School Governing Bodies

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Rosindell. I apologise for being a few seconds late for the start of the debate.

I am a member of the Select Committee on Education, which produced the reports that we are discussing, so I hope to be able to offer an insight into the thoughts of the Committee—as did its Chairman, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart)—during the report’s compilation and the various evidence sittings, although I also have some thoughts of my own.

Without doubt, governing bodies within schools play a critical leadership role, but inadequate governance is not addressed frequently enough and has ramifications that reverberate far beyond the governors’ meeting room and reach into the classroom. School governors provide the strategic leadership and accountability that are so important in determining the success of our schools. Governors appoint head teachers and other staff and in some instances, as trustees, own the school grounds. Governors are responsible for school finance, and they work with head teachers to make the tough decisions about balancing resources. In many cases, governors are actually dependent—often over-dependent—on their head teacher to enable them to fulfil their role, particularly in primary schools. That is why one of the key focuses of our report was on training, the need for it to be comprehensive and good enough to ensure that governors know their responsibilities, and how to get the information they need to make decisions and to hold the head teacher and staff robustly to account.

Some 300,000 people serve as school governors across the country, and we can be proud of the majority, who do an excellent job leading our schools and have a true passion for improving education in their communities. We must not forget that these individuals are unpaid and that, as such, governors constitute the largest volunteer group in the UK. We owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude. They do their very best in what I know from nearly 30 years of first-hand experience can be exceptionally challenging circumstances. We cannot, however, overlook the areas of weakness and the room for improvement. We must not lose sight of what the system does well, but attempting to convince ourselves that it is perfect would only make things worse. I was therefore pleased to have the opportunity, as part of the Education Committee, to examine the issues in much more detail.

One of my principal concerns when exploring the evidence to put the report together was the high vacancy rate on governing bodies, and the difficulties that many schools experience in recruiting. That, of course, can contribute to other shortcomings, such as a lack of the necessary skills base to fulfil core functions. Department for Education figures suggest that 11% of roles nationally are vacant. Having been responsible for nominating and appointing school governors for Cleveland county council before it was disbanded, and then for Stockton borough council for several years thereafter, I know the magnitude of the problem and the repercussions for the quality of governance.

I also appreciate that the difficulty in recruiting governors can vary enormously within the boundaries of a single local authority, let alone between different authority areas. The Committee took evidence to that effect from the National Governors Association, which confirmed that a large proportion of governing bodies have considerable difficulty in finding skilled governors. It is common sense that schools in cities and large urban areas are often better able to attract individuals with the specific skills required successfully to carry out the functions of a governor. From my experience, I know that that is not equally the case for smaller towns, let alone more rural areas, and so was able to relate to the observation, submitted to the Committee by the National College for Teaching and Leadership, that there is significant evidence that governors are recruited for their representative role, rather than for a particular skill set.

Some schools struggle to attract governors not only from the community and local business, but also from among parents, who may not have the confidence or do not think they have sufficient experience. I remember well talking with head teachers across the Stockton borough about their struggles to persuade capable parents to agree to put their names forward. The idea that an election would ever be necessary was, in many cases, a fantasy. It is true that a wholly representative structure would not necessarily lead to high-quality governance. It is equally the case, however, that governors recruited on the basis of skills alone may lack the all-important community knowledge that enables our schools to cater to specific local circumstances and challenges. An adequate skills base therefore need not be at odds with representation, but it is important to get the balance right, and training is the key element.

I was therefore pleased that the Committee’s report welcomed the Government’s commitment to raise the profiles of school governors. Governors, like teachers, are pillars of the community, but I often wonder whether they realise how important they are to our education system. Clearly highlighting the importance of governors, who have the potential to shape the future of our young people by ensuring provision of the highest educational standards, is a fundamental first step if we are to attract the most able candidates, and I welcome moves to make specific functions clear in both legislation and the governors’ handbook. I am more cautious in welcoming the removal of rules and regulations, in particular where they exist to safeguard important standards and performance, although I appreciate that it will be necessary in some cases to allow for greater flexibility to take decisions, as that can impact positively on educational standards.

During the final part of my speech, I want to concentrate again on training, and on my concerns about the Government’s failure to give clear direction on the need for both proper training and bodies to deliver it, particularly in the light of more and more schools opting to become academies, and the run-down of local authority services in the face of cuts inflicted due to both the academies programme and general central Government policy.

I remember Ian Short, now retired, who ran the governor support service in Stockton-on-Tees when I was cabinet member for children and young people. His team won awards for the quality of its provision, and governors in the area had better understanding of their roles and responsibilities as a result. Even then, not all governors undertook training, and some did little towards sharing the burden of the governing body’s work load. It is all very well to stand at the school gate and say, “I am a parent governor”, but often such people did not know about anything other than saying, “I am a parent governor”, or how to do anything other than attend the meetings.

