Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by John Harman

Having been a school governor I was dismayed at the lack of public education on the role of a school governor in any meaningful discourse, therefore you had a tendency to realise that the attraction of being a governor for many was based on false premises and in effect became a de facto popularity contest within the playground politics when seeking election, the methods for election give a very slim evaluation of the capabilities of purpose, roles and responsibilities and leadership. Therefore many parents do not understand what they are voting for, similarly many do not realise what they are signing up for.

Changes in recent policy development, particularly with regard to academy status has left a number of governing bodies at a loose end. Having attended consultation meetings with a local school that underwent conversion to an academy, it was evident that the governing body had little or no understanding of the proposition they were putting forward or how to engage in community cohesion. This has particularly left a dis connect between the school and the community.

The training provision for most governors is woeful at best and follows extremely bad practices of learning and development, they tend to be chalk and talk at the trainees with a handful of hand outs that are barely read, many of the training environments I attended training were in primary schools with inappropriate seating and in one case the venue was locked and we had to do the training on a bench in the playground. Better use of online learning programmes for knowledge acquisition and then active learning to scenario test applied skill would better suffice.

In society we have not adequately promoted the role of governor and many institutions do not support staff in performing this valuable task, we need to raise the profile wider than mere “worthiness” and connect it with skills and learning development for individuals in key areas of skills development required in the workplace—align it better (look at possibilities of badged learning attainment and/or things like tin can open learning initiatives)

Many governors I met were drawn to doing it based on seeing it as “preferential” to their children within the school, an “opportunity” to affect school policy to their advantage, this was the main reason I left governing as I found the whole approach abhorrent, additionally many governors will end up hindering the teaching and leadership of the school by insisting on practices that contradict good teaching and learning practices because they have outdated notions of education—better education on modern educational landscapes would be good. I often felt that we were not recruiting a diversity of skills from all sectors of life and rather because of the nature of the role, only attracting people that have time on their hands or a sense of “worthiness”—governing bodies needs a much wider capacity of skills to support a school and outreach programmes are not achieving this.

Governing bodies are not accountable enough to the community at large and too few opportunities are encouraged to connect the governing body to the community, many shy away from this. There should be better provisions for reporting to the community in easy ways, not minutes of meetings hidden away that the public have to seek out.

I would investigate different incentives to motivate people to be governors, including the possibility of connecting the work with work place pay reviews and potentially some form of tax credit or credit system.

January 2013