MPs urge greater scrutiny of school governors

Poorly performing school governors should be removed, a parliamentary inquiry report has said.

MPs on the education select committee looked at the role of governors and concluded that too many poor quality ones were allowed to remain in office with no sanction against them for failing to fulfil the role properly.

In its report The Role of School Governing Bodies, the MPs said some 300,000 people served as governors but “vacancies continue to be an issue for many governing bodies [and] the quality of governance in many schools is also inadequate”.

Many schools has not taken advantage of regulations introduced in September 2012, which allow governing bodies to be smaller, with an emphasis on governors’ skills.
“Governing bodies need to get better at identifying the mixture of representation and skills they require in order to be effective, and tailoring their recruitment accordingly,” the report said.

It called fora a "strengthening of current approaches to intervention in poor or failing governing bodies.”

The Government should investigate why so many councils – and education secretary Michael Gove – “have been reluctant to use their powers of intervention more often where governance is failing.

“We also recommend that the Government reviews processes for removing poorly performing chairs from office and give governing bodies the power to remove poorly performing governors.”

The report also said the role of clerk to governors should be a professional one. “High quality support and information for clerks should be a priority and the Government should work with the National Governors Association to rectify the loss of much valuable detail from the new Governors’ Handbook.”

Committee chair Graham Stuart said: “Greater freedoms for schools mean we need more effective governing bodies.  At the moment, the quality of governance in many schools is inadequate.  Accordingly, we are recommending a series of measures to boost governors’ performance. These include introducing professional clerks, whose status should be similar to a company secretary.  We also want to see greater training for governors – schools should be required to offer this to every new governor.”