School Governing Bodies

Neil Carmichael 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.

[Alex Cunningham]

I have experience of working with an interim board that was placed in a school in Stockton-on-Tees. It brought tremendous skills to the school and helped turn it around, so I was all in favour of that approach. But I have also seen tremendous parent governors, who are not going to be the leader of the body or its chair, but are tremendous advocates for parents. Surely there is room for people such as that as well in our governing body system.

[Neil Carmichael]

The key point is that a lot of governors are parents anyway. I have been a governor for a long time and a parent for a long time. I do not know about the hon. Gentleman’s family life, but I assume that most Members of Parliament have children. If they do not, that would not prevent them from being a governor, but if someone does have children that would not prevent them from being a governor either. I do not think that the question concerning parent governors is relevant to what the membership of an interim executive board should be. I have seen a large number of interim executive boards and I know that their members have children.

[Alex Cunningham]

Does the hon. Gentleman mean that he does not think that parents should have the right to elect some of their own to our school governing bodies?

[Neil Carmichael]

What is really important—this was going to be my next point, so I am glad the hon. Gentleman has taken me on to it, as we are probably done and dusted with IEBs—is that if the governing body is not good enough, parents should be able to say so. Accountability rests on that point. The real interface of accountability is between governors and parents. If parents think that the governing body simply is not doing a good enough job, they should be able to dismiss it. It is important to give parents as a group the capacity to make a decision as big as that, in defence of their children’s education and future.

[Alex Cunningham]

The idea of parents being able to sack governing bodies is an interesting concept; perhaps it should be explored in greater detail. Would we apply that idea to academies and free schools as well as to state-maintained schools?

[Neil Carmichael]

The logic of it is that if we want to make sure that governing bodies are properly accountable, we have to decide who they are accountable to. In my view, that should be parents. The problem with stakeholder representation and all that sort of thing is that it actually dilutes accountability: the fact is that once parents get on the body, they start becoming defensive of their own behaviour and conduct, when in fact what they should be doing as parents is testing what the body is doing.

[Craig Whittaker (Calder Valley) (Con)]

I know from my experience as a governor that quite often one or two very vocal parents seem to take the flow of other parents with them, but often are not doing the right thing but the worst thing that could be done. Will my hon. Friend elaborate on that point?

[Neil Carmichael]

I assume my hon. Friend means parents on governing bodies, and I completely agree, as I have seen that behaviour myself. We should be making sure that governing bodies are truly accountable and responsible to the key stakeholders, who seem to me to be the parents. Having parents on the governing body is a great idea, but not as a specific group of parent governors—they should be people who happen to be governors and to have children. That is the way to look at the issue.

[Mr Graham Stuart]

I fear my hon. Friend might be confused about interim executive boards. He seems to think that because the people on those boards are focused, dedicated, highly skilled and small in number, we can extrapolate from that the idea that all governing bodies everywhere should be small and similar in make-up to IEBs. That is simply not possible, given the weight of work required of governing bodies. That was the evidence we heard: as Professor Chris James of the university of Bath said, there is no statistical relationship between governing body effectiveness and governing body size or vacancies. I put it to my hon. Friend that there is no evidence for his view. If we could have astonishingly elite, small boards of dedicated people to put the time in, it might be a better system, but we do not have those people and they do not have the time.

[Neil Carmichael]

There are two points about the size of governing bodies. First, with a governing body of about 20, the influence of individuals is diluted. That applies to any committee system, including school governance. Secondly, it is not necessary to replicate exactly an interim executive board because that would be counter-productive. The word “interim” does not imply permanence, the word “executive” does not imply strategic decision making, and the word “board” is not commonly used in schools. The characteristics of IEBs and how they operate are important and we should think about how that might influence the way in which governing bodies will be shaped.

[Craig Whittaker]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the recent changes to the legislation to allow flexibility and innovation with smaller governing bodies are in place and do exactly what he is arguing for? The problem is that the Government have not communicated those models widely enough.

[Neil Carmichael]

That is precisely why it is important to signal that governors, and particularly chairs of governors, should be aware of the opportunities to reshape their bodies, and why I suggested that the Minister should demonstrate how that might be amplified and improved on. My hon. Friend is absolutely right in saying that we do not want an avalanche of more regulations. We want to encourage governing bodies to shape themselves around the needs and characteristics of their school. That is yet another reason why we should not require certain organisations to be represented; we should allow the governing bodies to make those decisions.

If all the schools in Stockton are absolutely determined to have stakeholder representation, they should have it, but if schools elsewhere want to focus specifically and exclusively on the skills they need, that is what they should do. We should have a system that enables that to happen. We want to ensure that governors and governance are fit for purpose, that our schools are constantly improving and delivering the best possible outcomes for their pupils, and that our pupils have the ability to seize and exploit opportunities in the world of work and whatever else they want to do with their lives.

To my mind, the future is not about replicating what happened in the past. It is about understanding the dynamics and changes that will influence people’s experience of work and economics. We are talking about a global economy, new technologies, new ways of working, new relationships and new structures. Governance must change to be able to respond to all those dynamics.

I want to ask the Minister several things. First, how will she inspire the best people to be governors? Secondly, how will deregulating the system ensure that governing bodies can shape themselves to reflect the sort of school that they want to have and their interpretation of their community and the business world? Thirdly, will she consider how to get rid of failing governing bodies? I have put on the table the idea of the ultimate option—parents revolting—but there are processes between doing nothing and using a “nuclear deterrent”. Those processes must be teased out and must have some relationship with measurement of attainment and inspection of schools. Fourthly, it is key to ensure that we focus on skills rather than just stakeholders. One can be achieved without excluding the other, but the most important thing is to have the best people governing our schools for our children and their future.