Wordle

Well I just discovered a cute little toy for finding out and displaying the content of some text in graphical format (bigger words occur more frequently).

So I had a play and chose a chapter of the Governors' Guide to the Law to experiment with - Ch11 relating to the relationship between governors and the school.

Here are the results.

Interesting that the most frequent words are Evaluation, Improvement, Performance, Inspection. This seems to be what GttL expects us to be doing - do you?

Governance or Management again!

I find myself once again being the butt of criticism (both overt and covert) by a couple of other governors for what I am doing for the school and this is annoying and frustrating me to the point that  it is distracting my attention.

From my viewpoint, the issue is that I have a bunch of professional skills that are very helpful to the HT and senior members of staff - as such I both volunteer and get asked to use these skills (for example in developing strategy and facilitating meetings and focus groups). My co-governors do not have these skills but seem to have plenty of skill in raising money for the school.

So, I get criticised when I volunteer my skills for the benefit of the school but it is OK for them to use their different skills - the difference seeming to be that I get involved with school managers quite a lot (although I am always very careful to avoid actually managing - the critics cannot seem to understand the difference between facilitation and management) and they don't.

The boundary between Governance and Management is a simple one in theory (not!) and a much more complex one in practice!

Aaaaaaarrrrggghhh....!

A new year starts...

Well, here we go again with another year to look forward to, wondering what challenges and delights it will bring.

Do you sometimes find yourself lost in the challenges and overlooking the delights? That's an easy situation to get into, especially as a governor where we so often find ourselves on the receiving end of complaints from staff, students, parents, councillors etc..

One thing we started last year and I will be emphasising this year is to focus much more purposefully on the good news - and there will be plenty. Let's go overboard in recognising the achievements of everyone associated with our school, it's rare that someone blows a trumpet for us so we will make sure we blow our own. This might seem a bit 'unBritish' or even arrogant at first but what's wrong with celebrating achievement?

So., here's my first success. Yesterday we ran a session for all staff at one of our sites during which one exercise was for everyone to list their skills/strengths/positives/etc and then talk to others in the room about how great they really are; 1 minute then move on and tell someone else; then again; then again; and so on... It was great, once people got over the initial embarrassment of talking so positively about themselves the enregy level really kicked up and peole had a great time. It struck me as a great energiser the day before term starts. Let's hope (expect?) that the same energy levels can keep with everyone through the term - I will be doing what I can to help.

Providing for SEN - whose responsibility?

I am a governor in a Special School with pupils with a HUGE range of needs, many of which are overtly represented in the children's Statements (I don't want to go into 'many' 'most' or 'all' in this post - that's for elsewhere another time). Now a question that I have been raising is where the ultimate responsibility lies for provision of what you might call 'non-educational' needs. Let me explain what I mean - and I am deliberately caricaturing a position here to stimulate dialogue.

The caricature is that teachers are there to impart knowledge/skills and that everything else is either to facilitate the pupils' learning or to more generally help thier lives and development. The Statement will list the required provision - let's say Speech Therapy, Hydrotherapy, Physiotherapy, help with personal hygeine (toiletting), Psychological Support - the question is who must take ultimate responsibility for providing all this support?

One position, which I suspect may be the default, is that the school has (or at least accepts, explicitly or implicitly) responsibility. Another is that the various 'other agencies' outside the education service (and I mean that in the administrative sense) must accept their own responsibilities. For instance, Physio is often provided (or not - that is the point of this post!) by the Health Service - but what happens when they are understaffed or just incompetent and unable or unwilling to deliver the requirements of the statement? The school fills the gap, resulting in the efforts of our 'teaching professionals' being diverted from ther primary duties. Or how about hydrotherapy? Teachers are trained to teach, and SEN teachers have a special set of skills that do not necessarily include (nor, I would argue, do they need to include) supervising hydrotherapy sessions. But again, who else will do it?

One big challenge here is parental expectation, where often they do not understand the nature of the system and school staff become seen as being totally responsible for delivering a child's needs (we once even had a parent expecting us to arrange an optician appointment and get glasses for their child!).

I think that it is time that all support professions accepted their specific responsibilities and stood up to be counted when things are not delivered.