We have a new kind of leader, and even governor, in the brave new world of academies and free schools; some do extremely well, but there are examples of failure, and some recent reports have shown that. If we are to get the best from our governors, however, they must be trained properly and, if they take on extra responsibility, such as being chair of the governors or of the finance and staffing sub-committee, they ought to undergo even more training. Not every school can attract an accountant, a human resources professional and a lawyer to sit on its governing body—though I would argue that they, too, should undergo compulsory training. The Government must therefore ensure that such training is available, but sadly, Ministers do not appear to agree.

I do not want to defeat my own argument by suggesting that Members present might point out that even Ministers do not undergo training for their roles when appointed by the Prime Minister, and they are dealing with matters of state. There should, however, be training for governors, who have day-to-day responsibility for the most important people in our community and ought to know what they are doing. I hope that the Government will rethink the need for high-quality, preferably compulsory, training, and having done so, that they will make the resources available to provide it for maintained schools, academies and free schools alike.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Carmichael]

I agree with my hon. Friend, who makes a powerful point. I can point to similar problems in my constituency. Any Member of Parliament interested in schools in their constituency will be able to say the same thing. That is rather a sad fact.

We need to find ways of making sure that governing bodies almost fear the consequences of failure. Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools, has suggested that he should have powers effectively to remove governing bodies that are quite clearly incapable of turning a school around from failure to success. If we see that local authorities are unwilling to act—perhaps because everybody knows everybody and no one is willing to upset someone they knew a long time ago or have worked with successfully in some other department or school—we have to find other ways.

The people we should really be thinking about are children and their parents. They are the real stakeholders. We have to provide a system that guarantees that their school will be promoted, managed and dealt with in the best possible way. So my next request to the Minister is to make sure that we have a way of getting rid of governors who cannot do the job. It is dead easy: that is what we would do in a business, so it is what we should do in a school.

We want to see self-improvement. Our whole education system is about self-improvement. Any organisation should always be motivated to improve. The question we should always ask ourselves each day is, “How can I do this better?” That is a natural thing to do, so we want to see governing bodies doing it. Of course, that must be in conjunction with head teachers. As my hon. Friend the Chair of the Education Committee correctly pointed out, we need clarity as to what the head is supposed to be doing and what the chair of governors is supposed to be doing.

Again, that may well be a matter on which different types of schools would have different opinions—I accept that. But we cannot have a situation in which chairs of governing bodies are sitting around in schools for a couple of days a week trying to do what the head should be doing—that is completely unacceptable—and we cannot have a head basically taking on the role of the chair by steering the governing body through a difficult course to cover up or disguise inappropriate results and the like. We have to have clarity on those roles. That is where the Department for Education comes in: we need an explicit description of what the chair of a governing body is supposed to do. That should be part of the attempt to inspire people that I referred to earlier: we want to inspire the best people to be chairs of governing bodies, so we need to make sure that they know what they are doing when they approach the job.

I have talked a lot on the Education Committee about interim executive boards. As we all know, IEBs are used to replace governing bodies if the big decision to dismiss a governing body is taken. That is quite right. But that raises the question of why, if the solution is an interim executive board—a smaller body than the one it is replacing, made up of skilled people and with a focus on improvement and the capacity to get on with the job—we do not have something similar to that in the first place: a smaller structure, made up of people equipped with the right skills, so that the school can benefit from that kind of flexible, imaginative, innovative, robust governing system. That is where I have a slight variance of opinion with some of my colleagues on the Education Committee.

[Alex Cunningham]

I have experience of working with an interim board that was placed in a school in Stockton-on-Tees. It brought tremendous skills to the school and helped turn it around, so I was all in favour of that approach. But I have also seen tremendous parent governors, who are not going to be the leader of the body or its chair, but are tremendous advocates for parents. Surely there is room for people such as that as well in our governing body system.

[Neil Carmichael]

The key point is that a lot of governors are parents anyway. I have been a governor for a long time and a parent for a long time. I do not know about the hon. Gentleman’s family life, but I assume that most Members of Parliament have children. If they do not, that would not prevent them from being a governor, but if someone does have children that would not prevent them from being a governor either. I do not think that the question concerning parent governors is relevant to what the membership of an interim executive board should be. I have seen a large number of interim executive boards and I know that their members have children.

[Alex Cunningham]

Does the hon. Gentleman mean that he does not think that parents should have the right to elect some of their own to our school governing bodies?

[Neil Carmichael]

What is really important—this was going to be my next point, so I am glad the hon. Gentleman has taken me on to it, as we are probably done and dusted with IEBs—is that if the governing body is not good enough, parents should be able to say so. Accountability rests on that point. The real interface of accountability is between governors and parents. If parents think that the governing body simply is not doing a good enough job, they should be able to dismiss it. It is important to give parents as a group the capacity to make a decision as big as that, in defence of their children’s education and future.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham]

The idea of parents being able to sack governing bodies is an interesting concept; perhaps it should be explored in greater detail. Would we apply that idea to academies and free schools as well as to state-maintained schools?

