Improving School Governance

How better governors make better schools

Nigel Gann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138832848
• eBook ISBN: 9781317564911
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

About the first edition:

"School governors will find this a sound and practical guide to the nature of their responsibilities and the process of managing their workload. It is well researched, based on vast experience, illustrated from the best practice, free from jargon – and always interesting." Joan Sallis.

Described by the National Association of Governors and Managers as "definitely a 'must' for your bookshelf"; reviewed in the Times Educational Supplement as an "essential guide to help governors".

This book is about governing schools – about how a governing board made up largely of 'ordinary' people with no professional educational experience, working in partnership with professional leaders, can help to make schools better. It is intended for governors in schools in England and Wales, in other parts of the world where lay people engage in school leadership, and for people who work with governors.

Improving School Governance examines:

• How school governors got to be where they are today
• How governing boards do their jobs
• How individual governors can best contribute to their schools
• Governors' accountability
• The nature of governors' meetings
• The rights that governors have
• The relationships between governors and the headteacher
• The role of governing boards in school inspection
• Governors' relationships with parents and the wider community
• How to evaluate the performance and impact of governing boards
• What the future might hold for state-funded schools and their governance
• What national strategic issues will need to be addressed by governing boards in the next five to ten years

Chapter 1

People and their schools

How lay governors, after a long history, came to have an important role in school governance

This is the story of governing schools. Governors have a longer history than you might think. You don’t have to read this history in order to make up your own mind as to how we should exercise our oversight of schools today, but you might find it useful to know some of the background to where we find ourselves in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.

The history of governing schools is the story of how ordinary people got to have a say in the running of their schools. But the main conflict within education has been – and in many ways still is – between politicians and professional educators. This conflict has been about who should have ownership of the education system.

The administration of education operates, in simple terms, on three levels: First, school governance – people with the responsibility for an individual school or group of schools. They delegate some functions to the professional staff they employ, specifically, the day-to-day running of the school with a view to enabling the best possible learning of the pupils. These governors (and we now have different levels of governors in some schools, where a board of trustees might appoint a local governing board) carry the legal responsibility for what goes on in the schools. Secondly, the local level of school administration, with more, less or in a growing number of cases, no control over the first level. Only for a comparatively short time in our history, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, have the people at this level been elected to deal solely with education. For almost all of the twentieth century, local government was elected to provide directly a range of services, of which schooling was by some distance the most expensive and the most labour-intensive. Only in the 1990s did a small number of state-funded schools take the opportunity then on offer to break away from their local education authority and to receive their funding from, and become directly responsible to, the national government. From this time on, and with increasing rapidity, the army of professional support provided to schools by local authorities began to shrink. Thirdly, national government exerts its influence in a number of ways, through acts of parliament, through the actions and preferences of ministers responsible for education, and through the more or less independent actions of civil servants employed by the department responsible for education.

There is no simple division here between policy and implementation, between theory and practice. For many years, state education in England and Wales was described as a national system, locally administered. This can no longer be said, even as the broadest generalisation. Except for a brief period towards the end of the nineteenth century, the voice of the community, the voice of ordinary people who pay for education through their local taxes, the voice of ‘the consumer’, has rarely been heard – until recently. What we saw, between 1839 and 1988, was a professionalisation and bureaucratisation of education at both central and local government levels; and the neutralisation of school governance by a failure to define specific areas of responsibility for lay people. The outcome was the overarching control of schools from ‘above’ by local education authorities and their officers; and from ‘below’, by their headteachers and other professional staff. Another factor which kept education largely away from the influence of politicians was the broad consensus between the two major parties of government about the purpose and structures of schooling. The trend towards providing ever-longer and more egalitarian state schooling to the entire population of young people dominated education policy throughout the twentieth century. Even debates about comprehensive versus selective secondary education were largely peripheral to the great aim of universal provision.

The 1970s saw the beginning of the end of this period, since when both the structures and the content of schooling have become deeply contentious. This turnaround has of course had its own impact on governance. In the early summer of 2014, what was almost certainly a hoax letter from a Birmingham school governor led to an impassioned debate in newspapers about the role of governors, exacerbated by the variety of types of school in existence throughout England, the confusing range of accountabilities and responsibilities of schools, the content of the curriculum, and the very purposes of schooling.

The history of school governing bodies

From the Dark Ages to Victorian times

The first school governing bodies were the boards of trustees responsible for setting up and running English schools from the sixth century on. These were originally church institutions, but by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries more and more schools were being set up by groups of lay people, such as guilds and companies. Of course, these were almost exclusively for boys only, and aimed at a classical preparation for the increasingly secular universities. They were now being governed by ‘respectable’ people who were trustees of schools established by wealthy, philanthropic citizens, representatives of the newly emerging middle class. Everything the school did was in the hands of these trustees, including maintaining the buildings and appointing the teachers. While some governing bodies took an active and day-to-day interest, we know that many of them didn’t take the job seriously, and left the running of the school to often incompetent, sometimes corrupt, headteachers.