Holidays time - what to do...?

Well, school has finally closed for the next few weeks - what's a governor to do?

Go on holiday - yes!

Read up on all the stuff we missed over the last year? What's important I wonder - there is so much that sometimes it becomes hard to distinguish the Important/Urgent from the Unimportant/Not Urgent/Waste of my Time stuff. So I think not.

Start to think about HT's PM objectives for next year - definitely. Not least because he is being seconded away for 2 days a week to help implement our emerging Inclusive Learning Strategy across the whole city. This raises the interesting challenge of who will PM him on this aspect of his time and whether or not working 3 days a week for the school is likely to generate "sustained exceptional performance" and hence a pay rise - clearly some discussion will be needed with his other part-time manager on this one.

Get clearer about where the priorities lie for the next 12-24 months? Well that's a full governing body issue so I woudl not want to get too locked into my own thoughts.

So - rest then?

On governor involvement...

Had an interesting discussion with our Business Manager a couple of days ago about the extent to which it was appropriate for governors to get involved in the running of the school. Now some of you will say 'never, governance is a strategic role", some will want to be involved in the detail of whether or not to spend £500 painting the toilets and some will be in between. It got me thinking about where the line is drawn between strategic governance and operational management and how many governors do stuff that is hugely supportive but not governance.

Let's take this latter idea. We have governors who help out with swimming sessions, read to the kids, occasionally help out in the playground, etc. To me, this is not governance even though it is governors doing the tasks; it is straightforward volunteering. OK, it does give the volunteers a particular insight that may help them in their role as governors but can we really argue that helping little Johhny get dried and back into his clothes after a swim is governance?

On the other hand there are governors who turn up for their termly meeting, say little and then disappear for a term. That's not governance either - they are so remote for the school that they can hardly have a local context within which to make their strategic decisions.

So where is the middle way? I recently facilitated the development of an HR Strategy for our school - I actually commented that I would have done this for any school that had asked me; it is using my professional capacity in a socially responsible (in the CSR sense) way. So was doing this for the school where I am a governor getting too involved or not? Especially as one reason I was in the group was to represent a key stakeholder, the governing body. What if I next get involved in taking the targets we are about to develop and converting them into projects - for me that crosses the boundary from the strategic 'what' into the operational 'how'.

In another role as a non-exec director, this distinction between what and how is much clearer than it can be in schools. Now the model does not exactly cross over but it seems to be a decent starting point. We need to know enough to be able to ask useful questions (the 'critical') and to be able to support the school publicly and the (senior?) staff privately if necessary (the 'friend') but neither of these roles demands that I know Juliet's latest SAT results or that Billy has been bullied by Susan.

So - any thoughts/examples of the boundary between governance and operations?

What great meeting!

Last night I chaired the last meeting of our GB this academic year. The major item was to agree (or otherwise) on a secondment for our Principal. Fantastic discussion that was a pleasure to chair - everyone had their say, great points made about the benefits and challenges of the secondment and a very clear decision at the end (only 1 dissenter out of the whole GB) to let him go.

Several people commented afterwards about how mature the discussion had been and that's so encouraging when a couple of years ago it might have descended into argument and other unproductive hecticness. This level of maturity does not come easily, it takes time and preparation - although it does disappoint me to find 'experienced' governors coming along without having read the papers, when I'm King we will just assume they have been read - as well as pre-positioning. How often do members your GB discuss issues that are upcoming outside/ahead of the meeting to give the chance to recognise and work on the issues that are likely to come up; good decisions tend to some from good preparation.

Thoughts on seconding staff

Opportunities arise for staff to go away on secondment, what do we do?

On the one hand we lose, albeit temporarily, a valuable member of staff who has built up relationships with pupils and other staff members; on the other we risk getting in the way of CPD of that staff member, we miss the opportunity to influence more than might otherwise be the case the topic for which they are to be seconded, we miss out on the opportunity for other staff to step in/up and get their own CPD, we miss out on whatever the person may bring back from their secondment...we stand to have someone else 'owe us a favour'...

Nobody should be irreplaceable and a secondment creates an opportunity to explore ways of coping without that person. What would you do if they won the lottery, walked out and went to Barbados for ever?