Earwig is delighted to have the eminent Dr Matthew Pearson as our latest guest blogger, writing about life as a school governor and the responsibilities that come with the position …

“The governing body of a school has always been a crucial part of how a school operates. The governors set the strategic direction of the school, they hold the headteacher to account and also keep an eye on the financial health of the school (NGA 2015). This is a lot of responsibility for a band of unpaid volunteers, yet strong governance is vital if a school is to move forward.

When I first became a governor of a primary school in Bolton over three years ago, two things struck me immediately. The first was the amount of the data the governing body are given to work with. As schools have become more accountable to OfSTED, the amount of data they generate to monitor performance has increased exponentially, and a governing body needs to engage with this data and discern a strategic direction from all of the detail and complexity. The second thing to strike me was how acronym rich education is, which is a very polite way of saying that education creates industrial quantities of jargon.  I had worked in education albeit higher and further education, for decades, but even I had a period of adjustment as I sorted out the INAs from the PPAs. Budding governors need to make sense of all these terms if they are to perform their roles properly.

But what ultimately matters most in any school is not the data, or the acronyms, or the jargon; what matters most is the experience of the children.  Governors are there to help the school do the best it possibly can to educate its children and help them achieve their full potential.  Any governor who does not take this task seriously should not be on the governing body.  To improve the experience of the children, the governors need to engage with the teaching and learning in the school, to see what is happening on a typical Tuesday morning in the school. Our governing body holds learning walks where we move through the school observing lessons, small group teaching and one-to-one work, and these sessions are very valuable for putting all of the data into a context.  You get to see what is happening on the classroom floor and this makes discussions in governing body meetings so much richer and full of context.

But governors are very busy people.  Governors are increasingly selected for the skills they bring to the governing body; skills such as finance, IT, facilities management or HR skills. For much of their time the governors are doing the jobs which give them these skills, so the time they have to visit the school is necessarily limited.

comments