[Neil Carmichael]

The logic of it is that if we want to make sure that governing bodies are properly accountable, we have to decide who they are accountable to. In my view, that should be parents. The problem with stakeholder representation and all that sort of thing is that it actually dilutes accountability: the fact is that once parents get on the body, they start becoming defensive of their own behaviour and conduct, when in fact what they should be doing as parents is testing what the body is doing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham]

On a point of clarity, I think that I said when I opened my contribution that I wanted to offer some of my own thoughts and I do believe in some form of compulsory training, but should not leaders in our schools accept that they, too, can learn? They should submit to training without being compelled to do so.

[Rushanara Ali]

The exemplars clearly do that. All of us will have seen schools taking on this role actively and ensuring that proper training is provided. I certainly benefited from training as a governor of a further education college. The charitable organisations that provide training to governors, not just of schools and colleges but of charities, charitable organisations and social enterprises, are vital. The question is about those schools that currently are not able or willing to provide training. How do we ensure that they step up and apply the appropriate mix of encouragement and pressure, to extend the training that is needed to get their governors to perform the kind of role that they need to perform?

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) and the Education Committee on this excellent and well thought through report, which casts valuable light on an important issue in our education system that does not always get the attention it deserves. I am pleased to hear that so many members of the Education Committee are dedicated governors, and I congratulate them on that. A great deal of understanding of what goes on in the front line has informed the Committee’s report.

The Government believe that school governance has a vital role to play in driving up school and pupil performance. In an increasingly school-led system, we need governing bodies that create robust local accountability, and the future of schools is truly in governors’ hands. As has been said in the debate, there are more than 300,000 governors across the country, all of whom give of their time with great passion and effort to improve schools, and to improve the lives and outcomes of the children who attend them. Schools need dynamic, confident and skilled governing bodies that understand their responsibilities and are focused on their core functions. Many governors benefit from their role as school governors, which helps them to build up their skills in leadership and management, and improve their understanding of what goes on in schools and the community. We must all highlight the benefits of being a governor when we talk about that extremely important role.

The Government have made several reforms to improve the ease with which governing bodies can operate, and more sharply to focus the work of governing bodies on improving educational standards in schools. As several hon. Members have mentioned, new regulations have set out the strategic role of the governing body and the central role of the chair in setting the vision of the school, holding the head teacher to account for educational performance and ensuring that the school’s money is well spent. Those functions reflect the criteria that Ofsted inspectors use when they consider the effectiveness of governing bodies. Ofsted plays an important role in ensuring that those governing bodies are fit for purpose.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey) commented, governing bodies may unfortunately have been diverted on to other issues of less strategic importance. The purpose of our reforms is to ensure that governors can spend more time holding the head teacher to account, ensuring that funds are well spent and that the quality of education in the school is high. One of my roles in the Department is to implement the new national curriculum, which will be ready in September 2014. I see one of the key roles of the governing body as ensuring that that implementation takes place and that schools take advantage of their new freedoms to create new school curricula. The governing body is a helpful conduit of information between the school and the community.

[Alex Cunningham]

On the question of accountability, does the Minister share the view of the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) that parents should be able to sack their governing bodies? Assuming that she does agree, should that apply to academies and free schools as well?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I am not sure that that is exactly how my hon. Friend put his point. It is down to Ofsted to identify weak governing-body performance. Ultimately, it is the decision of either the Secretary of State or the local authority to replace that governing body with an interim executive board, should it not be doing what it is meant to be doing.[Official Report, 6 January 2014, Vol. 573, c. 1MC.]

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham]

Will the Minister give way?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I am sorry. I must complete my remarks, otherwise we will run out of time before I address all the other points raised this afternoon.

In a multi-academy trust, things are more complicated, but there are significant potential benefits. The board of the multi-academy trust is responsible and accountable for all the academies within a trust and can take a strategic perspective. The hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Rushanara Ali) asked about maintained schools. The existing regulations contain ways that schools can federate that allow them to share governing expertise across schools, so we do not think there is a need for additional flexibilities in that respect. My hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley asked whether we plan to extend the time off work that people are entitled to if they are governors to governors of academies. We do not think that that is necessary at this point. We do not want further regulation to get in the way of what should be a co-operative arrangement between schools and businesses. Our approach has been to remove regulations and point out the value of the job.

Ultimately, performing a role on a governing body is of benefit not only to the employee in building up their skills, but to the employer in having well qualified staff who are getting extra training provided by the school and can go back to contribute in the business. We would rather sell the role as a positive than say to employers, “This is something else you need to do.” The NCTL is developing a resource on multi-academy trusts to be published early next year. It will offer useful guidance on establishing a multi-academy trust and case studies on how academies have implemented the structure.

As I mentioned, the Government recognise the value and benefits of governance structures spanning more than one school or academy. It can bring opportunities for a far more strategic perspective and the ability to contrast between schools in the grouping. That can bring more robust accountability for head teachers, because the governors have more points of comparison when looking at different schools. In the next version of the model funding agreement, we will offer multi-academy trusts even greater flexibility by allowing local governing bodies to govern more than one school.

The Government recognise and celebrate the role of governors. We are working in a changing landscape that is moving towards a school-led system. The role of governor has never been more important. We are doing a lot of work, including working with the CBI to promote the role of governor, ensuring that we get new governors into the profession, as well as increasing the flexibility of schools.