School Governors

Kevin Brennan Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure and honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I also welcome the new Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss). This might be her first performance as a Minister here—perhaps not. I am sure she will enjoy this one as much as she may have enjoyed the previous one. She has appeared before the Select Committee on Education and gave a fine performance. I am sure that we are in for a treat.

I asked for this debate because it concerns an important policy that should be deliberated. We need to think how we can adapt the role and recruitment of governors for the challenges ahead in the education system, which is still being reformed, quite rightly.

I want to thank all the governors who govern. We have nearly 300,000 possible governors; there are some vacancies at the moment. They meet regularly, often in relatively difficult circumstances, to deliberate on their schools and education policy. They must be thanked for all that they contribute to their communities and their schools. What I have to say about reforming governors and governance has nothing to do with the devotion of most governors to good practice and to the future of their individual schools.

Lord Hill of Oareford, one of the other Ministers in the Department for Education, said:

“The most important decision-making group in any school is the governing body… Governing bodies should set the overall strategic direction of a school, hold the head teacher to account and have a relentless focus on driving up standards but not get dragged into micromanaging the school or the minutiae of its day-to-day activities.”

[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate, and I echo his words on the efforts of school governors. What does he think of the Secretary of State for Education’s description of school governors in his speech last July? He described them as

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

[Neil Carmichael]

Out of a total number of several hundred thousand governors, there are bound to be some who are not as good as others and some who are there for reasons not necessarily those that we would all expect or salute. As I said, we have to congratulate and thank all governors generally speaking but note that there are bound to be some who do not rise to the challenge.

I return to Lord Hill’s quotation because I shall address the debate in that spirit. I have been a governor—whether I am a local worthy is another matter—in total for about 20 years in various organisations, such as further education colleges and primary and secondary schools, so I do have some experience. I dealt with a difficult situation quite recently where governance had been judged inadequate and the future of the head teacher became an issue. I am no stranger to controversy in school governance, as well the more reasonable activities of a governor.

I managed to persuade the Education Committee to conduct a full-scale inquiry on school governance, and I see that a member of that Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), is here. He will know that I was keen to do that, and I am pleased that we have an inquiry under way and that the first evidence session will take place in January.

I have also established an all-party group on school governance and leadership. The striking thing about that is that every time we have had a meeting we have had standing room only. There clearly is an appetite and interest in governance, governors and the policy around them. We have produced two publications: “Stronger Boards, Better Education” and “Who Governs the Governors?” We draw two significant conclusions from each of them. I will refer to the direction of travel in my remarks. The question of accountability is clearly at the core of who governs the governors. The question of skills versus stakeholders is clearly at the core of the quality of boards. I will set out those issues in more detail in due course.

As I have already said, there are a number of changes in the world of education, and the academies programme is clearly one of the most significant. It has significant implications for governance in several ways. I have referred to accountability, but the fact is that, as schools become more independent from local authorities, we should ask our governing system to fill the vacuum created. That is not an unfortunate vacuum—it is quite deliberate and quite right that schools are more independent and autonomous—but we must have a proper accountability system within schools.

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[Kevin Brennan]

Now that the right hon. Gentleman is more free to speak candidly than he might have been when he was in government, will he explain his remarks about those aspects of Government policy in the sphere of education that he feels do not contribute to localism?

[Andrew Stunell]

I suspect, Mrs Main, that you would rule me out of order if I answered that question, because it is important to focus on the issues before the Chamber.

Clearly—this is where I challenge my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud—any Government, if they see the need for change and reform, would be strongly tempted. He talked about changing the balance between stakeholders and skills, and I want to challenge that proposition because it is not a dichotomy. It is not a choice between stakeholders or skilled governors, but a question of ensuring that stakeholders are skilled to retain local community accountability. We jump from the frying pan into the fire if, instead of democratic local education authorities and a democratically accountable Secretary of State, we have professionalised experts with special skills running our schools with no special links to the pupils or staff and no democratic accountability. I want to pull back on what he said, and I remind my hon. Friend the Minister that we do believe in localism and accountability to the local community—both to the local community of parents and the broader community—that every school serves.