In the late seventeenth century, there was a rise in ‘associated philanthropy’ (Owen, 1964). Wealthy people came together in what we now call voluntary organisations: ‘One of the most shining testimonies to this new form of charity was the charity school movement. By 1729 there were over 1400 such schools in England catering for over 22,000 pupils’ (Smith, 1995: p. 12). They were as much concerned with religious instruction as they were with secular education – as was the Sunday School movement from the 1780s, which attracted possibly ‘200,000 working class children by 1800, and 2 million by mid-century’ (Smith, 1995: p. 18). Were such schools mainly a means of social control, or were they an extension of popular working-class culture? While ‘middle-class’ teachers and sponsors, for the most part, controlled the schools, some clergy attacked them as seditious.

Religious foundations, however, were the most likely to fund schools. Non-conformist schools were particularly likely to offer a practical education which suited the industrial and commercial expansion of the nineteenth century. It was these schools that grew into the public and grammar schools of the twentieth century.

People began to argue about what went on in schools. Should they just teach the basics, so that workers could function in the new machine age? Should they teach morals and religion? Were schools for ‘keeping people in their place’? Or for developing individuality? Could they foster social mobility, seen by many as essential for a vibrant growing economy? In this debate – which is not unfamiliar today – the development of state funding of schools added a third element to those already in place, the governing body and the headteacher.

1839–1870

Most of the schools providing elementary education in the country in the 1830s were established by the National Society (of the Church of England) and the British and Foreign Schools Society (of the non-conformist churches). The government awarded grants to set up these schools, and to run them. In 1839, the Government Education Office was created as an adjunct to the Privy Council Office, and presided over by the Lord President, to distribute these grants to the two societies. The Secretary of Education ran the office. He was the first civil servant to devote his time entirely to education.

The Education Office appointed two inspectors, one Church of England, one non-conformist, to decide the size of the grant to be given to each school. But these inspectors had no controlling brief. The first Ofsted inspectors in 1993 were reminded that they ‘should recognise that the appropriate authority (i.e. the governing board) has ultimate responsibility for executive action’ (Ofsted, 1993: Section 3, p. 18). Nowadays, inspectors tell schools what they have to do to improve – but not how to do it. In 2014, on the publication of some reports on schools which implied otherwise, Ofsted hurried to deny that they favoured particular styles of teaching. There are 170 years of history behind this. The first Guidance for Inspectors, published in 1840, read: ‘You are in no respect to interfere with the instruction, management or discipline of the school, or to press upon them any suggestion that they may be disinclined to receive’ (quoted in Gordon, 1974). So they had very limited powers. In 1857, for example, a committee of school ‘managers’ (until the 1986 Education Act, all elementary and later primary school governors were called, deceptively, managers) said to HMI Blandford of their schoolmaster: ‘He is very incompetent, but we like him for he gives us no trouble, and is very civil’. The power of inspectors was perhaps more in what people thought they could do, than what they actually could do.

Lina Waterfield (1961) tells how Matthew Arnold – son of the great Rugby headmaster, part-time poet, and school inspector – was once invited by her parents to visit her when she was 6 years old and still not reading:

‘“Your mother tells me that you do not know how to read, and are refusing to learn. It surprises me very much that a little girl of six should not know how to read, and expects to be read to. It is disgraceful, and you must promise me to learn at once; if you don’t, I shall have to put your father and mother in prison.” I was startled and frightened by this threat, and at the very same time very puzzled that a poet could put people in prison. I asked father whether he could put him in prison. Father hesitated: “No, I don’t think he could, although he is a Government Inspector of Schools”.’ The threat, though baseless, worked. The little girl was reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales within a few weeks.

The church school managers, therefore, were not inclined to take orders, just as long as the grant kept coming. Some boards probably developed some interesting practices in order to do this, including inaccurate reports of the moral and professional qualities of teachers and pupil teachers, disregard for the Department’s health regulations, and manipulation of attendance figures. Refusing to pay the grant became the only sanction that the government could impose on schools, while the responsibility for the provision of schools remained in the hands of the churches, charitable bodies and local – almost exclusively middle-class – people.

A report by HMI Norris, visiting church schools in Cheshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire in 1858, showed that:

• 37 per cent of schools were managed entirely by clergy, the management committees being active or non-existent;

• 43 per cent of schools were managed by clergy with a management committee;

• 9 per cent were managed by clergy and the local squire;

• 5 per cent entirely by the squire and his family;

• 3 per cent by a local industrialist;

• 3 per cent by a local lay committee.

