Ireland Code’s own steer on board skills and replacement is established, but no Northern Ireland method, template or regulator tool for a skills audit was found.

Where do trustee skills audits go wrong?

In the recruitment: a board that fills its gaps from its own networks keeps the narrowness the audit found. This page covers skills audits and charity trustee recruitment in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Neither the Charity Commission nor OSCR nor CCNI prescribes a method.

Most boards can produce a skills matrix in an afternoon. None of the gaps is hard to see once someone asks. Think of the finance gap, the fundraising gap, or the missing lived experience of the people the charity serves.

What happens next is the part that decides whether the exercise was worth doing. The Governance Code’s own expectation is not “identify your gaps”. It is Board effectiveness, whose outcomes include open processes for board recruitment and election. It is also Equity, diversity and inclusion, whose outcomes include drawing on a range of backgrounds to improve decision making.

Both are should, not must. The Code enforces nothing, as assess yourself against the Charity Governance Code sets out. This page assumes that assessment is done: its board-composition outcomes are usually where the gaps first show.

The failure mode is specific and common. A board finds that it has no finance skills. It then fills the gap from the room it is already in. That means someone’s accountant, someone’s former colleague or a name from the chair’s address book.

The skill arrives. The narrowness the audit was supposed to surface stays exactly where it was. And the new trustee arrives with a relationship to an existing trustee. That relationship now needs managing as a conflict.

If you do one thing from this page, decide the recruitment route before you look at the audit results. It is much harder to argue for an open process once there is a named candidate in the room.

What should a trustee skills audit measure?

There is no statutory list of trustee skills, and no regulator publishes one. Nor is there a Tier A method for running a skills audit. The honest source for this step is the Governance Code’s outcomes, and that is all. Treat any consultancy template that claims a standard set of trustee competencies as one firm’s opinion, however confident the formatting.

That leaves the useful question. Map the board against what this charity needs in the next few years, not against a generic list. Look at five things:

• What the charity has undertaken to do. A charity about to take on its first employee needs employment knowledge on the board or a clear plan to buy it in. One about to take a lease needs property knowledge.
• What the board already spends money on. If you pay for advice repeatedly in one area, that is a gap with an invoice attached.
• What the board avoids. The item that gets deferred at every meeting is usually deferred because nobody in the room feels able to lead on it.
• Who is not represented. Not as a box-ticking exercise. A board with no connection to the people the charity serves makes worse decisions. That is what the Code’s equity, diversity and inclusion principle is about.
• Who is leaving, and when. A skill you have today is not a skill you have next year if its only holder is coming to the end of their service.

A skills matrix is a grid of the skills the board needs, set against the skills each trustee brings. Two cautions on the matrix itself.

Self-scored skills matrices flatter the confident and undersell the quiet. So have the chair test each self-assessment in conversation rather than collecting a form.

Also record the board‘s judgement of what it needs, not only what it has. A matrix with no “required” column cannot show a gap.

How to recruit trustees to fill the gaps

Open recruitment does not have to mean an advertising budget. It means the process is capable of reaching someone the current trustees do not already know:

1. Write a role description and a person specification. Say what the board needs, what the commitment is, and what the charity offers. Without this, an open process produces applications you have no basis to compare.
2. Advertise somewhere the board does not already reach. A local council for voluntary service, a volunteer centre, a trustee-matching service, the charity’s own beneficiaries and volunteers.
3. Use the same process for everyone, including the person a trustee introduces. A candidate who comes through the network is not disqualified by that. They go through the same steps.
4. Check eligibility before you appoint, not after. Disqualification is automatic in some cases, and the charity carries the consequence. Eligibility is its own step in this hub: check every trustee’s eligibility.
5. Record the decision and the reasons. The minute is what turns a recruitment round into evidence that the process was open.

For a charity still being set up, recruit your founding trustees covers the first board.

Two things a first-time recruiting board tends to skip. First, say out loud, early, what the role costs a person in time and what it exposes them to. What trustees are personally taking on sets it out. A candidate who learns it after saying yes is a candidate who resigns in year two.

Second, plan the trustee induction at the same time as the recruitment, not after it. A new trustee with the missing skill who never gets told how the board works will not use it.

