Governance can be the weak link in contemporary schools. Inadequate strategic planning, confusing governance and management, not having sufficient real time information on how well their school is doing – all these are on the charge sheet together with failing to hold the head and leadership team to account and blissful ignorance of their own succession planning. I could go on, and risk being drummed out of COBIS! Not least having sat on the boards of UK and international schools including a decade as Chairman of the British International School New York. As a doctor friend once said of his profession start by healing thyself!
It was in 1977 that the economist JK Galbraith’s seminal “Age of Uncertainty” was published marking the arrival of a new economics to replace the market statism of the post war era. Today’s uncertainty is both obvious and hidden. School boards are struggling with the most traumatic event of the last seventy years in the forces unleashed by COVID-19. Due to amazing school leadership and the embracing of new learning technology schools have miraculously found their way through these waves. But larger tsunamis, while less visible, could become existential in their effect.
New economic and social paradigms are coming which will bring new curricular models as well as cost / operational models in which classrooms and some aspects of schools will become redundant. School leaders will drive forwards new approaches to motivation and communication. Great governance will be at a premium if there is to be the imagination and enthusiasm necessary to drive forwards change.
At the heart of it, governors will need to have ownership of the values and ethos of the school while forging fertile partnerships with the heads and leadership teams whose brilliance makes schools happen. Finding great governors and those willing to lead boards has never been harder. Governance must become professionalized and properly rewarded. The amateurs will need to hang up their bats!