The net effect of the changes that have been made in the past few years is that governors have more power and responsibility, which means they need more skills and focus. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud that we need to boost and build that.

There is a significant difference in scale and professional need between a secondary school and a primary school. Here, again, I want to make a localism point. Governments have a strong tendency—I experienced this myself, both in government and out of government—to imagine that there is a solution that addresses all the problems. I urge a flexible approach. We should understand that schools come in different sizes and shapes. A secondary school may have a turnover each year of more than £1 million, while a primary school might have a turnover of just a small fraction of that. We need to ensure that we do not over-engineer what we are asking.

Several references have been made to Ofsted. Schools are, of course, required to meet the standards of Ofsted. Whether, in a democratic structure, schools should be accountable to Ofsted is a moot point, but one of the things that is happening now and will happen more in the next year or so is that, even when a school’s results and teaching standards meet Ofsted’s criteria, it may now fail because it does not meet the governance criteria. It is right that there should be such tests of governance and that those tests should be done by Ofsted, but I suspect that quite a number of school governing bodies across the country are in for a bit of a surprise when they realise that they cannot bumble on in their traditional relationship with their head teachers and school bodies and excel as far as Ofsted is concerned.

I believe hon. Members and the Government need to recognise and support the role and development of governors. They are a crucial link in the delivery of good education to our children, and they are at a crucial point in challenging the professionals on what they are doing in the classroom and how they are doing it. Governors are often hard-stretched volunteers, strong on commitment and enthusiasm, but without the range of skills they need to be fully effective. Increasingly, they are the people who not only pass judgment but are themselves being judged on the quality and effectiveness of the education that their school delivers.

What do I think should be done? We have been strong on what might be called “brave words,” but what ought to be done? We should pick up on the Government’s report of two years ago, in which the Government asserted that school governors are a vital part of the education system who are traditionally undervalued and do not have the respect and support that they deserve. We now need to turn that absolutely correct statement of intent into real action. The plea made by the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) for mandatory induction training for governors is something the Government could take on board. Additionally, imposing a training duty without considering the cost would be a mistake when schools are under pressure. Obviously, the degree to which schools are under pressure is different in different places, but all schools face real budgetary challenges over the next few years and, desirable and essential as training is, imposing that through any system without the matching resources would be a betrayal of what the Government are attempting to do to improve educational standards.

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[Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)]

I shall give the Minister a bit more thinking time. It is not her first outing in Westminster Hall, but I welcome her as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education. She is obviously a woman of many talents: in addition to what might be regarded as the first part of her ministerial job, she does curriculum, exams and—we have found out today—school governance. It makes us wonder what the Minister for Schools is doing with his time. Perhaps he is over in the Cabinet Office, planning on behalf of the Liberal Democrats. I congratulate her; she is obviously doing a job and a half in the Department.

I also congratulate the hon. Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) on securing the debate and on his thoughtful remarks on governance. I thank him, too, for his work on the issue with the all-party group on education governance and leadership. He set out his view that skills should predominate over stakeholders in how governing bodies are set up—he had some interesting thoughts on that—and quoted Lord Hill a lot, as well as in the context of governor training. Lord Hill might benefit from some assertiveness training for the next time he tries to speak to the Prime Minister and resign, so that he is more successful than on the previous occasion.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) made a good point about mandatory training for governors, outlining brilliantly one of the big issues facing us: the unexploded ordnance that must be out there when accountability has been drawn out of the system. There is a worrying vacuum, as some Members have pointed out, in the pell-mell pace of reform set by the Secretary of State in his desire to be seen as a great reformer. My right hon. Friend is not the first to say that, but he said it effectively. I have no doubt that there is unexploded ordnance out there, and that the lack of accountability will result in scandals in the near future.

We have already seen such incidents, whereby powerful head teachers, without mechanisms in place to hold them to account, have been able to misuse public money. In some cases, criminal charges are involved, so we cannot talk much about them here, but I worry, as does my right hon. Friend, about the vacuum of accountability that is developing rapidly as the academies programme proceeds without sufficient thought having been given to the issue of governance.

