Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Wandsworth Borough Council
Summary
Governance is increasingly central to school accountability yet the quality of governance is inconsistent.
Strategic school improvement should be the central focus of the governing body and this should be taken into account when revising the statutory framework for governance.
Governance should be better promoted and supported to ensure that individuals with appropriate skills are recruited and consideration should be given to paying chairs.
Mandatory training and a code of practice should be considered for governors, chairs and clerks to governing bodies.
Moves to encourage smaller more flexible governing bodies would be welcomed.
1. The Current Situation
There are currently estimated to be around 350,000 people nationally volunteering their time to support their local schools as governors. This is the largest and, largely unsung, volunteer workforce in the country. The roles and responsibility of school governors has significantly increased over the last decades with much more emphasis on their role as strategic leaders and on being an effective system of challenge to school leadership teams. Governors oversee every aspect of school life and have strategic responsibilities that include:
appointing the headteacher;
performance management of the head;
signing off the budget and overseeing financial controls;
making decisions about changing the status or size of a school;
setting review panels for exclusions, staff capability proceedings etc; and
setting achievement targets.
2. Current Concerns
(i)The quality of governance varies too greatly between schools.
(ii)Heads vary in their knowledge of effective working with governors.
(iii)The legislative framework for governance is complex and unwieldy.
(iv)Governing bodies do not always have the whole remit of skills to meet their significant responsibilities.
(v)The chair’s role is pivotal to governing body effectiveness yet the skill of chairs’ varies hugely and there is no mandatory chairs’ training.
(vi)Effective advice and organisation is essential to strong governance but support from experienced clerks is patchy.
(vii)Governing bodies work largely in isolation with little opportunity to exchange skills and good practice.
In short, governors’ impact on school improvement is too variable between schools.
3. What Sort of Governance is Needed?
Good governance offers a robust and effective system of accountability for public money and a drive to focus on teaching and learning and school improvement. The governor role in holding a school to account has increased and become more important in the new freer schools market. Academy status brings greater governor responsibility and less local accountability. In order to ensure effective governance in the new system there needs to be a professionalisation of governance that includes appointing individuals with appropriate skills (human relations, finance, education professionals) taking up governance and payment for skilled chairs.
4. Governance in Schools Causing Concern
Where schools are judged by Ofsted as less than good—improving governance should be an integral aspect of school improvement. There should be recognition in the national “schools causing concern” guidance that development work for the governing body is part and parcel of school improvement work.
Where governance is strong it brings, not only checks and balances to a school, but significant creativity and ideas to support the school and its leaders.
5. Recommendations
(i)The new constitution regulations have a smaller stakeholder element and this has significant merits. The new model offers more flexibility but continues to have some representation from the school community (parents, the LA and school staff).
(ii) There is a need to ensure that professional skills are well represented on all governing bodies. The Governor One Stop Shop is already doing good work here and this has had a positive impact in Wandsworth. However, to attract individuals with strong skills governance needs to be higher profile and much better promoted.
(iii)The move to smaller governing bodies has not taken hold even where governing bodies are choosing to reconstitute. This is because, to be effective on a smaller body, the governors involved need excellent skills as well as strong commitment and this is hard to achieve. This borough strongly supports the move to smaller, more flexible governing bodies, as these can be very successful where they are able to meet promptly, reach quick decisions and generally be more proactive (as IEBs in this borough have shown). However, more work needs to be done to raise the calibre of new governors and to ensure that they can operate flexibly, with appropriate small quora, whilst maintaining accountability and able to fulfill their responsibilities for forming exclusion and appointment panels and so forth.
(iv)The recommendation in the recent ministerial working group report on school governance that every governing body would benefit from with a trained clerk should be fulfilled.
(v)The legal framework for governance should be revised to make governor’s responsibilities easier to understand and to ensure that governors are fulfilling a strategic rather than managerial role.
(vi)Chairs of governors should be required to complete mandatory training. Payment of chairs should be considered.
(vii)New governors should be required to complete mandatory training to ensure that they have a good understanding of their new roles and responsibilities.
(viii)Governance should be promoted and methods of recognising the work and support governors provide for our schools should be considered
(ix)The national training programme for aspiring headteachers should include a compulsory course on working with governors.
(x) Governing bodies should be encouraged to share good practice and skills between each other.
December 2012
