School Governor

[bossykate]

i have just volunteered to be a school governor. just wondering if anyone out there has any more to add on this subject? it would be really interesting to hear some stories. thanks in advance, i appreciate it.

K8 - how did it go for you?

[Ailsa]

K8, see if you can have a word with your local education authority, they should have a section along the same lines as the authority I work in, that section in my LEA is simply called 'Governor Services'. They should be able to give you more information about becoming a governor and what, if any, training courses are available to help you carry out your duties.

[Cfr]

Hi, I've just started my second term as a school governor, and I really enjoy it. In our area, Governor Services runs training courses for governors (including some specifically for new governors) and I have found them invaluable, both for the technical stuff which you need to be aware of and also to meet other governors and find out how their schools deal with tricky issues.

One thing I would say is to make sure you speak up in meetings if there's anything you don't understand - if you havn't understood it, the chances are others won't either, and there is so much jargon and so many new rules and regulations that it's impossible to be aware of everything. There is nothing worse than governors who sit through meeting after meeting without uttering a word.

Is anyone out there the designated Literacy support governor? I've been doing it since the introduction of the Literacy Strategy in 1998, but I'm not clear what my role is now.

[wendym]

at "my" school there are so many people wanting to be governors I haven't managed it yet. I know there is training available. From a parent viewpoint can I say that we don't get enough opportunity to talk to governors. I have just suggested that governors run a "surgery" once a term where parents can talk to them informally about any concerns they have. Also there is a real problem in schools with education for the more able - but it doesn't seem to be a problem governors ever address. There are organisations that run training days in how to identify and help the more able, there are books about how to help them. I'm just wondering how I raise this with the governors?

[Marina]

This is something I'd love to do a bit later on so I'll be listening out for your experiences and tips with great interest. I think School governors do a fantastic job and (in London anyway, with the problems facing state ed in some boroughs) a thankless one. Bouquets all round to the lot of you.

[Cfr]

wendym, is your school primary or seondary? At the primary school where my children go (and I'm also a governor), they are starting to realise that more able children need help too - previously effort was concentrated on the less able. The government targets havn't helped things, as everything is geared towards getting children to Level 4, so that the school gets a good position in the league tables. This means that more able children are allowed to coast.

Having said that, we are looking at the number of children who can go to Level 5 or even level 6, and the most able children in maths are taken out of the lesson a couple of times a week and taught seperately from Y4 upwards. You should be able to contact your chair of governors and ask about the school's policy on more able children.

I'd be interested to hear what the response is. Have you spoken to the head about it?

[MadMaz]

There is advice for schools on teaching Gifted and Talented children. Go to dfee website.
Excellence in Cities is a funding strategy for us poor inner city people, giving extra support/funding across a range of issues including a G and T strand. However the G and T stuff is primarily aimed I think at secondaries but it is coming into primary schools though tends to be at the older kids (yr 3 upwards I think). If you are an EiC school one of the teachers will probably be nominated the G and T coordinator.
cfr - interested to know how your school "came round" to seeing that the more able (I am assuming you mean able eg top 20% rather than the G and T 5-10%)are equally as entitled to help as those falling behind.

[Cfr]

Madmaz, it came up at the time when we had to start setting targets for the numbers of children who we expected to reach Level 4 (about 3 years ago, I think). One of our governors (sadly, not me) immediately pointed out that the school had no incentive to get children to Level 5, so we now set targets for Level 5's too. These are not published, which means that other parents are not necessarily aware of them (personally, I'm not keen on too much secrecy, although I can see where it comes from).

And, yes, I mean the more able rather than anyone specifically classed as Gifted (how do you reach that definition? Does it need some sort of test?).

In fact, we are trying also to look at those who appear to be underachieving, by tracking their progress through school. It then becomes clear that many of these children are actually doing very well (even if they can't reach the 'required' standard).

The only way we can do this though is by looking at each child individually - this is done by the teachers - to see what they could achieve.

There was certainly no resistance at all to the idea of helping the more able children, once it had been brought up.

[wendym]

cfr its a primary school. Personally I don't see why you have to wait to year 3 or 4 to identify able children. By then they mave be so bored they have become disruptive. Or they may have learnt to hide their ability so that they are like all the others. State schools seem to want to keep them all at one level. Able children need teaching adapted to their ability just as much as the slower ones.

[janh]

I was a parent governor for 4 years (95 - 99) - at the time I started the Tories were still cutting back savagely on funding, to the extent that our school had to lose a teacher in order to balance its books. I don't think anybody has to worry about that any more!

It was interesting and sometimes enjoyable, but the first and worst shock was that the minute you become a governor you are officially one of Them and this makes it much harder to represent Us, which was why I wanted to do it.

As far as "enriching" the curriculum for the more able was concerned, this was discussed following our first Ofsted very soon after I started; but it never really came to anything because there was (then) no LEA support, and the school had no resources, apart from using more advanced material for some children - to the extent of borrowing from the secondary schools for Y5 and Y6 - it wasn't so much enrichment, and broadening, as pushing on, which was sad.

