School Governing Bodies

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Westminster Hall

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

It is a great pleasure and privilege to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Rosindell. It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon with the Minister and colleagues from the Select Committee on Education to discuss our report on the role of school governing bodies, which was published in July 2013. It is also a pleasure to see the shadow Minister and other colleagues in the Chamber.

The 300,000 governors across the country perform an important job, and hon. Members on both sides of the House would want to send our thanks for the service that they perform in their communities. Holding schools to account for the quality of the education that they offer to pupils is a serious responsibility, and it is not all about external bodies; it is important that governors have the skills, self-confidence and ability to fulfil that role. Many governors offer outstanding advice and service, and they devote large amounts of time and expertise to monitoring and improving the schools in their charge.

By contrast, recent events at the Al-Madinah school in Derby underscore the importance of governance and the need for robust intervention when it is failing. The school’s chair of governors, Shazia Parveen, resigned in late October, and the remaining trustees finally resigned last month. Despite the shambles over which they had been presiding, the governors of the Al-Madinah school were under no obligation to resign; nor could they have been forced to do so under current regulations. That example is extreme and unusual, but I should be grateful to the Minister if she told us whether she thinks that the current situation is satisfactory, or whether changes need to be made to the regulatory framework to ensure that such people can be replaced sooner if they are clearly failing in their duties.

There is considerable variation in the quality of governance across different types of schools. The former chief inspector stated in Ofsted’s 2010-11 annual report that governance was good or outstanding in 71% of special schools and 64% of secondary schools, but only 55% of primary schools and just 53% of pupil referral units had such a rating, which is not acceptable.

School governance has recently been scrutinised by the Government. In September 2012, Ministers introduced regulations that provide greater flexibility to the governing bodies of maintained schools to reconstitute themselves, so that they may be smaller, with an emphasis on skills as opposed to prescribed constitutions. Those new regulations are most welcome.

During our inquiry, we found that schools are not making the most of the freedoms that they have. The envisaged process for strengthening governance has not necessarily happened in many areas, and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s thoughts on how the Government will encourage schools to make full use of the options available to them.

Our report makes a series recommendations that seek to improve the capacity, capability and profile of governing bodies. We said that the Government should study the effectiveness of governing bodies that are responsible for groups of schools, such as federations and academy trusts, and consider the optimum size for governing federations effectively.

Meanwhile, the recruitment and retention of governors continues to be a problem. Mike Cladingbowl of Ofsted told us that finding high-quality governors in all areas of the country represents

“a big and urgent national problem”.

We welcome the Government’s increased funding for the School Governors One-Stop Shop, which is the governor recruitment charity.

Our second recommendation is that the Government should work more closely with the CBI to recruit governors, as business is potentially an important source of capable governors. Will the Minister say something more about that? I know that the CBI is keen and is working with the Government. The CBI and other business groups are looking to get more involved. I would be interested to hear more from the Minister on that.

Linked to those issues is the fact that the barriers to recruitment must be removed. For example, the current legal requirement to give time off for the governors of maintained schools has not yet been extended to academy governors. That obvious oversight needs to be addressed. Last week, the CBI echoed our call for academy governors to receive time off to fulfil their duties. Will the Minister commit today that academy governors will be given the same time and opportunity to do their work as governors of maintained schools?

The third part of our inquiry concerns whether governors receive good training or, indeed, proper training at all. The Government told us that such training can be encouraged through Ofsted. Our report recommends that Ministers report back in due course on whether Ofsted’s intervention has been effective and, if it has not, reconsider making training mandatory for all governors.

We were also concerned by suggestions that few quality alternatives are emerging to the training that local authorities traditionally provide, which has been reduced in recent years. Ofsted and the Department for Education need to monitor the availability and quality of governor training, particularly in the context of greater academisation and reduced local authority services. If school governing bodies in the new context have even greater responsibility than under the old system, it is essential that the services to support those governing bodies and the training available to them are improved, rather than reduced, in quality and scope.

Ofsted has sharpened its focus on governance, which the Committee welcomes wholeheartedly. Part of Ofsted’s new approach, for example, is to provide a clear description within its inspection framework of the role and characteristics of high-quality governance.

We received evidence highlighting the importance of a good clerk to the success of a governing body. The evidence indicates that that should be a professional role, similar to a company secretary, and it is an important recommendation of our report. SGOSS may be ideally placed to take on the role of recruiting clerks, while simultaneously ensuring some sort of quality assurance. I would be grateful to learn whether—and if so, how—the Government intend to facilitate that process.

Clerks also need to be equipped with high-quality information and guidance. We are particularly concerned that the revised governors’ handbook, which contains less detailed guidance than the previous version, is aimed only at new governors. Will the Minister inform us of what steps, if any, have been taken to ensure that the revised handbook is relevant to governors of all levels of experience and acts as an easy access point for advice and guidance?