Scotland: telling candidates about the register

A Scottish candidate should hear, before agreeing, that their name will be published on the Scottish Charity Register. If your charity is a Scottish charity, the recruitment conversation carries something England and Wales does not. A trustee’s first and last name is published on the Scottish Charity Register once the charity submits its trustee details. The window for applying to keep a name off it runs from the date that trustee is added.

That means it is a recruitment-time conversation, not an administrative one for later. Record trustee details with OSCR sets out the test, the window and what the charity has to do at the point of adding someone. Raise it before a candidate agrees to serve, not after.

Scotland: skills and succession in the Scottish code

The Charity Governance Code does not apply in Scotland. The Scottish Governance Code for the Third Sector does, on a voluntary basis. It has 5 core principles. Two of them, Effectiveness and Board Behaviour, cover exactly this ground. In the Code’s own terms, a board should have:

• A skills review — the board should regularly review the skills, knowledge and experience of the board, and provide opportunities for training and development.
• A recruitment and removal system — a formal and transparent system for both the recruitment and removal of trustees, in line with the governing document.
• Reach beyond the usual networks — recruiting trustees beyond the usual networks to ensure diversity, with a positive effort (including budget, if necessary) to prevent obstacles to becoming a trustee.
• A real induction — a good induction process including meetings with other trustees, staff and volunteers, a copy of the governing document, and a mentor for new board members.
• Succession planning — a pro-active succession plan, linked to the organisation's strategic direction, following any rules for how trustees are elected and how long they serve.
• Terms of office — fixed terms of office for trustees — recommended, but no specific number of years given anywhere on the Code's site.

That last one is worth reading twice. The Scottish Code recommends fixed terms and gives no number of years anywhere. So if a Scottish charity is told that a particular term limit is “the standard”, it should ask where the figure comes from.

OSCR links to the Code under its good-governance guidance and lists it as a useful tool. It adds a disclaimer that it cannot accept responsibility for third parties’ guidance. So this is a sector expectation, not a regulator requirement, in the same way the England and Wales Code is.

Northern Ireland: a steer, not a method

Northern Ireland’s Code of Good Governance covers the ground in one line rather than a section. Within its principle on working together, trustees “should also make plans for developing the board’s skills and for replacing members when needed”. We read this directly in CCNI’s own Guide 5, which quotes the Code’s principles in full. CCNI names and recommends the Code in its current trustee guidance.

What was not found is anything more specific: no Northern Ireland skills-audit method, no CCNI template, no regulator tool. The England and Wales material here is a reasonable starting point for a Northern Ireland board. But it is our suggestion, not a Northern Ireland source, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Where this page stops

This step ends with a plan to fill the gaps you have now. The next step in this hub, set up your trustee rotation and succession plan, covers how long a trustee should serve. It also covers how to rotate a board so the gaps do not all reopen at once.

This page leaves tenure to that one deliberately. No source we consulted settles trustee terms of office or maximum tenure for England and Wales. We would rather say so than repeat the figure everyone quotes.

Two things are safe to say here. The Scottish Code’s position is fixed terms, no number. For England and Wales, the what changed in the 2025 Charity Governance Code explainer sets out the Code’s own tenure guidance. It also shows that the Code’s two formulations of that guidance do not match. Neither is law.

Common mistake: recruiting only through existing trustees’ contacts

It is fast, and the candidates come pre-vouched, which feels like diligence. The Governance Code’s board-effectiveness principle expects open processes for board recruitment or election. Its equity, diversity and inclusion principle expects the board to draw on a range of backgrounds to improve decision making. A closed round can satisfy neither, and it usually produces a conflicts entry as well as a trustee.

Worked example

Wrenfield Village Hall’s committee runs a skills audit and finds it has nobody with finance experience. The chair’s own accountant is willing to join, and the committee appoints them at the next meeting.

The gap is filled. But the process was not open. So the outcome the audit was run to reach has not moved at all: a board that is less narrow than it was.

The committee now also has a trustee with a direct personal relationship to the chair. That relationship has to go on the conflicts register. It has to be managed at every meeting where the accountant’s own firm or fees could come up.

Nothing here was done in bad faith, and the accountant may be an excellent trustee. The point is narrower. The audit found a skills gap. The recruitment answered a different question, about who the board already knew. Deciding the route before seeing the results is what stops that happening.