Managing Governors

For today's post, I have included part of a chapter from my manuscript on managing the relationship with your governors from a wellbeing point of view.

Chapter 11 - How to survive working with governors

The relationship between a headteacher and their governors is a very complex one. It is one of the peculiarities of the profession that a school is essentially controlled by a group of volunteers, many of whom will have little or no experience of working in a school. The main reason for someone wanting to be a governor is the desire to provide support to a school, but the balance between the two governor roles of support and challenge can be a tricky one to achieve, and a souring of the relationship between the head and the governors can have a huge impact on their wellbeing. In this chapter, I will share my experience of the challenges of working with governors so that you can use it to navigate and even avoid some of the common pitfalls of the relationship.

The relationship between you as head teacher and your Chair of Governors is central to the success of your relationship with the entire governing body. A conscientious chair will undergo all the training available for the role, which will present to them a huge list of responsibilities they are expected to fulfill. For a volunteer role, the amount expected from them is immense, and it takes real commitment for someone to take it on. I would argue that the role as it is presented on paper is actually impossible to do effectively, at least within a local authority maintained school, as it is written in such a way as to describe a role that should be carried out by a paid member of staff. Therefore, as things stand, a conscientious chair will take on the role and try to fulfill it as best they can but in doing so they are in danger of damaging their relationship with the head teacher. 

Therefore, you need a Chair of Governors who approaches the role with a realistic expectation of what they can actually achieve whilst supporting you in your role. Most importantly, you need a Chair of Governors who trusts you. If you feel that your Chair of Governors is trying to achieve the impossible in their role, or that they do not trust you, then you need to sit down and have an honest and open chat with them, and if that does not work then you need to seek advice from governor services. A document that both you and your chair should read, which will support a positive relationship between you, is ‘Leading governors: The role of the chair of governors in schools and academies’, which was produced by the National College for Teaching and Leadership.

Another hugely important role on the Governing Body is the role of Clerk to the Governors. This at least is not, or should not, be a volunteer role, but as with lots of schools the amount you are able to pay a clerk is not commensurate with the skills that are required to do the job effectively. As a result, this is one of the most difficult positions to fill in a school. If you are able to, I would advocate for appointing a clerk who has no other connection, formal or informal to the school. This will minimise the chances of a conflict of interest occurring, which can be complicated and damaging to the organisation.

Alongside official definitions of types of governors, there is one unofficial group that you need to consider carefully, as they can be particularly challenging and, if your relationship deteriorates, can have a catastrophic effect on the school and on your wellbeing. It is relatively common for governors to be current or ex-teachers, which can be hugely beneficial to you and your school if they bring with them and are prepared to share, their expertise. They are worth their weight in gold if their experience is within the same category of school that they are now governors of, but if they come from other phases of education you need to be careful. You could be using the same words but speaking a different language, if you get my drift, and it is important that all governors are on-message. If these governors disagree with something within your school it can be extremely undermining for all concerned as they may try to leverage their position using their ‘professional expertise’. This has potentially become even more problematic since the pandemic, as we have seen such a polarisation of thoughts and ideas since then that disagreements seem to be even more challenging to overcome, and at times impossible to do so.

If you are having issues with one or more of your governors, the first thing that I want to say is that you are not alone. Those four words were probably the most powerful statement I ever heard during my leadership career. I have not met a head teacher who didn’t at some time suffer from imposter syndrome, and when bad things happen we all think they are only happening to us. That is simply not true as everyone goes through the same challenges in their roles as you do, we just don’t always share that fact.

The next important point I want to make is that, if you are having issues with a particular governor, sit tight as they will probably remove themselves from the situation if they are unhappy with the way that things are being done. You may have a couple of tricky meetings, but it is likely not to last too long, and their impact on the school will soon be forgotten. Post covid though there does seem to have been a reduction in the number of people in society who are either willing to admit errors or to take the high road, so you may have a longer situation on your hands than you would hope for. If that is the case, there are clear procedures in place for their removal, so just speak to whoever your ‘governance professional’ is and be guided by their advice.

So what can unhappy governors do? Well they can complain to Ofsted, which doesn’t mean anything, as I have described elsewhere in this book. They can cause problems on social media or in the playground, which you can get support with but will probably only last a short while. It is important to remember in this situation that most members of the school community will be reasonable people and will disagree with whatever had caused the issue with the particular governor. Whatever happens, it is important that you stay professional and stick to your position. Your integrity means more than your popularity when it really comes down to it.

Obviously a large proportion of your, hopefully positive, interactions with governors will be occurring within full board and committee meetings. Governors meetings can be rewarding and positive experiences which cement positive relationships and support school improvement, or they can be overly long, tetchy, interminably boring affairs that have little or no effect on the school other than to add stress to an already overburdened headteacher and their staff. Over many years, and many many meetings, I have picked up a few tips and pointers that have ensured my meetings are definitely more in the former camp than the latter one.

The first thing to consider is definitely timings of, and lengths of meetings. Union guidance states that staff meetings should be around an hour long and the consensus seems to be that governors meetings should be a maximum of two hours long. The website ‘Governors for Schools’ states in its FAQs that 95% of schools hold their meetings in the evenings, starting between 5pm and 6:30pm.

