Anyone in a school governing body? Request for advice

[Aria11]

For reasons related to the recent developments re education provision, I became very interested in issues related to school governance and parent engagement and I would like to understand more what is going on in primary schools in general. For parents/teachers and especially those involved in school governance, can you please give let me know what is the situation in your school regarding any or all of the issues below:

1. Is there any specific management policy on parent engagement?
2. How does the governing body work in terms of addressing concerns raised by parents? E.g. is there a standing item in the agenda about this? Are parent governors required to canvass the opinion of parents regularly and provide feedback in meetings?
3. Can parents raise collectively issues/complaints to management or the school governing body?

Sorry in advance for all these questions. I have limited knowledge in this area and any information would be extremely helpful.

Who needs to read every policy? You suggested reading the equality policy! Who says you have to read everything as a parent? You read what you need to read and they are all on the web sites of every school. You don’t need to know legislation unless a topic is of great concern to you. Then you might wish to dig deeper.

Governors are given lots of advice on engaging with parents and the community via governor training. Lots of advice is available from LAs. It’s not difficult and it’s not rocket science but schools are not islands. They have a duty to engage with others when making policies and reviewing their improvement goals. But they don’t have to enshrine every bit of opinion in policies or improvement plans. They do need parents to buy into what the school does though. It’s likely to be a better school.

Sorry for the late reply. I fully agree with sirfredfredgeorge. The distinction between operational and strategic issues is not always clear-cut, it is easy to imagine how certain operational issues have a strategic dimension or a dimension that should be of interest to the local governing body. The example I gave about halal meals is only one of these. Others may be, for instance, prohibiting group complaints etc. I also relied on the Governance Handbook and to me it is pretty clear that parent engagement should be actively promoted and that definitely includes offering something much more substantial than an annual survey and a couple of appearances on sports' days.

Yes it does require more than that Aria11. I would say I don’t think a lot of Governing boards are very inventive on that front. However as I said, training is offered and lies of LAs/advisers/trainers will have good suggestions.

However group complaints are not the way forward. A good governing body will attempt to ensure parents are consulted on important policies in a meaningful way. Each policy will have a review date so the GB will have a timetable for considering the policies as they require renewal.

The Head/Parent meeting is a good idea, with governor presence, and of course there should be other ways parents become valued partners of the school. Some schools are way better than others at doing this. Some parents aren’t bothered about input though. I have seen groups of parents set up where a governor attends and chairs each meeting. These can be effective after a poor Ofsted but can be used for school improvement in a very good school. No school should be afraid of ideas and their parents.

Yes, I cannot agree more re group complaints. As I said earlier, my impression is that governance in schools is almost exclusively reactive and that's hugely detrimental to schools and children alike. Given the lack of management and lbg engagement with parents in the school my DS attends, some of us wrote a letter expressing these concerns (we didn't even submit a formal complaint, as we thought that it would be best not to raise the issues in this manner but to try to engage constructively with the smt).Yet, the way this was met by the headteacher was shocking. She effectively accused the person that volunteered to write the letter of bullying and the chair of governors supported this. As you can imagine, when management style is authoritarian, the scope for meaningful engagement is essentially absent. Unfortunately, people may not always have to time to take such matters further, especially in circumstances when it's known that such managers tend to be supported irrespective of the fact that they may be ineffective and even dangerous for the school.

Btw, the reason I referred to collective complaints was because the headteacher defined it as such in her response to us and then went on to suggest that such complaints are not allowed (despite the fact that no such policy exists officially at the school and that, as I said, we didn't raise it as a complaint in the first place).

Thanks OP for starting this thread.

I have had similar thoughts recently as we have a new Head who started in the middle of COVID and due to a number of issues I started thinking about how it all works at school, mainly as the role of school has somewhat changed recently due to the pandemic.

The responses are interesting and disappointing in that there doesn’t appear to be any real accountability in schools compared to other sectors, and little possibility of effective challenge or scrutiny, whatever approach you take as a Parent.

Is the issue you are wanting to raise related to the COVID response of your Head at all?

No they arent particularly accountable to parents. Marginally more so to the government via ofsted.

This is one reason i dont like the academisation process as they can remove the last vestige of local accountability. Some of the lgb have so little in the scheme of delegation they exist just for show.

I think some academies and their governance are very remote from parents. However I would say plenty of CofE schools are remote from parents and too close to the church which might not mean much to the majority of parents. Also many GBs will have only 2 parent governors and struggle to even find these.

