First Thoughts on School Governing

"No school or society can be better than the quality of its teachers."

Wiggdortz, Brett

I've recently started governing at a primary school in Liverpool. A friend of mine who trained as a teacher with me back in 2013/2014 had been living in Cheltenham after changing careers and had been helping out on a primary school governing board. He'd talked about how rewarding it was as someone who had a particular care and interest in education. It has been a few years since then - only recently I felt I had the bandwidth to take on another responsibility. I registered with Governors for Schools which seems to do a fantastic job of streamlining the process of finding and applying for governor roles as well as providing training resources once you've found a role. The whole process probably took around a month from start to finish (finish being confirmed as governor by the rest of the governors on the board at the first meeting I attended). At first, I had thought that a secondary school might be a better fit for me as I'd had experience as a teacher and literacy coordinator in a secondary school. However, after speaking with my friend, I decided to go for a role at a primary school. My friend described how he thought coming from a higher school experience meant that he had a different, useful perspective to offer when analysing the school from a governance perspective.

Fast forward, and I have attended my first govenring board meeting for Greenbank Primary School round the corner from me in South Liverpool. It is a wonderful school with talented teachers and other vital staff and of course, lovely, hard working children from our community. As we listened, questioned, and challenged in that meeting, I took notes and made several that went on a bit of tangent from what we were direclty discussing. I want to use this space to explore and expand on some of those thoughts.

Thoughts & Reflections

Digital Governance

I was surprised (and pleased) to find that the board of governors uses an actually quite well designed and performant digital tool to manage, share, edit, etc. govenrance documents. I was mentally prepared to be keeping a file and printing things off!

School Leadership

Modern headteachers have an increasingly challenging job from a 'business' perspective as they are challenged to do more with less while energy, upkeep, and staffing costs are rising more quickly than funding increases. Energy inefficient buildings and (to my mind, immoral) PFI school maintenance agreements between large contracting firms and schools would seem to be a source of undue pressure on school finances.

Student Voice / Teacher Voice

I wonder if it would a) be valuable b) be practical to implement a long running "poll" or student voice type survey to track how opinions and attitudes over time

Teacher Quality of Life

The workload and implicit expected hours of teachers, like many others in public service jobs, seems excessive - and to go beyond just putting in the extra yards because you want to work hard and get a job done extra well. Children pick up on stress the same way adults do. We want teachers to be well rested, relaxed, and happy so that that is transmitted to the children to help them have good childhoods and be in a better state to learn and progress.

The Liverpool Demographic and Context

Persistent absence is a problem in many areas and for many schools but apparently particularly in Liverpool. I remember this being a really challenging issue when I was teaching. An additional aspect of this is parents taking children on holidays in school times. The impact on children who are taken on holiday on top of already persistent absence may be different as comapred to regular attenders who are taken on holiday - whilst potentially controversial, it would interesting to find (or run) some statistical analysis of this.