The first serious Education Act

The 1870 Education Act was the first serious legislation in progress towards universal education. It didn’t do much to alter the management of existing schools, but it did introduce a structure of local government responsible for providing and administering schools and it was, by the standards of the times, directly accountable to the people (or those who could vote). W. E. Forster, as Vice-President of the Privy Council, faced what we would now call a postcode lottery. Fewer than one third of school-age children were in state-aided schools, fewer than a quarter in other, voluntary, schools, and at least two million had no schooling at all. The lead-up to Forster’s bill set the tone for parliamentary debate on education for the next 75 years. At no time does the secular curriculum of education appear to have been regarded as a matter for politicians. What they talked about was the place of religious instruction and worship, and the ownership of schools between church and state.

The 1870 Act and its successors brought some 5.2 million children into compulsory elementary education by 1895. The universal provision of education was a radical step – although Gladstone was not convinced of its benefits, and H. G. Wells described the act as ‘an Act to educate the lower classes for employment on lower class lines, and with specially trained, inferior teachers who had no universal quality’ (Wells, 1934). At the same time, deciding who would administer schools involved a very democratic system for its time.

The country was divided into School Districts, along the lines of boroughs or civil parishes. School Boards were created where there were not already enough schools. The size of these boards varied between five and fifteen members according to the population of the district, and members were elected every three years by cumulative vote (that is, every voter having as many votes as there were seats, and distributing them among the candidates). The electoral roll was the same as the burgess roll in a borough, or ratepayers in a parish, so, unlike parliamentary elections, it included single women and widows with property. However, there were none of the usual restrictions on eligibility to stand for election: ‘the school boards created under the Elementary Education Act were the most democratically constituted of all elected bodies of local government. Members, who sat for three years, required neither a property nor a residential qualification. Although voters had to be ratepayers, they were all treated equally’ (Hurt, 1979: p. 75). A further significant blow for women’s rights at the time occurred when Victorian feminist, journalist and educator Florence Fenwick Miller won the right to be elected to her school board under her birth name rather than her married name, which led the way for married women later to stand for parliament under their birth names. Elections were by secret ballot, and the boards were able to pass bye-laws making school attendance compulsory for children between the ages of five and thirteen.

The 1870 Act had enormous political significance. Indeed, Hurt suggests that the debate ‘was not predominantly an educational one about the need to extend the existing provision of elementary schooling, on that point there was by now a substantial consensus of opinion; it was a political one about how this extension should be made, the extent to which the schools should be under popular control, and how they should be financed. Essentially, it was a conflict between protagonists of differing visions of society, for whosoever controlled the schools could influence the education of the rising generations in a state that was moving slowly, albeit unwittingly, towards parliamentary democracy’ (Hurt, 1979: p. 76, my italics).

And so, we might add, it is today. The debate about school governance in the 2010s is just as much about who should have control over the education system in both its academic and its socialising roles.

The debate on Forster’s bill was largely about who should be responsible for managing schools. Some thought it should be only ‘the great and good’: ‘This business of education is of a peculiar character; it requires for its performance a special knowledge and an interest in the intellectual and moral improvement of the children’, said the Rt. Hon. W. F. Cowper in defence of the established order (quoted in Hurt, 1979: p. 79). The National Education League stood for national, universal, free, compulsory education managed by elected lay people. The National Education Union, supported by a number of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, wanted the schools to remain, in the words of Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, ‘to a great extent under the influence of the superior classes of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Improving School Governance
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 People and Their Schools: How Lay Governors, After a Long History, Came to have an Important Role in School Governance
• 2 The Revival of School Governance: How Governing Schools Came to Make a Meaningful Contribution to School Improvement
• 3 The Strategic Governing Board: How the Governing Board Brings about School Improvement
• 4 The Responsibilities, Roles and Rights of Governors: In which We Look at Some Ideas about Governing
• 5 Governance, Leadership and Management: Being an Investigation of the Relationships that Governing Boards have with Their Headteacher and Staff
• 6 School Governance and School Inspection: A Consideration of the Impact Inspection has on School Governance
• 7 Schools, Parents and the Community: In which We Consider the Relationships of Schools with Parents and Other Local People
• 8 Evaluating Governance: How do We know How Well We are Governing the School?
• 9 Schools in Uncertain Times: What the Present Looks Like and What the Future might Hold; The State of the Nation and Its Schooling
• 10 The Future of Governing Schools: Future Proofing the School
• Reading list
• Bibliography
• Appendices
• Index