School Governors and School Improvement

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship—not for the first time, Mrs Main. It has always proved a success, and I expect it will do so today. It is great to see that my right hon. Friend the Minister for Schools survived yesterday’s activities, as we would expect. I am wondering where the reshuffled Opposition education team are. They will now be led by an historian, the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), which will certainly be interesting.

I want to talk about the importance of governors and governance, and to say that I enormously appreciate all that governors do. It is a tribute to our national life that 200,000 people are able and willing to serve as governors on our school and college governing bodies, and we should all thank them enormously. I have been a governor of several schools and colleges, so I know about the stresses and strains, the sometimes unsocial hours and the sense of accountability and responsibility that they normally feel: I have been there and done that.

I am pleased that there is an appetite for debate about school governors and governance. I was particularly glad that the Select Committee on Education, under the chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), agreed to hold an inquiry on school governance. That inquiry exposed some interesting issues that I want to discuss, although I will not do so in a detailed or completely comprehensive way. The inquiry certainly raised a few interesting issues, and the Government have responded. They were sometimes in agreement with the Committee, and sometimes less so, but they always considered what we said, which is a tribute to the Select Committee process.

The context of this debate is straightforward, in that we are experiencing and will continue to experience a changing structure of education, because more and more academies are coming on stream and there is more competition. Of course, the arrival of free schools will be a key factor in accountability as regards the role of governors and school governance.

Another key issue that informs the debate is the need to focus on performance and outcomes. Never before has the education system been in a situation where performance and outcomes are so pivotal to the debate, which is quite right, because it is absolutely essential to give every child a proper chance and a fair opportunity to perform as best he or she can. Nothing less than that will do.

The changing role of local authorities is another factor, on which we will touch throughout this debate. That factor should be recognised, because schools often used to have the local authority to help them along or to deal with issues, but schools are now more autonomous, and with that autonomy comes more responsibility.

There are also challenges, including the issue of children who are not necessarily best dealt with or given the best chances in their schools. That was brought out extraordinarily well by the chief inspector of schools and colleges, Sir Michael Wilshaw, in his report, “Unseen children”. We cannot allow that to happen. As people interested in education, we must drive forward the highest standards across our whole country, not just where something happens to be relevant to an individual MP. We must ensure that delivery is good all over.

That point is reinforced by the chief inspector’s focus on leadership and management in schools. I will not talk about individual schools—that would be inappropriate—but I will say that where we have good leadership and management in schools, we have a good chance of having schools that are good and have high standards of teaching and learning. That is what we should talk about in the context of school governors and governance.

I pay tribute to my colleagues on the Education Committee, first for agreeing to do a report on school governance and secondly for contributing to that report, because we had some lively debates—quite rightly. The report was important as another way of keeping the question of school governance and governors on the agenda, which we must do. As I have said, the structure of education is evolving, and one question that we must tease out is how we deal with accountability, in which school governors of course have a role to play.

In the Select Committee, we discussed in detail some issues that are relevant to this debate—for example, the size of school governing bodies. It is generally accepted that smaller committees sometimes achieve more than larger ones, partly because they are more dynamic and tend to rely more on individuals with specific gifts. We should therefore try to streamline governing bodies into smaller ones, so that they can be more dynamic, flexible and innovative. The Government agree, but it is important to make it absolutely clear why smaller governing bodies will improve performance and, to underpin that, the Government must be strong in making sure that governing bodies get that message.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

My hon. Friend, like the Government, seems intrinsically to believe that smaller governing bodies are necessarily more effective. Will he share with the House the evidence to back that up?

[Neil Carmichael]

I can do so, because the Education Committee looked into that issue, and if people read the report, they will see that answers to many of the questions I asked yield such evidence. We need to look at that evidence when we consider questions like the one asked by my hon. Friend, the Chairman of the Committee. That dynamic can be seen at work not just in school governing bodies, but often on company boards and in other organisations. It works, and it should be considered.

The role of business is very important. That arises in relation to the question of why we do not have the best interface between business and education, which is a general problem. For example, it is certainly a worry that only 28% of A-levels are in STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering and maths—when the business community is seeking a bigger pool of STEM-educated children and students.

Another issue is why more businessmen are not on school governing bodies, increasing that interface and bringing in leadership and management expertise. The Government have recognised that the Select Committee is right on that count, and we must ensure that we start to break down some of the barriers. The Government are right, and I hope that they will persist with the idea of creating a legal requirement to give people time off for service on a governing body.

I will finish by raising several points. The first is that we must strengthen the mechanism for imposing interim executive boards—IEBs—when schools are identified as failing. I believe that if an Ofsted inspection finds that a school is in serious trouble, there may well be a case for having an IEB, and the Select Committee suggested that Ofsted should be able to use its powers to impose one. The Government have said that there are other ways of solving the problems. If a school is in a federation or some other structure, they might get some assistance. None the less, we need to send a signal that setting up an IEB might just be the right option. It will not be right in every case or in every situation—for example, when a primary school is allied to another school—but it is certainly right for a secondary school that is failing in an obvious way.

There needs to be a pool of governors on those IEBs. Too many areas of the country do not have a sufficiently large pool of good people to be on IEBs. We need to redouble our efforts to find and properly train people. One structure that could solve that problem is the National College for Teaching and Leadership.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

My contribution might come in at under two minutes, Mrs Main. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, to follow my distinguished colleague on the Education Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), and to see the Minister in his place and other colleagues in the Chamber. The Government recently produced their response to our inquiry and report. In the brief time I have, I want to focus on the opportunities for getting greater business involvement with school governing bodies. The CBI has offered to work with the Government, and the Government have taken that up, and are looking to work with other business organisations. We have a real problem with careers advice and guidance in schools. We know that we need to ensure that careers understanding is embedded across the curriculum. What better way to do that than by having governors from business bringing their understanding of local and national business to the governing body? There is a real opportunity for business organisations to stand behind those individual governors, and to provide them with resources, tools and a template to ensure that their school provides a curriculum and an experience that provides young people with the skills—soft as well as academic—that they need. There is a tremendous opportunity to strengthen our governing bodies and better to align our education system with the world of work that follows.