It’s quite clear that patents and the community should be valued and they should be consulted in a meaningful way. However that’s not the same as driving policies and the school improvement agenda. The governors are not accountable to parents and neither is the head. The parents don’t appoint them or terminate their contracts. This is not the same as shareholders in a company but it’s designed to allow people who are supposed to be professional to get on with the job.

The GB would have been better advised to have the issue raised on the agenda and then take expert advice on how to approach the issue with regard to the law and also how the LA or MAT would advise.

You can write to the LA or MAT and ask for their policies on any issue. Heads can be quite scared of groups of parents. They shouldn’t be because they need to work with parents so shouldn’t be defensive when reasonable questions are asked. The Head was wrong to say questioning is bullying.

The school needs an effective mechanism for engaging with parents. If something cannot be implemented then they need a robust argument detailing why not. However there has to be recognition that parents cannot keep putting ideas forward on a hundred different topics. The governors and head are tasked with management and taking the decisions. They should be informed but they don’t have to agree with you. I do understand the frustration though.

Thank you for excellent response so far!

The issues I am experiencing are around the COVID response from our school and how that impacts on our family, but does relate to other issues ongoing which affects us but also may affect other families too.

I wanted to find out what the proper channels to go about escalating this may be due to the dismissive attitude of the new Head, as I haven’t experienced that before at this school and was quite taken aback.

Divide and conquer springs to mind.

This needs dealing with now and not in the Autumn but oh well.

I agree with the last couple of comments. In our case, we did raise these concerns during the Covid-19 situation, put forward suggestions including starting engaging with the parents but unfortunately the response we received, as I said, was deeply concerning. In fact, the head went as far as to suggest that the signatures were forged. This essentially confirmed our fears about the current head's management approach. On the issue of the scope of parent engagement, no one would argue that parents should be consulted and their views taken into consideration in every possible situation. However, I beg to disagree re the issue of accountability. The new handbook explicitly states that "as the strategic leaders of their organisations it is vital that boards are connected with, and answerable to, the communities they serve, particularly parents/carers." To me, this signifies a clear recognition of the accountability of boards to parents/carers that should be taken into account by boards and schools alike. In reality, shareholders do not either have much say in terms of who is involved in a board of directors: directors are nominated by the board and then approved (in the majority of times) by shareholders. The point is that there are formal and informal mechanisms for engagement and this is what is missing from schools at the moment.

Any ideas how we can change that, sooner rather than later?

Be aware that in an academy, the local governing body (which is a committee, not a governing board or body) has no legal authority at all. It may operate under the Scheme or Delegation, but this can be changed and there’s nothing to say a school or Trust has to take them seriously.

You might want to check the MAT complaint procedure.

I really don’t know as much about this as I would like or obviously need to, are you saying there are legal obligations on school governors? From the county council?

I mean is that part of this scheme of delegations?

I am a CoG and have read with interest. If I had received a non specific letter from a group of parents first thing I would ask is did you follow the complaints process? If the complaint process had been followed and you were escalating to me I would need to know what you are expecting to happen as a result of the complaint - to manage your expectations.

It may be that your expectations are unrealistic. Imagine for a moment that a parenr came to me around how an injury was looked after and I asked the question....their ideal might be that it wasn't handled like that....i can't do anything about what has happened, but I can review the Accident policy to see if it's fit for purpose, make sure all staff training is up to date etc etc But I can't go back in time.

What specifically is your issue? Is it just lack of engagement? How does your school measure engagement? - what percentage of parents attend parents evening, how many parents write in their child's reading book each week, how many emails does the teacher recieve? How many parents talk to the teachers after school, how many parents attend the class assembly.....these are all measures of parental engagement too. Before I became a governor I attended a 'parent forum' there were 3 of us not including the teacher running the session......i held a session and there were 4 of us.....there are 350 pupils at the school......it doesn't mean the parents are not engaged - just that that sort of thing isn't always useful...run it during the day you exclude working people, in the evening you exclude those with no childcare etc etc

The example you give is Mumdiva99 is helpful but I am sure that no parent would demand in such cases that we go back in time. More importantly, the issue cannot be reduced to that of the complaints' procedure and it is not useful to conflate the two. The point in the case of parent engagement is for important issues to be raised by parents so that the LGB is aware of these and that adequate redress is then provided if necessary, e.g. in terms of reviewing the policies and putting in place measures to mitigate such risks in the future. As to possible means for doing this, schools and boards are ideally placed to design and implement such mechanisms in collaboration with parents and other stakeholders. The duty is still there, irrespective of whether parents choose or feel able to engage or not, and to justify lack of engagement on these grounds indicates poor judgment.