I welcome the right hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Andrew Stunell) to the Back Benches following his stint in the Government. Clearly, he was a little unhappy for some of that time. He hinted to us, while rightly staying in order and not going into too much detail, about some of his unhappiness with Government policy in this area, particularly on local accountability and education. I look forward to hearing more from him in the House on that subject in the weeks and months ahead as we debate education policy more widely.

[Andrew Stunell]

I assure the hon. Gentleman that he will hear more, but it will not be in any way to undermine this Government’s bold moves on localism, including in education. I was pointing out to him—I regret that I did not convey it more accurately—that if we take power away from one institution and give it to another, we must ensure that that institution has responsibility and the skills to bear that responsibility.

[Kevin Brennan]

I interpreted the right hon. Gentleman’s remarks as meaning that he was worried that, in some cases, for “localism” read “centralisation”, but perhaps I was reading too much between the lines. Nevertheless, I look forward to hearing what he has to say on the subject in the weeks and months to come.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) spoke about the need to build capacity within the system, given that a vacuum has been created by what he described as a slapdash approach to reform and its impact on governors and local accountability. I urge the Minister to reflect on hon. Members’ contributions about their concerns over the vacuum that is emerging.

I join others in praising the 300,000 volunteers—probably the country’s largest volunteer force of any kind—who give up their time freely to serve on governing bodies across the country. I suspect that almost everybody participating in the debate has served at one time or another on a school governing body, and that everybody therefore brings a degree of expertise to the debate, having seen how governing bodies work.

In government, we continued a process of giving more responsibility to governing bodies, tried to reduce local authority interference in how governing bodies operate and made changes relating to the composition of governing bodies. We also started the academy programme—a targeted intervention to try to lift the worst-performing schools in the country’s most deprived areas, which successfully raised standards. I say in passing to the Minister that that is different from simply re-badging a school as an academy and expecting school improvement to happen automatically. It will not happen without a genuine intervention to try to improve standards. However, I will not stray too far from governance while making that point.

I praise governors. We tried to enhance their role. Hon. Members have referred to some of the work done latterly by the previous Government, particularly by the former Schools Minister, Lord Knight, who is now in another place. Unfortunately, some of his initiatives ran out of time as we reached the general election. The discussions held at that time outline the difficulties of reaching consensus—I sympathise with the Minister on this—on the right balance between governing bodies’ ability to perform their strategic role in improving performance in schools and, as other hon. Members have mentioned, the need for governing bodies to have their feet on the ground and their roots in the community, and to use local information and intelligence to do a good job. This is not an easy issue to tackle, and it is appropriate that we try to build consensus on reforming governance in our schools, rather than making the issue a big divide between Government and Opposition.

However, it is important that that debate is held in a tone that shows respect for the work done by governors across the country. That is why I mentioned, in an intervention on the hon. Member for Stroud, the Secretary of State’s speech on governors earlier this year. I suspect that he was trying to make the same reasonable point that the hon. Member for Stroud made: standards vary, and governors are a mixed-ability group like any other. However, in his temptation to use figurative and colourful language, the Secretary of State deeply offended many governors across the country by using the phrase “local worthies” to describe the people who give up their time to serve on governing bodies. The full quote is:

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

That remark deeply offended large numbers of people, whether it was intended to do so or not. When the Secretary of State wants to offend, he is usually quite deliberate about it, but I am not sure whether he did on this occasion. Libby Purves, who has sympathy with the Secretary of State’s approach to some things, wrote on 9 July in The Times:

“The expression ‘local worthies’ has no place under any government, let alone a Conservative one that claims to want a Big Society and less central nannying.”

I make a plea to the Minister at least to tell us that she will not use such derogatory language when talking about our country’s largest volunteer force, who give up their time to do the difficult and challenging job of helping our schools be the best that they can be. That would greatly help to raise the tone of the debate, so that we can get on with discussing the important, central issues.