The fourth section of our report considers the problem of poorly performing governing bodies. We welcome the Government’s encouragement for governing bodies to undertake more self-evaluation and peer-to-peer review, using tools such as the all-party group on education governance and leadership’s 20 questions—I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) on his work on that all-party group—and other tools in the new governors’ handbook.

We also welcome Ofsted’s new data dashboard, which will help governing bodies to become more adept at using performance data effectively. It is important to note that, although the data dashboard provides an easier route to start grappling with such data, it is not the end of the road. One would hope that governors will use the data dashboard to get a feel for the issues and then delve more deeply into the data, to hold their schools effectively to account.

We remain concerned that current approaches to addressing underperformance and failure in governing bodies are insufficiently robust. Accordingly, we recommend more demanding appointment processes for the chairs of governors, accompanied by clear procedures for removing poorly performing chairs from office. We also recommend that time limits should be imposed for the implementation of interim executive boards.

We believe that Ofsted should explicitly recommend IEBs following an inspection, where deemed appropriate. If Ofsted goes in to review a school and finds the school’s governance to be fundamentally wanting, it is appropriate that Ofsted should be able to recommend the speedy replacement of the governing body with an IEB.

Ministers should investigate why so many local authorities and, indeed, the Secretary of State for Education have been reluctant to use their powers of intervention where school governance is a concern. We ask the Government to clarify the role of local authorities in school improvement, as that function will provide an important challenge to schools between Ofsted inspections, the gaps between which can be quite long under the current regime.

As an adjunct to that, we considered the relationship between governing bodies and head teachers. In its 2011 report on school governance, Ofsted noted:

“Absolute clarity about the different roles and responsibilities of the headteacher and governors underpins the most effective governance.”

However, we heard evidence that schools face difficulties in managing that relationship properly. We recommend that existing regulatory and legislative requirements should be reviewed to ensure clarity on the proper division of strategic and operational functions between head teachers and governors.

The fifth and—you will be delighted to hear, Mr Rosindell—final part of the Committee’s report considered new models of governance. Academies define their own governance procedures, subject to approval by the Secretary of State. Such freedoms for academies have led to the evolution of new models of governance, from which lessons could be learned in many cases. Our report highlighted some confusion, however, about the accountability of some academy governance models, and we made three main recommendations. First, the Government should identify the roles of governors in the different types of academy. Secondly, the Government should explain how relevant local groups, including pupils, parents and staff, should have a voice in the business of the governing body and the running of the school. Thirdly, clarity should be provided on how decisions are made in academies, along with details of where to turn should concerns arise.

I have summarised the main findings of the Committee’s report. I am pleased that the Government agree with much of what we said, but with some notable exceptions. As I have explained, our report concluded that mandatory training for all governors should be introduced if Ofsted intervention is found to be ineffective. Regrettably, the Government response was adamant that good schools

“don’t need government to mandate training.”

Will the Minister reconsider that response if it becomes apparent that the standards of training remain unacceptably inconsistent between schools?

Likewise, we recommended that Ofsted should use its power and responsibility explicitly to recommend that a governing body be replaced by an interim executive board following an inadequate inspection. The Government said that they did

“not agree that there is a need for a new role for Ofsted here… Having Ofsted make specific recommendations on the proposed solution could blur the boundary of responsibilities between the Chief Inspector, the local authority and the Secretary of State.”

Does the Minister not accept that clear advice from Ofsted might be required to prompt some local authorities to take decisive action? The Secretary of State has seemed remarkably reluctant to act, even when the most obvious evidence of failure was present. The Government rejected the notion that the Secretary of State had held back from using his powers of intervention, although I would say that the evidence suggests the opposite.

We argued for more robust appointment processes for the chairs of governors, accompanied by clear procedures for removing poorly performing chairs from office. The Government agreed, but they have no plans to give governing bodies more power to remove elected governors, so the Committee finds itself only partially satisfied.

Our report demonstrated the importance of recruiting and retaining high-quality, effective governors. It simultaneously identified the challenges in achieving such a standard. I accept that the Department for Education’s work on governance is still in development, just as the wider educational landscape is still evolving, but a continued focus on governance will be important in years to come if we are to deliver better educational outcomes for the next generation. That is ever more important in what is now designed to be a self-improving, more autonomous school system. The challenge has been laid down, and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply.

