Governors Beware

Sir Michael Wilshaw, Chief Inspector of Schools, has set his sights on governors of schools now. In a sense I welcome this, in that governors should be held to account for weak governing bodies who allow poor leadership to continue without challenge. Governors after all are the only people who can "sack" a headteacher.

The trouble is that governors are unpaid - Wilshaw's solution is to pay them. With what? At the expense of teaching staff? Budgets are dwindling Sir Michael - where's the money going to come from?

The job of school governor is an important one, of course, but due to its voluntary nature, not one many want to get their hands dirty performing. Some governors are only there to make themselves look better within the community, say before running for Mayor, council, parliament etc. Now I know that this sounds fairly cynical on my part, but it is true I'm afraid.

Many governors are parents of children who have done well at the school, perhaps dare I say, despite the school and will have a rose tinted view of the school and its leadership. You won't get many parents of kids in the bottom sets volunteering to sit on the governing body, which is partly why their kids are in the bottom sets - little interest in education in many cases.

Will Wilshaw's plan ever see the light of day?

In my view the answer's "No", for these reasons:

1. There won't be enough money to do it - each school requires around 5 governors, if not more. It depends on the size of the school.
2. If governors become a target of Ofsted, no-one will want to do it as they can live without the grief.

The only way schools will ever be governed properly is if local authorities or academy organisations employ "professional" governors who govern a group of schools. This will eat into the budget as far as the local authority are concerned, and eat into the academy organisations' profit. It therefore won't happen.

Nice try Michael, but once again your judgement is clouded by your buttocks.

Ofsted - clueless!

It's not just me who thinks that Ofsted are totally clueless when it comes to assessing schools. There was a letter from a teacher to Chris Woodhead (former Chief Inspector of Schools) in The Sunday Times this week bemoaning a glowing recent Ofsted on their school. The report had stated that the behaviour of the students at the school was "exemplary" whereas in reality the students ran the place with the headteacher being totally ineffective and using the Ofsted report as justification for doing essentially nothing.

The stories from this teacher, whose name is understandably withheld are truly shocking. Female staff are called "stupid bitches" to their face, students regularly "go on strike" and corridors are urinated in (by students rather than staff!). The place sounds like a candidate for academy status to me, but apart from one minor quote about behaviour in the corridors being occasionally "boisterous", the inspectors have clearly no idea what really goes on in the place, relying heavily on data to form an opinion.

You have to give credit to Woodhead who attempts to defend Ofsted, as he always does. He claims that maybe the troublemakers amongst the student body were "mysteriously disappeared" for the visit, which does happen regularly. When our school was last inspected the board listing those students on external exclusion was pretty jam-packed with the usual candidates. Woodhead does admit that due to the inspectors' reliance on data and the brevity of a visit, their judgement can be far removed from the reality of what's going on. Which would suggest that the entire inspection process is a bit of a waste of time, would it not?

The teacher is clearly exasperated with their head's totally ineffectiveness and Woodhead suggests writing, as a staff body, to the head explaining what the issues are. He then says that if the head does not accept the view from the staff then you should go to the school's governing body and/or the local authority.

This only goes to show how far removed from the reality of school life Mr Woodhead is. The member of staff would be committing career suicide by writing to the headteacher, and if they tried to drum up support from other members of staff, news would quickly get back to that headteacher about who was behind it. Bear in mind that the teacher requires a reference from that headteacher to move on, and if moving on isn't an option, they would almost certainly find that next year's (and all subsequent years) timetable would be shocking for them, and leadership drop-ins/observations would increase. On top of that teachers are very good at moaning about something, but not always so good at doing something about it.

Writing to the school's governing body would have the same result as writing to the headteacher in that essentially most of the governors don't want any grief and are doing the job either to further their career in the local community (mayor anyone?) or because their child is at the school and they want to know what's going on. A few might do something about it, but as it's not a paid position, can you blame them for wanting an easy time of things? The headteacher will often hoodwink the governors into believing that everything's going swimmingly, and they won't know any different, so won't realise that there's a problem.

The only possible action would be to write to the local authority, but that would almost certainly get tied up in red tape and take an eternity for anything to happen. Even then, when they visited, who would be the only person to have contact with the local authority employees? The headteacher. So ultimately, headteachers are untouchable. I suppose the new Chief Inspector of Schools' proposal to have local troubleshooters is an attempt to tackle this, although it remains to be seen if these troubleshooters will be effective.

The letter just highlights the fact that Ofsted are clueless, overpaid and of no use to parents, schools or children.