On another recent occasion, the Government tried to recruit governors effectively as spin doctors for their policies by putting out a plea via e-mail. The Guardian reported in August that the Department for Education, having created a database of sympathetic head teachers, was trying to enlist governors. An e-mail was sent from the National College for School Leadership to approximately 40 school governors saying that the DFE’s school governance unit is planning “communication activities” around new regulations coming into force next week regarding the size of governing bodies.

School governors are volunteers who give up their time to serve their local schools. They are not there to be recruited as spin doctors for the Secretary of State and his reforms. I hope that the Minister will distance herself from that approach by the Department.

There are real challenges to be faced to get the balance right between the strategic job that governors have to do and the local input required for them to represent the local community effectively. Views differ widely. Some colleagues believe that in this new world in which most secondary schools are now academies, and where they are no longer in the orbit of the local education authority, there is a case for the professionalisation of governing bodies and for executive governing bodies to be in charge of a chain of schools, with, perhaps, more local advisory bodies for local schools. That is one end of the spectrum. At the other, there are others who think it essential to maintain that aspect of localism and ensure that every school, whatever its size, has its own governing body and chair of governors.

I want to probe the Minister on the Government’s current thinking on the governance of schools. Is it her view, and the Government’s, that governors should remain as a voluntary force in support of our schools, or that they should be professionalised and become a strategic board, with at least the chair of governors, and perhaps others, being paid for their work? What is her current position on the payment of governors? Is it Government policy to pay more governors?

Does the Minister believe that there should be fewer governing bodies? In other words, rather than having governing bodies for each school, should there be governing bodies that look after a chain of schools? Does she agree with the Secretary of State that governors are glory-seeking “local worthies”, or is she prepared to recognise the work of local governors? I look forward to hearing her answers.

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[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.

[Kevin Brennan]

The Government have legislated so that some schools that are doing well academically do not have to be inspected. My right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) was making the point that that can mask corrupt practices and there will not be sufficient governance or training in place for governors to monitor that properly and nip it in the bud before it becomes a huge issue.

[Elizabeth Truss]

The Ofsted inspection will take place in due course, if the school performs below satisfactory levels. The reality is that, often—I could tell the right hon. Member for Exeter about similar cases in my constituency—poor performance on financials is related to poor overall school performance.

My colleague, Lord Hill, who leads on governors in the Department for Education, has already presented the awards for school clerk of the year, which was mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove, who also spoke about ensuring higher take-up. I understand that Lord Hill has committed to doing so again next year, which is good news for all of us.

I was interested the suggestion that we run a “becoming a governor” campaign and will take that back to Lord Hill for further discussion. We are, of course, happy to listen to suggestions from all parties in the House about how to improve standards of governance. As right hon. and hon. Members rightly said, there is a process for ensuring that all governing bodies attain the capability that we want, so that they can carry out their functions.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stroud raised some other issues. His organisation’s work promoting skills in governing bodies is important. He is right; we need wider recruitment of governors, including business people who have financial skills that would help, as the right hon. Member for Exeter mentioned. My hon. Friend welcomed our efforts to relax the constraints on the size of governing bodies, so that we have governing bodies that are fit for purpose and offer the right scrutiny of what head teachers and schools are doing.

Being a governor can help build the individuals’ skills and experience. We have talked a lot about how the governors’ skills and experience can contribute to the schools’ performance, but we should also see it the other way round. I know a lot of people who have benefited from their time as a governor and have been able to build up their capability to understand how a school works and education policy, management and financial scrutiny.

The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central mentioned the platoons that we are seeking to support in society. In that regard, it is important that we retain governorship as a voluntary service, because it is a two-way process, with members of the community gaining experience as well as contributing to the future of a school and schools gaining from that experience of the community. The Government do not have any plans to pay governors and go away from the well-established principle of voluntary governance. There might be times—for example, if a school is in trouble and an interim executive board is needed for that failing school—when payment might be appropriate, but in the general run of things, we support a continuation of the voluntary governance principle.