School Governors

Ben Bradshaw Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mrs Main. May I preface my brief remarks by paying tribute to all our school governors? They do an incredible job, many of them in difficult circumstances. I can think of hardly any other role that anyone can play in our community that has more potential to help improve the life chances of our young people.

Two years ago, a friend of mine took over the chairmanship of a governing body in a difficult inner London primary school. He has spent most of his spare time in the past two years helping the head teacher to manage out under-performing staff. That school has transformed its performance in those two years, but it has not been a pleasant task. It has taken up a lot of time. He is not paid for it. He does it out of a sense of dedication and duty to the children in his community and their prospects.

I want to say a little about the importance of training for school governors, based on a recent story from my own constituency, which I have spoken to the Minister’s Secretary of State about on a number of occasions. One of my high schools in Exeter was on the brink of being given final approval for academy status, and it emerged that the head teacher at the school was paying himself more than the Prime Minister. He was employing his wife as his deputy, and some other family members were also employed at the school. What happened in the end, thanks to a freedom of information request from my local newspaper, was a call from me to the local authority to launch an inquiry. The local authority went into the school and carried out an inquiry—a thorough one. It recently reported and it was very shocking and damning.

I can summarise what went wrong at the school—I have had this experience before in schools that have gone wrong. There was a powerful—perhaps autocratic—head, who ran the school like a fiefdom and who had a rather cosy relationship with the chair of governors, who was, I think in this case, too weak. They basically made decisions together about the school—some of them against the rules, according to the report—and they froze out the rest of the governors.

I am not necessarily blaming the rest of the governors for their failure to ask more questions and to scrutinise more effectively. I think they could have done that, but one of the things that struck me when I looked into what went on at this school—I talked to not only the existing governors, but the staff, some of the new governors who have gone on to the governing body since the scandal broke, and some of the very good public servants at Devon county council who were responsible for supporting and training governors—was the lack of a requirement for governors to receive training.

I know that the Government and particularly the Minister do not like regulation. She does not want to ply schools with more responsibilities and duties. The Government are all about localism, autonomy and local decision making, but—I issue this warning in the gentlest possible way—with the Government’s policy driving towards more autonomy for schools, it is even more important that governors are properly trained because they will be assuming a much more significant role as a result of that autonomy. If a school comes under the umbrella of a local authority, at least the local authority still has a locus to intervene when something goes wrong, which is what happened in the case of the school in my constituency. If that school had already gone through the academy process and become an academy, the local authority would have had no means of intervention whatever. I am afraid it would have fallen to the Minister or her Secretary of State to intervene.

I suggest that the Minister and her Secretary of State are storing up all sorts of future potential problems for themselves by removing that level of local authority scrutiny. Given that that is the policy that they are set on and determined to implement, I urge her to at least consider the pleas from the very good public servants around the country who support governors and provide governor training. I urge her to listen to their appeals that the Government should consider making training for school governors mandatory. Since the scandal erupted, the school has invited the local authority trainers in. They are doing a great job. The governors are realising that there are lots of things they did not know about the job, but they do now.

At most schools in Devon the governors are given training, but there are others—most of them academies—that resent any interference and advice from the governor training bodies. Given that academies have no local democratic oversight, the only backstop is the Secretary of State, so it is more important than ever that governors are given the skills to do their job properly, exactly as the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) alluded to in his speech. If they are not given the skills, I predict that the Minister will see more scandals. There was another much worse scandal along similar lines in a school or schools in Lincoln. The Minister should seriously consider the impact of her policy and how important that makes it for governors to be properly trained.

I also urge my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), who speaks for the Labour party from the Front Bench, to consider whether we might adopt mandatory training for governors as a policy. I think it would be popular and not too burdensome. It is the least that parents expect. They expect the people who are in charge of the quality of their children’s education at a local level to be properly qualified and properly trained to be able to do a very important job effectively and well.

--- Later in debate ---

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

I thank all hon. Members who have contributed to the debate. It has been very instructive and helpful, and we have heard a lot of interesting contributions. I pay special tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) for his tireless work as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on education governance and leadership, on which he has worked hard in the past few years. There is no doubt that his questions have been helpful to many governing bodies. He has a wealth of experience, and he has skilfully covered many of the points that I planned to make.

I thank the National Governors Association for its work, and I completely agree with hon. Members who have expressed their thanks to governors who play such an important role in helping our schools, driving up school and pupil performance and ensuring that every child receives the best possible education. As has been mentioned, hundreds of thousands of volunteers serve as school governors. One of them is my mum, who is a school governor in Leeds. I can assure hon. Members that I receive regular feedback from the front line, at all times of the day and night, about what is going on in schools in Leeds. I am not without a direct feedback loop.

Being a school governor is not only an influential role; it also demands skill, time and energy. We very much appreciate those who volunteer. Governors have four sets of responsibilities. First, they have a strategic function, which many hon. Members have mentioned. Secondly, they use their skills and experience to ensure that the school is doing the right thing, that the school and the governing body run efficiently and effectively and that the school works to continually improve itself. A theme that we have heard in the debate is that school governing bodies need to be not just satisfied with how things are, but to train up and have continuous professional development for the school to improve.

There has been rather a lot of selective quoting of the Secretary of State’s governance speech. He praised many governors and acknowledged the important role that they play. He was describing what he thinks bad governance looks like, as opposed to what he thinks good governance looks like. His comment was certainly not about all governors or in any way meant to be detrimental to the many people who serve their local schools and are an important part of the local community.

I was pleased to hear that the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) continues to support the academy programme, which was, of course, set up under the previous Government. I want to respond to the important points raised by him and the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) on school accountability, and explain the Government’s approach.

In September 2012, we introduced new rules for Ofsted that make governance more central to how schools are assessed. In category 3 of a school requiring improvement, Ofsted may recommend an external review of governance. It can also give schools subsidised training for the chairman of the governors—something mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud. If a school is in unsatisfactory category 4, the Secretary of State or local authority may impose an interim executive board to replace the governing body, or it may be forced to become an academy with a sponsor, who may replace the school’s leadership, head and governors.

The essential philosophical difference between the Government and the Opposition is that we think that governing bodies need to be measured on the outcomes that they produce, rather than on inputs. Although I am a great supporter of training and professional development, it should not be a mandatory requirement, not least, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell) mentioned, because it will impose costs on governing bodies. We do not know what the content will be. In my time, I have been on a fair few training courses that promised a great deal but did not deliver. That is not to say that I do not support training, but simply to say that it is a judgment that the chair of the governors and the school should exercise to ensure that its governing body has the right skills and experience. Rather than mandating the governing body to carry out things in a particular way, we should hold them accountable for the outcomes. They should take up the kind of professional development and training to ensure they have the right skills, as in the case raised by the right hon. Member for Exeter, to challenge the head teacher and understand the finances of the school. That is our broad approach.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I appreciate what the Minister says, but the performance of the school that I referred to was not bad enough for it to qualify under the new Ofsted rules that she has just outlined. The school was still improving and doing well enough. The problem was not the performance; the problem, basically, was corruption within the school. The worry that I have is that there is no local accountability in academies and that there is nothing anyone can do—except for her.

[Elizabeth Truss]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. What I am saying, though, is that the capability of governors and the outcomes of governance will be assessed as part of the Ofsted assessment. It is not just a matter of looking at the academic performance of the school; it is also about understanding what the governors are doing and how they are carrying out their duties.