From California’s Death Row to school governance, the Confederation of School Trusts’ Samira Sadeghi explains how the roles are more linked than you might think. When Samira Sadeghi is delivering training to support sector leaders getting governance right, she explains how insights gleaned about human fallibility from her time working as a lawyer on death row can help. The eight prisoners Sadeghi, director of trust governance for the Confederation of School Trusts, represented during her twelve-year legal career on California’s Death Row “almost without fail” had one thing in common. There’s a “direct parallel” between the prefrontal cortex and school governance, Sadeghi adds, as both are where “decision making, monitoring your performance, problem solving, planning ahead, and goal-directed behaviour come from”. A drawing of a parrot made by a death row clientMoving upstreamDeath Row work was “never a 9 to 5 job” and she quit to “make up for lost time” with her two children, then three and six.