Would I enjoy being a governor?

[Undecidedthiswinter]

There’s a currency at my DS’s school. I’m a fairly corporate person, and think I could bring a bit of “business strategy “ if that makes sense.

it does seem to be a lot of extra work though!

This! I was originally told it would be 4 or 5 meetings a year, in the evening. The occasional inspection.

I ended up being in most weeks, doing as @Tonissister says, 7 or 8 hours. I work and was having to cancel / take days off paid work to attend. It was massively underrated how much work it would be. I think the commitment is too big, probably even for a retired person.

I lasted about 2 months it was a clique of women, they gave me a role to re-draft a policy I spent about 15+ hours learning the ropes and doing what was asked when into the meeting with the draft to be told they didn’t need it in the end.. I do not have hours to waste. It was all time wasting shite in my humble opinion.

I have been a governor for over 25 years and I absolutely love it. I have moved around on to Interim Executive Boards to support schools that need rapid turnaround supported by strong governance. My experience covers nursery age to sixth form, maintained schools and academies. I have been Chair of Governors and I am Chair of Trustees for a MAT. I have experience dealing with Heads who run toxic schools or who battle against governors, and getting them changed.
Training is essential. Outstanding governance has the power make a huge difference to education settings. It is hard work, but very rewarding.

Sounds awful. Drafting or redrafting policies is not the role of governors.

Also think about whether you can drop things/get the time off for Ofsted visits. My
job doesn’t allow for that and my name was mud in the meetings for months after the Ofsted visit!!

@Slightyamusedandsilly What on earth were you doing??? No governor needs to do this. Your GB must have been awful. Neither is it a few meetings a year. People need to speak to governors who sit on excellent governing boards to know what good governance looks like. It’s neither of those models.

Regarding data presentation - it’s the job of the head! It’s operational. I’m appalled that governors think they get involved with producing data. It’s clearly not strategic. Of course teachers have to judge the progress dc are making and input the assessment data, but you buy a program to produce the data reports. I’m amazed so many schools don’t seem to do this. You have to accept a certain amount of errors but the key thing is, does the data match with sats at the end of y6. If it’s wildly out, it’s poor data.
The head should know exactly where dc are at in terms of assessment and if teachers are being cautious. Lots are.

Prospective governors should be given minutes of all meetings (except confidential ones), be put in touch with the chair (and maybe the clerk if worried about timings), plus they should look at the improvement plan and other relevant documents which inform them about the school. Being told rubbish isn’t helpful and people won’t stay. All new governors must take training. It’s poor not to inform yourself of the role enough to do it properly. All governing boards should encourage this.

Governors rarely meet at 5 pm these days. Most are evenings - for good reason.

I can if given enough notice. I don’t work a traditional 9-5 which helps, but I still
need to block my calendar weeks in advance

There is less than 24 hours notice for Ofsted. Phone call on Monday will be first school know about it, inspectors in on Tuesday. Meeting with governors possibly on Wednesday (last day of visit) then feedback session on Wednesday before 6pm. You can join virtually

Depends on the school. Ours was not well run. At all. Which was one reason he decided to get involved.

It's what DH did and he had similar frustrations. Hours spent redrafting and researching policies he'd been specifically asked to do, only to be told it was no longer needed. Real time wasters.

I was a governor and it was a complete waste of time and thankless task. Maybe just the school, but the parent governors were basically ignored, and the staff governors and LA representatives ran the show and often the "choices" we got to vote on were weighted towards what they wanted with no other options. The final straw for me was a particular meeting one evening where we spent a couple of hours discussing a topic, and the vote went one way (in favour of the parent governors for once), but the LA representatives then said that what we had voted for was against policy so the vote wouldn't be accepted. It just showed that it was all smoke and mirrors, and both myself and another parent governor resigned that night. In our case the idea of "democracy" was a sham - the head, staff and LA decided the major things between themselves and we were just expected to be "nodding dogs" to agree with them on big issues. We only got a genuine say on irrelevancies and trivialities.

I wouldn't do it, but tbh I think the whole system of schools having a board of governors who mostly know absolutely zero about running a school is ridiculous. Between me and dh we have about 55 years-worth of teaching experience (including deputy head and acting head for dh) and seen many negatives and few positives.

