School Governing Bodies

Rushanara Ali Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[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.

[Alex Cunningham]

On a point of clarity, I think that I said when I opened my contribution that I wanted to offer some of my own thoughts and I do believe in some form of compulsory training, but should not leaders in our schools accept that they, too, can learn? They should submit to training without being compelled to do so.

[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.