Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Martin Nicholson

Summary

1. The author, a former teacher and further education lecturer, has served as a governor for nearly three decades. While broadly supportive of the status quo he has some concerns relating to workload and the general lack of appreciation school governors receive from central government.

Effectiveness and Accountability of Governing Bodies

2. In my experience, which goes back almost continuously to the early 1980s, too many governors are either unaware or indifferent to the legal framework within which they are required to operate.

3. Within the last few years I have experienced, at first-hand, a high performing school that failed to hold an election for the vacant post of Chair of Governors despite having a correctly nominated candidate and despite the election appearing on the agenda for the meeting. All attempts to resolve the problem via the school or the Department for Education proved fruitless. I have also supported a school where many of the statutory policies either didn’t exist at all or hadn’t been scrutinised for many years.

4. When I first became a governor most of my colleagues had many years of service “under their belts” and the annual turnover of governors was low. Over the years the median age of governors appears to have dropped—although the turnover appears to have increased greatly.

5. Recently I can remember being shocked at the first meeting of the academic year when I realised that I had served more years as a governor than all the other members of the governing body combined.

6. Governing Bodies should be required to submit an annual return detailing by category which governors had resigned in the previous 12 months and identifying how many years each of these governors had served. The results would feed into any debate on the optimum number of governors of each type that should form the membership of a typical Governing Body.

7. The idea of having a core group of governors taking responsibility for a high performing group of schools (each school being OFSTED good or outstanding) has some merit. Where this becomes more problematic is in the case of a group of under-performing schools. In my experience such schools both require and deserve a greater investment of time from governors than would be the case with less challenging schools. I am not convinced that there is a large pool of volunteers who would want to take on such a challenge.

Current Models of Governance including Structure and Membership

8. I currently serve on two governing bodies—I am Chair of Governors at a small village primary school and I am Chair of the Behaviour and Support Committee at an 11–16 school.

9. I am broadly in favour of the status quo—with only a small number of caveats.

10. I support the principle of having strong representation of parents on the governing body of schools. However this is somewhat tricky in the case of village schools where the number of potential candidates for parent governor can be very small. Governing bodies usually perform best when they have a wide range of skills within their membership and this can be hard to achieve if the pool of available talent becomes too restricted.

11. The difficulties associated with being a staff governor should not be underestimated. I was a staff governor for a number of years and it is thankless role. Staff Governors, if they wish to remain on good terms with their Principal or Head Teacher, are almost obliged to support the “party line”. It can be difficult to extract an alternative perspective from them if they feel it will damage their career if they speak out.

12. When I first became a governor back in the 1980s I was working in a further education college in Somerset. My Chair of Governors was a large scale landowner and a local “worthy”. He appeared to have no interest whatsoever in the views of other governors from outside his small inner circle—neither were the views of the pupils (16+) or their parents worth finding out, never mind acting upon. He had none of the attributes normally associated with being a “good” Chair and I always wondered how he came to be re-elected year after year.

13. After my election the Principal (a gentleman in every sense of the word whose word was his bond) warned me in a friendly way about the utter indifference the Chair felt towards staff governors and the extreme hostility he seemed to feel towards trade unionists. This was always going to be a problem for me because I had been elected by trade union activists at the college who had become bored to death with the lap-dog inaction of the “Association of Agricultural Education Staff” (AAES). I don’t think that the Chair ever spoke to me directly during my years as an elected representative.

Remuneration of Governors

14. Many governors appear reluctant to claim legitimate travel expenses if such claims have to be met from the school budget. I suggest that all approved claims should be met termly using ring-fenced funds specifically allocated to and administered by Local Authorities for that purpose.

15. Should the decision be made to pay school governors, over and above their expenses, I would suggest a three tier system. Band 1—Chair of Governors, Band 2—Vice Chair of Governors and Chairs of the sub committees, Band 3—all other governors.

16. No payments should be made to governors in their first year in the role to discourage people joining school governors just for the allowances on offer.

Relationship between Governing Body and other Partners

17. Senior staff employed by the Local Authority need to be extremely careful that they do not create the impression that they regard their own time as far more valuable than that of the school governors with whom they are interacting. Meetings should, as far as possible, be held at mutually convenient times and if some inconvenience is unavoidable this should normally be borne by the paid employee and not by the volunteer.

18. During my time as Vice-Chair and then Chair of Governors at Danetre School in Daventry, Northamptonshire I met weekly with the Head Teacher. This was one of the most rewarding parts of my professional life.

19. In contrast my interactions with trades unions were usually in situations where there was an on-going capability or disciplinary issue. Incoming correspondence and phone calls from the trades unions tended to be some combination of aggressive, flippant or sarcastic and a less experienced Chair might well have felt intimidated.

Issues not Addressed Elsewhere

20. Taking on the role of the Chair of Governors, particularly in an underperforming school, involves accepting that you will need to spend hundreds of hours per year on school business. Many of these hours will need to be during the working day. An unfavourable OFSTED report will inevitably result in the “the blame game” with lots of finger-pointing being directed, from both inside and outside the school, towards the governors in general and the Chair and Vice-Chair in particular.

21. Add to this the almost total lack of thanks or appreciation Chairs of Governors receive from the Local Authority or from central government and you can see that it doesn’t make for a very attractive “employment” package. On more than one occasion as a volunteer I have chaired high-powered meetings where the combined salaries of the eight to 10 people around the table would have been in excess of £500,000 per year. I was as knowledgeable and experienced as any one of them but the “powers that be” were content for my work to be unremunerated.

22. The administrative and emotional burdens associated with dealing with allegations of staff misconduct or the issues surrounding the capability of school staff must not be underestimated. A Chair of Governors is likely to have to carry much of the burden single-handed, particularly during the initial investigation stage of what can be a lengthy process.

23. When I started as a school governor both the number and complexity of the responsibilities that had to be dealt with were very much less than are now the case. It was also assumed that you would be able to serve your apprenticeship before other members would even consider asking you to take on the role of chairing a sub-committee. Chairs and Vice-Chair were usually veterans with 10 or even 20 years of experience to draw on and most of the time deserved the respect with which they were treated by the other volunteers.

24. Now fast forward to the present day. The number of people prepared to take on the role of a school governor has dropped significantly—not least because Government has dramatically increased the workload and this has meant that many more people have neither the time nor the inclination to spend their limited leisure time in this way. Governors are now being “forced” to take on positions of additional responsibility before they feel comfortable doing so and, more importantly, before they have the knowledge required to do the job.

25. I think it is extremely difficult to do the job of Chair of Governors unless you are retired or self-employed since much of the job has to be done during the working day. It is also almost a prerequisite that you have a detailed knowledge of education before you take on the role—how else can you be expected to act as a critical friend to the school? You need to know what questions to ask and what would be a reasonable answer.

December 2012