Education CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Frank Newhofer
1.0 I have been involved in education for over 40 years as a teacher, senior adviser (in seven Local Authorities and across all phases), school improvement partner and as a governor. I have had direct experience of working with more than 200 governing bodies in that time. I have been a chair of governors in a large urban secondary school and am currently a governor in a large primary school.
2.0 We need a system for governance in our schools that can help to make a positive difference to pupils and to their communities.
3.0 For what should a governing body be responsible and to whom? Michael Gove says “we have to be more professional” in his call for better governance. There has been much talk about the importance of “accountability” in our schooling system. The expectation is that a governing body should be responsible for setting strategic direction, challenging the executive on standards (“forensically”), securing solvency and best value, compliance and engagement. In addition the governing body selects and hires the head teacher. Consequently it is now quite properly said that governors are required to have certain skills if they are to carry out such responsibilities in a beneficial way. And yet...and yet at the same time there is an equally proper expectation that a governing body should be accountable to (and even represent) its “stakeholders”. There is a problem of “realism” and “compatibility” here.
4.0 I remember when I first became a governor the main need on governing bodies was for skills that professional educators lacked in trying to run a school post LMS; accountants, business people with HR experience, people who understood things like health and safety, capital and buildings issues, and children’s health, were particularly prized as governors. Such skills were seen as helpful in adding to the “stakeholder” voice of parents and local community representatives. There was at least a tacit understanding that it would be inappropriate to supplant the skills of professional teachers when it came to the matters most directly concerned with the education of children. And we were also expected to represent what the Taylor committee advocated in 1977:
“We believe that there is a need to ensure that the school is run with as full an awareness as possible of the wishes and feeling of the parents and the local community and, conversely, to ensure that these groups are, in their turn, better informed of the needs of the school and the policies and constraints within which the local education authority operates and the head and other teachers work.
To meet this need we believe that all the parties concerned for a school’s success—the local education authority, the staff, the parents and the local community—should be brought together so that they can discuss, debate and justify the proposals which any one of them may seek to implement. We recognise that cooperation for the good of the school can and does take place between these interests both formally and informally on both an advisory and a consultative basis. We consider it necessary to go beyond this and propose that all the parties should share in making decisions on the organisation and running of the school since; in our view, this is the best way of ensuring that every aspect of the life and work of the school comes within the purview of all the interests acting together”.
5.0 Now the government wish that a governing body be effectively and predominantly part of the skilled leadership team in a school, accountable for standards and at the same time be necessarily drawn from and accountable to staff, parents and their communities (if even in a new more “flexible” regime). It’s a recipe for frustration and confusion and the solution lies in some clear policy direction, dare I say “regulation”, rather than more prevarication.
6.0 The government no doubt feels somewhat hoisted by its own “big society” petard in that to achieve its ideal governance model, one akin to a board of directors, with a paid chair and a small number of highly skilled/experienced scrutinizers/monitors, risks removing a huge number of volunteer parents and community representatives from their governorships.
7.0 There are fundamental problems with a “commercialized” model of governance. Even assuming “new” volunteer governors can be recruited, either with the necessary skills sets, or the time and inclination to be trained in such, how does their role actually articulate with those more directly employed as leaders of learning and those responsible for inspection? The argument is that a school needs the “regular” challenge of a governing body. But there are few governors today that can and do spend more than 30 hours pa in their school. Schools are increasingly complex and the rigor required of inspection is extensive—can governor challenge/monitoring (without surveillance) ever be more than a poor shadow of a properly defined and necessarily expert process of “holding to account for progress”?
8.0 There is an expectation that all schools can/should be “good”. And of course this applies to their teachers. There is much that needs to be said about the essential nature of “trust” in relation to necessary professionalism and the unintended outcomes of unrealistic expectations and punitive cultures. We have the same, understandable, expectations of our doctors. And yet our relationship with the medical profession and its institutions is very different to that of our relationship with our schools. (Baroness Onara O’Neill is eloquent on the way that “accountability has replaced trust”, the importance of the way that “trust dispenses social capital” and the “complexity inherent in making ‘reliable’ judgements”).
9.0 In 1995 Putman wrote in “Bowling Alone” how “systematic enquiry showed that the quality of governance was determined by longstanding traditions of civic engagement. “Networks of civic engagement foster sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity and encourage the emergence of social trust. Such networks facilitate coordination and communication, amplify reputations, and this allow dilemmas of collective action to be resolved. It is parental involvement, in particular in the educational process, that represents the most productive form of social capital”. In my view, by sacrificing stakeholder accountability we will be eroding this social capital and that will only further serve to diminish civic engagement and social connectedness.
10.0 So is there a solution? The so called “new freedoms/flexible arrangements” for governing bodies just avoid the issue (“we need to work towards more intelligent forms of accountability” Baroness O’Neill). It is with some reluctance then that, in the face of the realpolitik of the government’s intentions, I compromise on Baroness O’Neill invitation and suggest that we now distinguish between a school’s Board of Directors and its Governors.
10.1 Schools should be accountable to their communities; they are responsible for listening and responding to their “stakeholders”—pupils, parents, staff, community representatives. Every school should have a “Stakeholders Committee” with nine “Governor” members—five parents, two staff, one pupil, one community representative. This “Stakeholders Committee” should have a right to send one representative governor to also be a director on the local “School Board”*. This committee should have a clear role and responsibility for “support and challenge” in relation to all pastoral, communication, extended school and site (saving budget) related issues.
10.2 A properly skilled ‘School Board’ should have accountability for regular scrutiny and the monitoring of standards of attainment. Such a Board could operate on a federalized’ or district locality basis for a group of schools. A “School Board”, of “directors”, should have the following membership: a paid chair—with employment experience in education/training and experience as a chair (or willingness to take on certified training in this area), one Stakeholder Committee governor from each school, three executive directors at least one of whom should have experience of finance and one of whom should have experience of the analysis of complex data. (It is debatable whether or not head teachers should be able to be Board directors). Questions remain as to how such Board Directors will be recruited and appointed (particularly given the increased diversification in the system) and in at least the case of the chair paid for?