When my older children (19 and 16) were first at primary school there was virtually no admin for the teachers, and bags of time for things like orchestra, needlework, other crafts, guitar lessons, sports clubs etc., and the teachers were not nearly so stressed. Ours has been for years a high achieving school and its results have not been noticeably improved by all the strategies that have come and gone since then - although the other local schools have improved a lot so the strategies obviously do work.

But it was quite a frustrating time (and I imagine it still is for our current govs) because the Head a) is a bad listener and b) is really only interested in documentable achievements - happier children and staff has never been one of her priorities. I hope all of you who are currently on Governing Bodies are luckier in your Heads!

[Cfr]

Wendym, maybe you misunderstood, our school doesn't wait until Y3 or 4, but the children are grouped into ability groups right from the start. These are pretty flexible, from what I can see (as a parent) and allows for the teacher to set work appropriate to the level of the group, rather than the whole class. I must say, though, that it's far from perfect and I have felt in the past that one of the main factors holding back brighter children is the low expectation some teachers have. I feel that this has improved in the last couple of years, but there's still a long way to go.

Janh, it makes me very sad to see all the 'extras' squeezed out of the timetable to fit in an ever-increasing curriculum, which seems to be laid down in stone. All the subjects covered seem necessary and important, but there is no time to fit in anything else. They still manage to do Christmas plays and school trips - and PE - I know of one school nearby where they dropped PE to fit in extra work. I don't know how they managed to do that, as I thought PE was compulsory. Our school results have improved, but I think we're pretty laid back compared to some of the 'high pressure' schools nearby. It was described as a happy school, which I think is a great compliment.

As for class sizes, infant classes are now restricted to 30 to a class, and I suppose this will be imposed on junior classes in the next couple of years. 39 seems very large - does it have and extra teacher or classroom assistants?

[Ailsa]

The Government have been giving grants to schools in order to keep infant class sizes to 30. At the infants school that ds goes to, one of the reception classes has 31, but, because of this, instead of having one teacher and one teaching assistant, they have to have two teachers and no teaching assistant.

I believe that in the near future the government will be concentrating on Key Stage 2 classes.

Janh - I work in the worst or second worst funded shire county in the country (depends which league table you look at apparently), and from what I have seen things are no easier now than they were under the Tories. One of Labours selling points to get themselves elected was to put right what the Tories did wrong. To date I haven't seen much evidence of that, and I've been doing my job for 11½ yrs. BTW, just so you know I work in my LEA's Educational Finance Section, assisting the schools with their finances.

[bossykate]

Just an update on resources/info for anyone interested in this.

The School Governors One Stop Shop - recruiting governors with management experience for inner city schools

www.schoolgovernors-oss.co.uk/

Department for Education and Skills School Governors Centre

www.dfes.gov.uk/governor/index.cfm

HTH.

[Gumdrop]

Janh - I wish we weren't having to lose teaching staff, but up where I am falling roles in almost every school means our funding has fallen year on year - so we have had to lose two teaching staff in two years.

Bossykate et al - another good website is www.governyourschool.co.uk

Best of luck

[janh]

Gumdrop, losing teachers because of falling numbers is obviously a problem, but presumably class sizes remain reasonable - our numbers were increasing at the time and we still lost one!

The net effect was that we had a single reception class of over 40 - it was in 2 (connected) classrooms but there was only 1 full-time teacher, with support from 2 p-t nursery nurses, 2 p-t NTAs (very cheap) and one p-t teacher 2 days a week.

(There had been 2 reception teachers but one, newly qualified, was forced into a Y1/2 class - and subsequently had a nervous breakdown - and the Y1/2 class teacher was forced to take a Y3/4 class which put her under a lot of strain too. I hold the Conservative Govt entirely responsible for the whole mess.)

Whatever else new Labour may or may not have done they have at least ensured that 4-5 year olds are taught in reasonably small classes.

[Gumdrop]

Janh - agree absolutely with your comments.

IMHO, part of the root problem is that in the 80's boom education became very devalued (because here were all these working class stock exchange traders etc etc making "loadsamoney" without appearing to have received a higher education), and in the recessions "X has loads of qualifications and he still hasn't managed to get a job". Can't win either way.

As a result providers of education and the process of education lost a lot of the respect that I remember from my earlier years - although I could be looking back with rose tinted specs, I suppose.

Bit tangential, but does anyone have any ideas about how that respect could be got back?

[CAM]

I know exactly what you mean gumdrop. At the risk of sounding like the world's worst snob, I heard a phrase recently that seems to sum it up: "the middle class is the new proletariat". I think education policies became untenable once the attempt to make everyone "equal" came into being, all that has happened is that everyone is forced down to the LCD. Hope this doesn't sound too elitist, but I wonder where the next generation of doctors and good teachers is going to come from as we already have far too few of these.