School Governing Bodies

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Westminster Hall

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. We are having an interesting debate, which I am pleased is being held, because the Education Committee did a huge amount of work on the subject.

I also applaud those who have supported me in the all-party group on education leadership and governance, which has been an important vehicle to promote school governance. It has struck me that not only have we been debating governance within these walls lately, but I have been invited to several debates in London and beyond to discuss it; most recently, I attended a debate hosted and organised by The Guardian. That underlines the point that school governance is becoming an important subject, largely because of the changing landscape in our education system.

We need to look back to 1944, 1988 and the legislation that paved the way for the academy programme and all the rest to understand that the system has changed considerably, but that the governance structure of governors has not kept up—the pace of change for school governors has not been fast enough. We must understand that central point if we are to debate governance properly.

The other major overall point is that our schools need to engage not only with the community, as the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) said, but fully and thoroughly with business, professions and opportunities in the world of work. Governing bodies have a role to play, and I want to talk about that in some detail.

First and foremost, I urge the Government to start thinking about how they might inspire the best governors to be even better and great people to become governors. We need to attract from a broader range of society the kind of people whom we want to run our schools. That means talking up the role of governors, enhancing the role of governance and ensuring that people feel that, when they become governors, they count, are valued and can make a difference. We have to think about the need to inspire, and I urge the Minister to consider how the Department and others can inspire people to become governors.

On the question of regulation or deregulation. I am not a great believer in regulation; I like to see things operating freely and individuals using systems to promote good things in a good way. My inclination, therefore, is that we should not have more regulations or training programmes specifically tailored by someone else to be superimposed on people who might well have their own opinions. What is important, however, is for us to create an environment—a framework—for governing bodies to make such decisions for themselves, so that they know who they need to recruit and to train and how such training should be done. Only they know what their school and governing body need.

Therefore, I ask the Minister what can be implemented to encourage governing bodies to think about how they are structured, how their membership is formulated and other such matters. I have already urged the Education Committee to write to the Department to see how the draft Deregulation Bill might help—I would be grateful to hear from her about how that might be done.

In my constituency, I want to see more interface between business and schools; I want to see medium-sized and small businesses more engaged with education. Furthermore, I will come up with a plan to implement that, which will, broadly speaking, involve a series of seminars at which chief executives and board members of businesses can meet governors. Two things will be achieved: first, governors will see how boards operate, make decisions, decide strategy and ensure the highest standards in their businesses, whether they are a recruitment firm, a manufacturer or whatever; and, secondly, on the other side of the coin, businesses will be able to talk to education as a whole and schools in particular with a view to saying, “These are the sorts of skills that we need for our recruitment”, and to explaining the sort of people they need to design and manufacture their products, operate their services and be their professionals.

There is not a sufficiently clear interface between our education system and employers as a whole. One of the ways in which we can improve that is through improving governance, so that it becomes more business-oriented, benefiting from business skills—not to the exclusion of all the other vital skills, but to ensure that business skills are part of the narrative.

On the question of what happens if a governing body fails, I pressed the case in the Education Committee that we should be tough on failing governance—because we have to be. Too many schools are simply not doing well enough. Worst of all, too many schools are coasting and seem to think that that is okay. We need a governing system that holds those schools to account, to ensure that coasting or the quiet tolerance of some rather poorly taught subject does not happen. As we know from the past week, we have a long way to go to ensure that our schools deliver the kind of education that we need for the long term.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about failing governing bodies. It is key that we encourage local authorities to intervene accordingly. Sadly, in my constituency a school has recently been rated inadequate; that rating included the governing body. We need quick change when there are those kinds of problems.

[Neil Carmichael]

I agree with my hon. Friend, who makes a powerful point. I can point to similar problems in my constituency. Any Member of Parliament interested in schools in their constituency will be able to say the same thing. That is rather a sad fact.

We need to find ways of making sure that governing bodies almost fear the consequences of failure. Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools, has suggested that he should have powers effectively to remove governing bodies that are quite clearly incapable of turning a school around from failure to success. If we see that local authorities are unwilling to act—perhaps because everybody knows everybody and no one is willing to upset someone they knew a long time ago or have worked with successfully in some other department or school—we have to find other ways.

The people we should really be thinking about are children and their parents. They are the real stakeholders. We have to provide a system that guarantees that their school will be promoted, managed and dealt with in the best possible way. So my next request to the Minister is to make sure that we have a way of getting rid of governors who cannot do the job. It is dead easy: that is what we would do in a business, so it is what we should do in a school.

We want to see self-improvement. Our whole education system is about self-improvement. Any organisation should always be motivated to improve. The question we should always ask ourselves each day is, “How can I do this better?” That is a natural thing to do, so we want to see governing bodies doing it. Of course, that must be in conjunction with head teachers. As my hon. Friend the Chair of the Education Committee correctly pointed out, we need clarity as to what the head is supposed to be doing and what the chair of governors is supposed to be doing.

Again, that may well be a matter on which different types of schools would have different opinions—I accept that. But we cannot have a situation in which chairs of governing bodies are sitting around in schools for a couple of days a week trying to do what the head should be doing—that is completely unacceptable—and we cannot have a head basically taking on the role of the chair by steering the governing body through a difficult course to cover up or disguise inappropriate results and the like. We have to have clarity on those roles. That is where the Department for Education comes in: we need an explicit description of what the chair of a governing body is supposed to do. That should be part of the attempt to inspire people that I referred to earlier: we want to inspire the best people to be chairs of governing bodies, so we need to make sure that they know what they are doing when they approach the job.