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[Neil Carmichael]

I assume my hon. Friend means parents on governing bodies, and I completely agree, as I have seen that behaviour myself. We should be making sure that governing bodies are truly accountable and responsible to the key stakeholders, who seem to me to be the parents. Having parents on the governing body is a great idea, but not as a specific group of parent governors—they should be people who happen to be governors and to have children. That is the way to look at the issue.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I fear my hon. Friend might be confused about interim executive boards. He seems to think that because the people on those boards are focused, dedicated, highly skilled and small in number, we can extrapolate from that the idea that all governing bodies everywhere should be small and similar in make-up to IEBs. That is simply not possible, given the weight of work required of governing bodies. That was the evidence we heard: as Professor Chris James of the university of Bath said, there is no statistical relationship between governing body effectiveness and governing body size or vacancies. I put it to my hon. Friend that there is no evidence for his view. If we could have astonishingly elite, small boards of dedicated people to put the time in, it might be a better system, but we do not have those people and they do not have the time.

[Neil Carmichael]

There are two points about the size of governing bodies. First, with a governing body of about 20, the influence of individuals is diluted. That applies to any committee system, including school governance. Secondly, it is not necessary to replicate exactly an interim executive board because that would be counter-productive. The word “interim” does not imply permanence, the word “executive” does not imply strategic decision making, and the word “board” is not commonly used in schools. The characteristics of IEBs and how they operate are important and we should think about how that might influence the way in which governing bodies will be shaped.

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[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell, on an entirely different brief from my previous one. I congratulate the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), and the hon. Members who serve on that Committee for this welcome contribution to a very important subject.

As the Chair of the Committee and other hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham), have said, 300,000 volunteers serve on governing bodies—probably the largest group of volunteers working in a particular field in the whole country. I, too, pay tribute to them for the work that they do. Like a number of hon. Members in the debate, I had the opportunity to be a governor, not of a school but of a further education college, and I know how valuable that is. Hon. Members bring expertise and practical experience to the debate.

When Labour was in government, we gave greater responsibility to governing bodies. We reduced local authority interference in how governing bodies operate and made changes relating to their composition. We also started the academy programme—a targeted intervention to try to lift the performance of the worst-performing schools in the country, which were often in deprived areas, and to raise standards. Governing bodies played a very important role in that arena.

I want to take the opportunity to tell the Minister that what I have described is different from simply rebadging a school as an academy and expecting school improvement to happen automatically. It will not happen without effective interventions to try to improve standards, including having strong governance arrangements, encouraging the effective leadership and management of schools and ensuring proper accountability of governing bodies.

This report is therefore welcome and timely, particularly as we are seeing so much reform in the education system. There is so much change, including the proliferation of free schools and of course more academies, and we need to ensure that governing bodies play an effective role in this rapidly changing environment.

I shall focus on a number of the themes on which the Select Committee report makes recommendations. The Chair of the Select Committee, in particular, highlighted some of these points. First, the Select Committee recommended mandatory training for governors. This is a crucial issue. As I said, it is crucial in this time of change that we ensure proper accountability. At a time when local education authorities are losing powers of oversight and there is no clarity about what the role of a middle tier would be, it would be helpful for us to make sure that governing bodies play an important role in ensuring that accountability.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

On a point of clarification, we did not recommend that training should be mandatory. We said that that should be looked at again if it turns out that the input from Ofsted and other Government inputs do not lead to the improvement in training that we hope to see brought about in the system. That improvement would be brought about in a non-regulated way ideally.

[Rushanara Ali]

Okay; we are talking about non-regulatory training. The point is that appropriate training is vital. According to The Times Educational Supplement, 93% of the respondents to the joint survey said that this would be helpful; they supported training. That reinforces the Select Committee’s recommendation. The Government should examine the issue closely, genuinely to ensure that governors have the appropriate support and that schools get the kind of governing body that they need to respond to the challenges of running their institutions. Governors need to feel equipped and able to perform their role effectively and work towards building achievement and raising standards in schools. In the end, that is what motivates people in communities to take part in this work as volunteers. They give their time and make that contribution to see a transformation in their schools.

I therefore hope that the Minister will recognise the importance of training—other hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North, highlighted this issue—and explain how the Government will seek to address the Select Committee recommendation and ensure that governing bodies get the training that they need. The National Governors Association has also given evidence and pushed for that recommendation to be implemented.

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[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?

[Mr Graham Stuart]

Does the hon. Lady agree that one way to encourage more training for governing bodies is to have clerks as professionals, facilitating, raising aspiration, sharing best practice and not being a member of staff from the head teacher’s department? Does she agree that the role of a clerk should become a professional role?

[Rushanara Ali]

I do, and I will come on to that point shortly, but before I deal with clerks, I want to focus on federations and multi-academy trusts. In their ideological drive to force schools into academy status regardless of the views of parents, governors and school communities, the Government have been ignoring the benefits of federations of schools as drivers of school improvement and as an opportunity for governing bodies to work more strategically. A number of hon. Members have highlighted the need to examine that area. In many cases, working together in that way—sometimes through co-operatives—can bring all the benefits for teaching and learning of a more strategic partnership, without unnecessary and sometimes painful organisational upheaval.

