School Governing Bodies

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[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.]

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister spell out how the powers of the Secretary of State and local authority to act if governance is failing differ between maintained schools and academies?

[Elizabeth Truss]

I will come to that point later in my comments, but in essence, the governing body in both cases can be replaced with an interim executive board.

Many hon. Members commented on retaining and recruiting high-quality governors. It is clearly critical that governors have the right skills to do the job. We set out clearly in the governors’ handbook the important strategic nature of the governors’ role and, as I commented, we have cut back on rules and regulations that tie governors up in red tape They now have much more flexibility in the way they operate. The best governing bodies identify explicitly the skills and competencies they need and audit regularly the skills of their current members.

There was some debate this afternoon about the size of a governing body. The Government’s view is that the size of a governing body should be no greater than it needs to be to get the necessary skills, but the No. 1 thing is that it gets the right skills. Size is secondary to ensuring that the skills are in place to do the job. My hon. Friend the Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) pointed out what can be done locally to recruit governors. I commend him for his activities in Calder Valley to promote the role of governors with employers. He lays out a lesson for many MPs about what they should do to promote the roles of governors in their local communities. We absolutely need to get the message across that the role is valuable and will help individuals in whatever career they decide to pursue.

We have given governing bodies the power to reconstitute themselves under a more flexible framework and to become smaller and more skills focused. We agree with the Committee that not enough governing bodies are using the flexibilities at the moment. We plan to consult on whether a move to reconstitution should be mandatory by September 2015, because we do not think that enough governing bodies are doing it at the moment. It will be interesting to see the results from that consultation.

The hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) spoke extensively about training. I think we all agree that we want well trained governing bodies that are capable of exercising their role. We are keen for schools to use their budgets effectively. Ensuring that governors get the quality training they need is an effective way to do so. There might be a debate about how we achieve those objectives, but our view is that the outcomes of the Ofsted inspection process are the best way to make an assessment, rather than insisting on mandatory training, which can sometimes become a tick-box exercise. We want high-quality training and we want to know that, following that training, governors have the skills they need to do the job.

Developments in the level of training are needed, so in addition to expanding its training for chairs and aspiring chairs to offer 6,700 places by March 2015, early next year, the National College of Teaching and Leadership is launching specific training workshops for governors on understanding RAISEonline data, which my hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk Coastal mentioned, driving financial efficiency in schools, and performance-related pay. Where we identify a gap in the training available, the NCTL is helping to provide it. We are continuing to expand the NCTL national leaders of governance programme, to mobilise outstanding chairs of governors to provide free peer-mentoring support for other chairs.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) talked passionately about the need for the involvement of business in governing bodies, and I could not agree more. The Government are working with the Confederation of British Industry on a campaign to promote the role of employers in freeing up employees to get more involved in governing bodies, but the issue is broader than that and about more than governance. We need more business leaders in our classrooms working with children on specific subjects. That helps children to form high aspirations about the types of role they can go into. The new national curriculum is much more flexible and will enable more business involvement. We have seen some very good developments, for example, organisations such as Mykindacrowd facilitating the new computer curriculum that is coming in.

I also agree about the role of the professional clerk. NCTL is developing and will deliver a training programme for clerks. By 2015, it will have provided training for 2,000 highly skilled professional clerks, who have a vital role on the governing body.[Official Report, 6 January 2014, Vol. 573, c. 1MC.]

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Does the Minister feel that there needs to be regulatory change? We heard tales during our inquiry of the clerk of the governing body, whose role is to hold the head to account, being someone who works in the office of a headmaster. We felt that that was not the right situation. If changing it requires regulatory change, will she consider that?

[Elizabeth Truss]

As yet, we do not feel that that requires regulatory change, but if my hon. Friend has evidence of specific issues that have arisen, I will be interested to hear about them.

A number of points were raised about accountability. As the programme for international student assessment outcomes has shown this week, autonomy and accountability are two of the key drivers in any successful education system. Lord Nash told the Select Committee that he thought the Ofsted inspection framework was the sharpest tool in the box for improving the quality of governance. I certainly think that is true. Any school failure is a failure of governance. Interim executive boards can be an effective solution in certain schools to secure a step change in the schools’ performance, through a complete change in the school’s leadership and management. IEBs are not always necessary; sometimes the governing body can self-improve—ultimately, it is up to the local authority or the Secretary of State if the school is in an Ofsted category. Where individual governors are not pulling their weight, it is a matter for the chair of governors. We would like all chairs to have annual conversations to take stock with every member of the governing body. Ultimately, it is the chair’s responsibility to ensure that members of the governing body have the skills they need to do the job.

[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.