My views are that where possible, governors committee meetings should be run either within the school day, or start as close as possible to 5pm. Whilst a consensus needs to be found that enables everyone to attend, the difference between a 5pm start and a 6:30pm start is huge in terms of the impact it will have on those attending. A two-hour meeting starting at 6:30pm, followed potentially by a significant journey home after will mean that you, and other members of staff attending, can be impacted in your capacity to work at your most effective for the rest of the week. Given that governors meetings tend to be at the beginning of the week, this effect is significant. I don’t buy into the argument that when one applies for a job that involves a long commute one knows what they are letting themselves in for. That is not an excuse for ignoring staff wellbeing.

If we look outside of education for inspiration, we can see that there has been a lot of research in business into maximising the effectiveness of meetings, which often means shortening their length. We do of course find extremes, including Sir Richard Branson who apparently favours 10 minute meetings, and I am not for a minute suggesting shortening governors meetings to that extent. Staff meetings however can definitely use a bit more of a Bransonesque approach (see my chapter on staff wellbeing)! We can, and should, definitely apply business practices in order to reduce meeting times though. As Tim Cook (CEO of Apple) is quoted as saying “The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.” As research shows, there is a significant drop-off in focus and attention in meetings from 84% at the thirty minute mark to 64% when meetings go longer than three quarters of an hour.

So how do we get meetings that have traditionally lasted upwards of two hours down to closer to the ideal length of 45 minutes? Well, legendary athlete and civil rights campaigner Bill Russell had the answer when he said “the magic to a great meeting is the work that is done beforehand”, which is my top tip for running a meeting efficiently. Here is my full list: 

• Ensure all paperwork is sent out at least seven days before the meeting and make it clear to everyone attending that they are expected to read the paperwork and table questions to you prior to the meeting. This will save significant time as it will cut out chit-chat and means you also do not have to read things out to the governors at the meeting like they are children. Ensure reports from committee meetings are also shared in this way.

• Avoid repetition of discussions that took place at committee level. These are shared with governors but should not be included in full board meetings.

• Do not have AOB on your agenda. If it is worth discussing in the meeting it should be on the main agenda. If you have an option for people to chat, they will take it!

• Consider offering remote access to governors who are struggling to make a meeting. This option can also be used to ensure that start times are not too late (see above).

• If your governors are interested in ‘school news’ then ask them to subscribe to your newsletter. Governors meetings are not time for sharing that kind of information.

• From discussion points identify clear actions which can be minuted and then referred back to at the next meeting. Creating an action can be used to move a meeting on if you feel that it is stalling.

• Have a policy schedule that spreads reviews out across the school year.  Look at the list of statutory ones and ask yourself, do we have any policies that are not statutory, and if we do, do we really need them? The answer is probably yes, and no, so get rid of the ones you don’t need asap. Ensure that your clerk takes on the management of school policies as this is a time-consuming job. For Local Authority schools there are only 20 policies that you must have, at the time of writing.  From these, there are eight that will be produced centrally and need very little input from the school (Admissions arrangements, Careers Guidance, Data Protection, Governors Allowances, School Complaints, Teachers Pay, Teacher Performance and Capability, Safeguarding and Child Protection). There is a group that are more personal but will need relatively little work (Charging and Remissions, Attendance, Exclusions, Uniforms, SEND, Support for pupils with medical conditions, Health and Safety, and Premises Management) That leaves us with a very small group of four that should be the ones you spend the time on with the governors. They are the school behaviour policy, equality objectives, RSHE, staff behaviour and grievance. These should be discussed at full meetings, the rest can be rubber-stamped and only discussed if really necessary.

• When writing an agenda with your chair and clerk, I would strongly recommend that the three of you discuss approximate timings for each point on it. If you have these written down somewhere then someone, ideally the clerk or the chair can move things on when the allotted time has elapsed, within reasons of course as it might be that discussions take longer than expected. But if you use this approach in a flexible way you can help the meetings run efficiently.

• Consider AI minute generators, which are becoming more affordable and effective.

“Meetings are a symptom of bad organisation. The fewer meetings the better” Peter Drucker (Management Consultant, known as “The Father of Management”)

Once you have streamlined your meetings you need to consider how many that you should have over the course of an academic year. The law says that there should be a minimum of three full meetings per academic year, with committee meetings on top of this. I would strongly suggest that you go for six full meetings over the year, plus one or two committee meetings every half term. You are not required by law in maintained schools to have committees, and we tried abolishing them to streamline things, but it didn’t work and left the governors vulnerable, so I would not advise doing this. Obviously, different-sized schools do have the need for differently configured governing boards, so the most important thing is to ensure that you have a board that works for your context. On top of this, I would recommend three safeguarding visits from your safeguarding governor and three from your health and safety governor over the course of the year. These can be increased to committees and added to the formal meeting structure in larger schools, but that is too much to ask in smaller establishments. 

Before moving on, it is worth highlighting one further potential governor-related issue that can be the cause of high levels of stress for the headteacher. You are likely to have a committee that looks at pupil progress and attainment, perhaps known as the ‘standards committee’, and within that committee, I want to advise care when considering what data you share with governors. Sharing too much ‘school level’ data can be counterproductive as it can move this committee beyond the governor's remit, and too little can mean that governors cannot talk confidently about progress and attainment across the school. You really need to stick to ‘pre-published’ and ‘published’ data, by that I mean data that shows you what your published data looks like now and what it is going to look like at the end of the academic year. This is the data that Ofsted will interrogate, so this is the data that the governors need to talk confidently about. Any more depth is for the teachers, and for them only. If the governors want more, politely remind them of that.