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FEATURE: SCHOOL GOVERNANCE


The missing pool of talent on school governing boards


gender, region and working status. We’ll refer to this as the ‘public poll’. Our second study, with governors and trustees


themselves, was carried out by GovernorHub, part of The Key, and had 4,006 respondents. We’ll refer to this as the ‘governor survey’. Looked at together, the two studies can tell us


a lot about who’s missing from governing boards, explore why they might be missing and, crucially, raise opportunities to help bring them on board. So, what did we uncover? Firstly, most people


I


n our final feature this month Nicola West Jones, Head of Market Research at The Key


Group, looks at the findings of the Group’s research into public perceptions of school governance, discusses how governors and trustees themselves feel about their role, and asks how representative school governance really is as a reflection of modern Britain. In January 2022, we conducted two pieces of research to dig into what the general public understands about school governance, as well as to find out what governors and trustees themselves feel about their role – including how visible they think it is to wider society. Our first study, with the general public, was


carried out by Ipsos and had 1,901 respondents. The sample was representative of 16 to 75 year- olds in England, having met quotas on age,


don’t understand the role of school governance. In the public poll, we asked respondents who they think is responsible for ensuring strategic direction in a school, holding leaders to account for educational performance and overseeing financial performance in a school (the three core functions of governance). We also asked who they think is responsible for monitoring that school dinners meet the School Food Standards (something else that comes under governors’ remit). Respondents were presented with a list of up to twelve roles for each of the four questions, and asked to pick as many as they thought applied. Worryingly, overall, only 9% of respondents


chose “governors/trustees” across all four questions on governors’ areas of responsibility – suggesting a distinctly low understanding of the role among the public in general. 24% of respondents picked “governors/trustees” just once across the four areas of responsibility. This finding is backed up by what our


governors and trustees told us in the governor 44 www.education-today.co.uk


survey. The majority (82%) felt that the public doesn’t understand their role. When asked how visible they thought the role was to the public, using a scale of 1 (“hidden”) to 5 (“visible”), governors gave an average rating of just 2. While this only represents governors’ perception, it accurately reflects the limited understanding of the role that we found in the public poll. This is problematic for current governors, who, we shall see, then feel less valued. It’s also problematic for those who might become governors, who don’t then understand the important strategic nature and impact of the role and might be deterred from applying. The findings offer a strong sense of why this


role isn’t widely understood by the public. Our governor survey asked respondents how many times they’d seen a story about school governance in the mainstream media. Our motivation for asking this was a sense that, more often than not, stories about schools refer only to school leaders, teachers or pupils; while governors – a fundamental part of what makes a school successful or not – rarely get featured. The largest response, 42%, came from governors who said they had only seen a mainstream media story about school governance “once or twice”. A further 34% had “never seen a story on governance”, and 9% couldn’t recall either way. This lack of reporting may well contribute to the public not understanding the role and therefore not seeking out opportunities to become a governor (“you can’t be what you can’t see”).


July/August 2022


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