I can’t answer for other Parents or other schools as I don’t know!

Is it an unrealistic expectation that Headteachers want to engage with Parents in a meaningful way? Especially when they are a new Head and there is a global pandemic in progress...

As a pp mentioned, is the CoG there to simply back up whatever the Head has done or said?

What if there is an issue with the Head, do Parents have to put up and shut up for fear of being branded as belonging on the naughty step or voting with their feet and changing schools, if so how is this in the interests of anyone including children and schools?

TyphoidMary2020, I fully agree that in these cases the options available at present are either exit or silence and voice is certainly excluded (unless it is the form of a complaint). In our case and given our concerns, we applied succesfully for a place in another school and our DS will move in September to that school. We are not doing this as a reaction to the vindictive attitude of the headteacher but because we are concerned that such an approach will be to the detriment of the school in the long-run and there is already evidence of this. I have worked long enough in universities to know that when senior managers behave in a similar way, they can destroy a reputable department in a matter of a couple of years.

Aria11 that is also my fear also sadly due to previous experience...

The parents are not the same as the GB. Yes parents don’t have the power to hire and fire so yes, if they don’t like the Head they cannot get rid of them. However in a case I’m familiar with parents put up posters about the ineffective head (as they saw it) all around the streets for people to read. You can go to those lengths. You could complain to Ofsted. You can make a complaint to the LA/MAT.

Governors are advised by the Head because the Head is the Managing Director. They are the professional running the school under the strategic direction of the GB. That doesn’t mean the GB cannot appraise what the head does and in fact they should. But it’s not the role of parents. Partnerships with parents are very different to taking full account of what a minority of parents think.

Not all heads are good. An excellent GB will challenge the head and some need this regarding parental engagement. When policies are up for review, it’s an obvious time to think about this but you cannot really engage parents fully in the curriculum
Policy, the appraisal policy or the Safeguarding policy for example. Other policies are better for parental engagement and, as I said earlier, a Think Tank approach could be used or a Meet the Parents meeting with SLT and a governor. This can certainly diffuse issues if everyone is reasonable.

Ofsted inspections and their aftermath are the most effective way of changing leadership if the outcome is poor. Heads can be moved to capability procedures. Usually the GB and the LA would work together on this but it’s rare.

The governors could certainly add improved parent relationships into the heads appraisal and it sounds like this is necessary. However you have done what most of us do when we don’t like something: we move on.

I'm not giving excuses for not doing things just offering a different view on what counts as parental engagement.

But you still haven't answered the question of what your issue specifically is. Nor what you want as the solution.

Is it that you believe all policies should be sent for parental review? That is not practical nor feasible. However, should a policy be published that you are unhappy with then you can start a dialogue. But take something like the change to RSE which comes into effect in September. This was a large change and absolutely there should be consultation with parents. However at the end of the day an LA school has to teach the National Curriculum.... (and yes the government did engage with parents as part of the process).

Other policy changes are as a result of legal changes or changes to DFE or LA advice and guidence to schools and aren't really up for debate.

My point was that Governing Bodies wouldn’t consult with parents on their curriculum policy. They should on homework and behaviour policies which are written by SLT.

All parents can see the legally required policies because, legally, they must be on the schools web site. No parent has to wait until the publication of a policy or even the review date. A good school will start engaging with parents prior to a review date if they take parental engagement seriously on matters where this is appropriate. What they cannot do is let a vociferous small group of parents dictate policy. The governors are there for all not just a minority.

@My0My - sorry I wasn't questioning you. I was asking OP her issue. I agree with everything you say.....except any decent governing board does not have any policies dictated by a small number of people...that just isn't how it works. I can't really think of any of our policies where we could get to that situation....mand surely your clerk would advise you that you weren't working effectively if that was the case.

That doesn’t mean the GB cannot appraise what the head does and in fact they should. But it’s not the role of parents. But the CG is answerable to parents/carers and this is what we are talking about here. The board, including the chair of governors, the SMT and the parent governors, should have policies in place to engage with parents in an inclusive way and should, as you suggest, incorporate such a requirement in the head's performance review (Ofsted does in the assessment of schools). This does not mean allowing a minority of parents to dictate what should be done but there are many different ways for such engagement to take place and unless boards and schools do this in a meaningful way, there are limited options for parents. One cannot help but wonder though why schools/boards feel that the current status quo is adequate and my concern is that this is the case because the GB and trusts are too close to management. And, frankly speaking, I would hope that no parent had to make such difficult decisions, i.e. moving the child to a different school, because of such issues.