In reality, many individual governors' supposed areas of expertise seem to act more like biases or axes to grind. We've seen multiple shockingly bad examples of recruitment of Headteachers too. People with any kind of strategic responsibility over schools should actually have experience working in education.

Such a shame to see so many examples of poor governance. The governing board I sit on adds value, is effective, challenges the SLT who are super supportive, has some really dynamic members etc.

I just wonder how many other sectors give boards full of people without any expertise in that sector such influence and input into its companies / organisations.

@OttersMayHaveShifted The governors are NOT running the school! The head is. This is the difference in a company between Executive Directors and a paid Managing Director. It’s very normal for expertise to be available in companies from a broad range of people. Governing boards replicate that model and I don’t believe teaching prepares for that. Unfortunately teachers aren’t that keen on doing much on a GB but I don’t blame them. They are busy people. Teachers also have no qualifications in HR, finance, Health and safety, buildings, etc. People who do are more valuable but they need to work within the framework of a GB and the law. Having teachers ends up with an echo chamber and not challenging at all.

There’s training galore in terms of the role of a governor and there are staff and the HT as governors. The whole idea is to balance out the expertise and again, governors do not run schools.

@TeenYearsAreBrutal Agreed. Really poor examples of being a governor here and the lack of understanding of the role is worrying. Few talking about training too.

@OhDear111 ,

I am not sure I would totally agree. I have had a career in finance and one in teaching and both helped me to be an effective governor.

Teachers aren’t useful on the finance committee but they definitely are on the Quality of Education committee. I think their skills are underestimated.

If you were to appoint non executive directors to a nuclear power station, I still think an understanding of how nuclear power is generated and the engineering around it would be useful in some of these non execs, albeit not all.

Often chairs are ex heads or have worked for Ofsted. There is value in knowing the business, regardless of training and user-friendly metrics.

I’m a governor. I’d think quite hard if they don’t know what skills they are ideally looking for in a new governor. We are always very careful to understand where our skills gaps are and try to recruit accordingly. If they don’t know what they ideally want, how effective are they?

They just said it was a “generalist” position as the previous one decided not to serve another 4 year term.

Yes but they must know what committee has vacancies, if an education professional would be more useful than a finance/legal person.

I did ask! And was very explicit about my background and she just said that unless there are multiple people wanting to be a governor, they’d just take whoever volunteers.

@Undecidedthiswinter They didn’t do a skills audit then. All governing boards are ideally asked to recruit a variety of skills. That’s why the idea of all teachers is completely wrong. The governing board might be in a hard to recruit area so might just want a body but that’s not entirely helpful to having a well run GB.

I’m loved being a governor but had to give it up because I no longer had time. It can be like being an additional unpaid job, it’s not a matter of turning up to a couple of meetings.

The last school I was governor of we had
, Ofsted, Headteacher recruitment, federation with another school and a deficit budget. It was a busy time and busy role. If that sort of stuff is going on and you’re not feeling busy you’re not pulling your weight as a governor.

My advice would be to have a proper conversation with the Chair of Govs and understand what needs doing - but as I said I found it to be very rewarding.

I’ve just finished a four year term. I was early years governor. I attended meetings 3 standards and outcomes and 3 lgb meetings a year. Meetings were 2-3 hours long. Did training around early years, safeguarding, Ofsted regularly and also three school visits a year. Visits were typically around 3/4 hours and usually I would pick a focus - transition/ phonics/ maths etc and would look at how children are doing and what school are doing to improve outcomes. I was involved in interviewing for new hires as well. I’d say it took up 10 hours a month on average.

Yep! I hold a senior position in the LA and an ex headteacher. My role includes working with headteachers, governing boards and includes the training both. Part of the role is also to carry out the LA’s statutory duty in safeguarding children.

I fully understand the governance role, including triangulation of evidence so that governors have an objective view. This includes information that can’t be shared under confidentiality.

When I stood for parent Governor I was the the only one standing at the time of the election so got appointed

Many schools (like many other organisations) are struggling to get any volunteers never mind ones with specialist knowledge to fill a gap in the skill set of the board