Comments on: Schools debate – must do better

By: Arthur Mark

Arthur Mark — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:21:21 +0000

Bloggers. Please keep in mind that Fellows in other countries may be at a loss in understanding the meanings of terms peculiar to the UK; for instance, what is a school governor or what is OFSTED ? Perhaps we can guess that
a “governor” is what we call a school board member and
OFSTED is an accrediting body for schools. Perhaps we
need a glossary when Google fails us.

By: matthewtaylor

matthewtaylor — Mon, 11 May 2009 07:29:11 +0000

Thanks Joan. I had a very frustrating time as a governor myself. I made myself really unpopular raising questions about the performance of the senior team. Subsequently the team was given such a poor rating by OFSTED that the head resigned on the spot. But, if anything this made me even less popular. One way forward I believe is for the non executive functions of overseeing the management of the school to be separated from the broader need to engage with parents. This means having a strong parents council – as we do at our Academy

By: Joan Keating

Joan Keating — Wed, 06 May 2009 12:38:23 +0000

I have had two failed attempts at being a parent governor. In both cases I gave it a couple of years before giving up. As I don’t work I had time to go on the training courses, attend all the meetings, sit on panels and do the various extra bits of research that the school needed on particular issues. When the school were interested in taking on a new reading scheme, for example, I was invited along with the senior management team to visit schools already using the scheme. I even regularly baked cakes for the meetings! But I found there was a brick wall whenever I wanted to challenge some of the school’s policies – the budget for books, for example. In the end I felt that it was a role that was all responsiblities and no power. And while I would concede that I’m possibly not the easiest person in the world to get along with and some of the problems were probably down to me there are, I know, plenty of other people who have found school governance less than useful. The point I am making is that before opening up new routes of influence for parents maybe more should be done to address the problems with the existing ones first.