In my constituency, when schools have come together and worked together collaboratively—governing bodies, as well as teachers of different subjects—standards have been radically improved. We need to ensure that that happens and that the role of governing bodies is considered in that context. Will the Minister commit to supporting those local initiatives, rather than imposing models that are not necessarily fit for purpose or appropriate for local areas? Will she commit to giving groups of small schools that federate to improve outcomes the same sort of grants as multi-academy trusts receive?

On profile and recruitment, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North and the hon. Member for Calder Valley (Craig Whittaker) pointed out, governors are fulfilling a vital role voluntarily. Recruitment is a major challenge in many areas, so we must take urgent action to ensure that employers can provide the flexibility—day release or time away from work—that their staff require to make a contribution. Particularly where we want to bring in expertise from professions that may be pressured, it is vital that employers support their staff to make a contribution as a governor.

When the previous Labour Government were in power, civil servants had the scope to take a few days’ leave for their work as school governors or in similar roles, with the permission of their employer. I hope that the Government will consider how that might be done appropriately, without burdening employers and recognising that the role of school governor is crucial and that people need to be given flexibility to fulfil it properly and effectively. I hope that the Minister will set out in her response how such measures might be introduced.

As the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness has said, the Education Committee highlighted the importance of having professional clerks. The National Governors Association is campaigning for their introduction and is disappointed that the Department for Education has not set out its intention to make that happen. I hope that the Minister will reconsider and support the Education Committee’s recommendation, which will be good news to the hon. Gentleman and to me.

On accountability, there is a worrying trend in the reforms introduced by the Secretary of State. We have observed in previous debates on governance that there was an unexploded ordnance in the system and the lack of accountability would result in scandals. As we have seen in the case of the Al-Madinah free school, the Kings science academy, Barnfield federation in Luton and others, there are real concerns, and we must ensure that such incidents do not occur again.

There is concern about several other schools, and we must make sure that the school governing bodies have the appropriate power. Where the governing bodies are at fault, the system must be effective enough to intervene to ensure that the relevant action is taken to address such problems. At a time of reform when there are concerns about accountability, we must ensure that school governing boards are properly held to account and given appropriate support if they have to take action against school management to improve matters, as happened in the examples that I have given.

Performance is clearly a major issue. A balance must be struck between attracting the best possible people and ensuring that they are rooted in their communities. Recently, the Secretary of State described governors as

“Local worthies who see being a governor as a badge of status not a job of work.”

I hope that the Minister will emphasise that we should not be using such language to refer to governors, who play a vital role. I hope that she recognises the important work done by governors, the need to support them to make their contribution and the need to improve their skills and capacities, so that they can continue to make a vital difference to our education system. I hope that she will take into consideration the questions that have been raised and the points that I have made and that she will take on board the importance of improving accountability and the status of governors in schools.

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[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.

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[Mr Graham Stuart]

It has been a great pleasure to have this debate today. The Minister looks shocked and horrified at the prospect of my summing up, but I am sure she will survive. We have had contributions by hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber, and thoughtful ones at that. Many of them were from Members who not only sit on the Select Committee and hear the evidence we receive, but who, prior to that, spent many years on governing bodies themselves, trying to making a difference to schools.

In her response to the debate, the Minister said, “The future of schools is truly in governors’ hands.” The Government have made good progress in taking the role of governors seriously; I congratulate her on that. I and the other members of the Committee will be delighted that the Government will be working with the CBI, the School Governors’ One-Stop Shop and, I assume, the national college on a campaign to promote the role of governors, in order to attract more people to be governors and to make a difference by filling the empty places for governors that we have heard about.

I would not be doing my job if I did not chide the Minister on one thing, which concerns the legal requirement to release staff. At the moment, companies are obliged to release staff for maintained schools but not for academies. Now, either the Government think that that requirement is an over-regulation and it should be abolished, so that all schools are on the same playing field, or they should extend that to cover academies. I cannot see any case—intellectually or otherwise—for justifying an unlevel playing field, such as the situation we are in now. So I ask the Minister to look at that issue again.

I have one final point. My understanding, and it may well be incorrect, is that the Secretary of State does not have the power to appoint an interim executive board for an academy; they have the power only to rescind the funding agreement. However, I may be wrong about that. If it turns out that the Minister is incorrect, perhaps she could write to me, as Chair of the Select Committee, to clarify matters. That would be very helpful in ensuring that we are all on the same page on that issue.

It has been a pleasure to serve under you, Mr Rosindell, and we look forward to our next debate under Sir Alan Meale.