School Governors

Rehman Chishti Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Westminster Hall

[Neil Carmichael]

I knew that the hon. Gentleman had been approached, which is why I felt at liberty to mention it and to encourage him to participate as vigorously as he obviously will. He is absolutely right about the stakeholder versus skills matter, but I believe that we need more skills and less emphasis on stakeholders. If we have too many stakeholders with vested interests, who are thinking about the status quo and not wanting to upset the apple cart, we are going down the route of not facing up to the big decisions. Governing bodies would be wiser to focus more on skills than on stakeholders, and that is the direction of travel that we should go in. The Government have already relaxed the rules about local authority governors, and we should go further and say, “Look, there is the emphasis on skills rather than the stakeholders.”

I have been the chairman of several governing bodies and a member of many, and I have seen stakeholders represent their groups and their communities extraordinarily well, but they do not necessarily ensure that the tough decisions are made in the school, and that is the distinction that I draw. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for putting the spotlight on that.

[Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. I agree with him about ensuring that governors who come on board have those skills, which they can use to hold the head teacher and the rest of the executive to account, but at the moment there are some 30,000 governor vacancies in the country. How do we go about filling them and ensuring that the people who are chosen have the right skills?

[Neil Carmichael]

That is a really good question, to which there are two answers. If you have everything corralled off into stakeholder groups, you are—are you not?—limiting the number of people who you can recruit. By definition, the pool is necessarily smaller. If you say that you must have parent governors or local authority governors—

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Carmichael]

Absolutely, my hon. Friend is right. It is not wise to say that we will go in completely the opposite direction. There is a balance to be struck, which is that where there are neighbouring schools with common interests and common issues that would benefit from a federal or partnership model of governance, that model would be good and should be welcomed. However, where there is a school that clearly does not fit that description, that type of model would not work. It is up to governing bodies to think that matter through. I am simply saying that the federal or partnership model of governance is one that we should promote where it is useful and relevant.

The second aspect of structure that I want to talk about is size, which my hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire touched on. In many cases, a governing body of 20 or more governors is simply unnecessary. Actually, such a body quite often ends up with just a core number of governors playing the decisive role, and once one of that core number goes the rest are bereft of the necessary skill and expertise, and the governing body can fall apart. That relates to the recruitment problem. As we have heard, about 30,000 governor posts are still vacant, so it would be wise to consider relaxing the rules on the size of governing bodies and having fewer, but more focused and more skills-orientated, governors on a governing body.

I have already talked about the importance of governors challenging head teachers. It is absolutely right that head teachers should be challenged, but they should be challenged constructively. However, it is also really important that we have governing bodies that govern strategically, focusing on the long-term interests of the school and its pupils. It is necessary to think in terms of formulating a governing body that genuinely has that capacity to be strategic—to think about the school plan and what it can do to push forward the aims and objectives of that plan, and any other plan that is appropriate. Those are three areas of structure that need to be considered.

[Rehman Chishti]

On the numbers, I hear my hon. Friend say that 20 governors is too many. Are we looking at around 10 or 12 as the appropriate figure, if those 10 or 12 governors have the skills and in-depth training to hold the head teacher and others to account?

[Neil Carmichael]

In one of the publications that I referred to, the all-party group certainly came up with 12 as the ideal number. Having 12 governors means having a reasonably good chance of getting a good cross-section of skills, and there would also be a sensible way of dealing with succession planning, which also needs to be considered when we discuss governors and the future structure of governing bodies.

One thing that the all-party group has done is produce a list of 20 relevant questions for governors to ask themselves. We went through a fairly exhaustive process. We had lots of governors in one of the Committee Rooms of the House, talking about the questions that should be asked by governors. They are the questions that we want to encourage more governing bodies to ask of their head teachers and of themselves.

One of those questions is:

“Do we engage in good succession planning?”

Another is:

“Do we carry out a regular 360 review of the chair’s performance?”

Still another is:

“Does our strategic planning cycle drive the governing body’s activities and agenda setting?”

Obviously, there are loads of other questions, but formulating these questions—and, indeed, the other work of the all-party group—has been useful in sketching out ways in which governing bodies might like to consider testing themselves, because we need more rigorous self-assessment by governing bodies.

Members will be pleased to hear that I am nearly finished. I want to finish off by asking a few key questions that are relevant to this debate. The first is, how do we make school governors focus on school improvement, based on a proper understanding of data performance? That question is a combination of wanting to ensure that we have school governors who challenge the performance of the head teacher and who are able and willing to take tough and rigorous decisions, but who are also capable of understanding, analysing and drawing appropriate conclusions from the amazing amount of data and information that fly around.

I have already touched on the second question, but I will repeat it as a sort of finale: are the governing bodies that we have too unwieldy, how do we ensure that we move from a stakeholder situation towards a skills-based governing body, and can we enhance the professionalism of school governing bodies? I want to emphasise the idea of ensuring that the chairmen of governing bodies are properly trained, properly engaged by the head teacher—and vice versa—and remunerated in a way that is consistent with their responsibilities and with the skills that we need to recruit for such posts.

[Rehman Chishti]

Regarding skills and ability, local authorities such as mine set a minimum training requirement that governors have to do, linked to compulsory aspects of the overall training scheme. Does my hon. Friend agree that that type of training by certain local authorities, in partnership with governing bodies—for example, the partnership between my local authority and Medway governors—works well?

[Neil Carmichael]

Yes, I do. There are good examples of training schemes and the National Governors Association—a good organisation to which I pay tribute— also does a huge amount of good training work. However, we must ensure that governors and governing bodies recognise that there is a strong need for governors to be trained, because some governors seem to think that training is something that people do only if they are bored, not because it is necessary. We need to promote the training of governors.

We are engaged in a real set of reforms in the world of education, which is an opportunity to look at governors and governance in a way that reflects our understanding of the new autonomous and independent approach that schools should have, as well as the fact that we want to drive up standards, wherever it is necessary to do so. We want not to waste time, but to get on with things to ensure that we have the appropriate leadership, impetus and toolkits to deliver the job.

I am not being prescriptive. I am simply raising issues that should be on the agenda to inform our discussions on changes to school governance. We should at all times—this is an appeal to the Minister and her colleagues —mention governance, underline its importance, encourage people to become governors and recognise that school leadership through effective governance is what we need as part of the mechanism to ensure that our schools continue to improve.