Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Rosemary Lovatt (Chair of Governors, Brentwood County High School, Brentwood, Essex)

Key Points

Recruitment of Governors can be very difficult.

Many parents struggle to make any meaningful contribution because of work commitments.

If you are able to find a good parent governor they have to be re-elected after 4 years, and there is no guarantee they will be re-elected.

A significant amount of training is required for any governor to be really effective.

If you are a chair of vice chair of a governing body the time commitment and responsibility is significant without any financial reward, or even reimbursement of out of pocket expenses.

The latest Ofsted framework is much more robust in inspecting governing bodies, but is it realistic to hold volunteers to account to this extend?

Local authorities oversee schools at arms-length and rely heavily on governing bodies to hold schools to account.

1. Currently the structure and recruitment of governing bodies makes any reassurance of quality governance extremely difficult. As the Chair of a Governing Body one has no say over the parent governors who join or leave the Governing Body and therefore cannot influence the overall skillset of the Governing Body. This means a significant proportion of the Governing Body may be well-meaning parents who have limited skills, abilities or time to be effective members of the governing body. If you are lucky enough to find a good quality parent governor who is prepared to give up sufficient time to contribute to the governance of the school there is a very strong chance that just as they are really getting up to speed, their term of office comes to an end and there is no guarantee that they will be re-elected, even if they wanted to. Other governor categories are equally difficult to recruit. This means that we are giving the responsibility to ensuring our education is the best it can be to often poorly managed and populated governing bodies of volunteers who are time poor and usually lay-people who have very limited experience of education.

2. To understand schools and governance there is a significant amount of training required. This again is a big “ask” of volunteers and even the most dedicated can find it hard going. Once this knowledge is gained it is often lost at a governors term of office comes to an end.

3. As a Chair of Governors I have at times worked more than 40 hours a week for the school. Although I do this willingly because I care that our students get the best possible education and I have made a commitment to do this, I still feel it is a crazy system, which isn’t sustainable. It costs me money to be a Chair of Governors. There is no vetting of my skills, experience or performance as Chair, and yet I have significant potential impact on the performance of our school.

4. I totally support the more robust line being taken by Ofsted to raise standards in our schools. It is appropriate to hold governors to account, but given all the points above is it realistic to expect volunteers, most of who don’t go through any selection process, to be high quality. I strongly believe that the system needs a major overhaul if we are to rebuild our world class education system. We need suitably qualified, and rigorously selected individuals as governors of our schools who are financially rewarded for their time and are subject to performance management like everyone else taking on a role in an organisation. Local authorities should employ governors, or at least the Chair of Governors and take a more active role in monitoring the performance of each school.

5. Local authorities are toothless in enforcing high standards in our schools. They work at arms-length and are reliant on an effective governing body to address issues and ensure standards are improving in a school. If the governing body isn’t effective a school can coast for years!

Conclusion

The system needs a significant overall to ensure that responsibility, knowledge, accountability and power are combined in one body. Today school Heads and their senior leadership teams, Local Authority officials, Ofsted and Governing Bodies all “dance around” each other in a well-meaning, but often ineffective way. I’ve seen this first hand at my school where years of “satisfactory” Ofsted judgements were not acted on by anyone, the consequence of which was that our children did not meet their full potential. This cannot be allowed to continue.

December 2012