I have talked a lot on the Education Committee about interim executive boards. As we all know, IEBs are used to replace governing bodies if the big decision to dismiss a governing body is taken. That is quite right. But that raises the question of why, if the solution is an interim executive board—a smaller body than the one it is replacing, made up of skilled people and with a focus on improvement and the capacity to get on with the job—we do not have something similar to that in the first place: a smaller structure, made up of people equipped with the right skills, so that the school can benefit from that kind of flexible, imaginative, innovative, robust governing system. That is where I have a slight variance of opinion with some of my colleagues on the Education Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to participate in this debate, Mr Rosindell. I think I am the only Member here who is not on the Education Committee, apart from the Minister and shadow Minister of course, but we are discussing a critical role, and I am so pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) led his Committee in an inquiry on it. It is a really important subject.

I was a school governor, back in the mid-’90s at a school in Kilburn, and in the late noughties at a school in Hampshire. At both schools, the experience was very interesting. In the mid-’90s, we seemed to spend a lot of time talking about children and teachers, but by the time I next became a school governor 10 years later, most of the agenda at our meetings seemed to be focused on whether we had done this or that policy update, or what about the charter mark we were going for, or what about this and what about that. As a consequence, the amount of time we spent speaking about children and teachers was dramatically reduced. I am pleased to see that there seems to have been quite a revolution in reducing the amount of direction given, and in allowing good school governing bodies to get going. However, my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael), who is no longer in his place, made an eloquent point about the need to tackle poorly performing governing bodies, and I agree with him wholeheartedly.

In terms of recruitment and retention, my experience is that one of the barriers to becoming a school governor—at the moment in my constituency, I am trying to encourage people to become school governors—is perhaps the perception of the amount of time it takes, and the feeling about what value people can add. We know that some of the brightest and best business people are already dragged into so many other situations and are being asked to give their time, whether on issues to do with the future of the high street, their business association, or the chamber of commerce. Nevertheless, I find that when people do the work, they really enjoy it, and recognise that an effective governing body is critical to the good—if not outstanding—performance of a school. I encourage more people to come from business, but also from our public sector.

On the tools available, the Committee was right to talk about data, such as those data provided by RAISEonline—reporting and analysis for improvement through school self-evaluation. Although I have a PhD, I will not pretend that it is always the easiest thing to encounter cold, but it gives people very detailed information about children’s progress. That is why I was so pleased to see the data dashboard that came from Ofsted last year. Some amendments have already been made to it, to try to focus on the key issues. I have been to every school in my constituency and have met plenty of school governors, and I took great delight in encouraging them to use the tool. I cannot wait for the next set of results to come out, so that we can continue to try to understand whether progress is being made. The division between key stage 1 and key stage 2 was particularly illuminating for some primary school governors in deciding where they should be focusing their efforts, and I welcome that.

Importantly, my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness referred to clerks. He is so right: they can make a critical difference to whether a governing body is effective. High levels of training should be made available, and I recommend that clerks should not serve in a school for more than a certain number of terms—not school terms, but terms of appointment—because it is useful to exchange clerks and make sure that things stay fresh and that the latest ideas come in.

I agree with the Government on pay; I do not think that we should pay school governing bodies. As is pointed out in the Government response, it is open to any governing body to buy in services, and that is very useful. Federations are a new model of governance. I represent a mainly rural seat, and with 54 schools in 300 square miles—some of those schools are very small—there are, rightly, increasingly moves towards more federations, the sharing of head teachers and so on. However, what has not happened yet, but should happen, is a merging of the governing bodies of those schools. I understand why people might feel concern that that reduces accountability, but it absolutely does not. There should be a partnership across schools. A suggestion was made in the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce report on Suffolk schools, called “No school an island”, to have parents’ councils to ensure—how can I put it?—that schools do not feel ignored. We see services merging, and the sharing of head teachers and senior teachers; I think we need to see the same with our school governing bodies.

In terms of the mix of skills, I wonder, at some schools, how prepared governors are to be critical friends. It is not the role of the chairman or chairwoman of the governing body to be only a cheerleader. We see that dilemma at the BBC: is the noble Lord Patten a cheerleader, or a critical friend of the BBC Trust? We have the same challenge for our school governing bodies; we must try to address what is really going on.

Head teachers should ensure that their teachers are up to scratch, but there is also another challenge. In one of the governing bodies on which I served—thankfully, I joined just after this took place—it took more than two years to try to displace a head teacher who was simply letting children down. It is very challenging for governors to do that kind of thing, and sometimes, the easiest way out is simply to do nothing at all. As has been said eloquently today, we cannot allow that to happen, which is why I am very pleased to see that a number of colleagues—I do not know how they manage to fit it in—continue to be school governors. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) is a governor of Ravenswood community primary school. I was delighted to see that, in the recent round of inspections in Suffolk, his school moved up the ratings to “good”. I shall be honest: many schools in Suffolk went the other way, so I thought that that was good for its credibility. I need to inspire myself to take that leap and go and do something to help the schools that are struggling in my area.

I was a latecomer to the debate, but this is such an important topic. I am glad that it has been given the prominence that it has. I see the Government response, and I admire all of it. I encourage the Government to go further—to stand up for governors and to recognise that they are the people who can make the difference, alongside great head teachers and great teachers.