Newsnight carried a item on 20th February about the growing gap in school performance between London and the rest of the country. Chris Cook of the Financial Times did his customary job cogently summarising the situation and Sir Michael Wilshaw attempted to suggest that what was happening in London could happen elsewhere. Nudged by Gavin Esler, he also said heads could and should 'root out' poorly performing teachers. In the Twittersphere, some (e.g. @GarethJAnderson ) have suggested that governors were incapable of doing likewise with underperforming heads (probably intending to imply, by the way, that local authorities could and did).
This is an interesting assertion and one which assumes greater significance as 'control' in the system becomes more disorganised with the growth of stand-alone academies and chains. Under what circumstances are heads removed from office? Did it happen more regularly when schools were consistently overseen by local authorities? Is the number rising or falling with the growth of academies? I don't know the answers to these questions - I don't even know if the data are available. It would be interesting to hear from anybody who does have these data.
We at CUREE do have an accumulation of individual cases to draw on to which I can add current experience as a National Leader of Governance (and past evidence from years of working with schools). From this I would make the following assertions - in the interest of provoking a debate:
- headteachers are very rarely unseated for reasons of school performance in advance of a critical Ofsted judgement
- they very often are immediately after
- neither LAs nor governors are more likely to act preemptively on heads' performance
- Heads are much more likely to lose their jobs for financial irregularities, misconduct (including those involving pupils) and cultural/philosophical clashes than performance
- this is all true for many private companies too.
None of this is particularly surprising for four reasons:
- the overall performance of the enterprise is a complex thing dependant on many variables few of which are directly in the control of the head. We have been disinclined to reduce these to a few simple measures and to hold the head responsible for these regardless of the circumstances. The opposite is a kind of 'football manager' contract (no wins in 10 matches and your out) but these tend to have big payoffs which we have trouble with in education;
- the head (or the chief executive) holds all the informational cards. In the absence of co-operation from the head, it's pretty difficult for the governors to form an independant view of school performance without an external trigger and information/advice;
- in any case, we operate in a culture and regulatory climate of collaboration between head and governors which currently offers no quotidien alternative when that relationship has become dysfunctional
- finally, most governors have no access to resources independant of the head to support them in their monitoring role. This would require a Clerk who reports to the governors (presumably the Chair) NOT the head and he/she would need some secretariat-type support.
So, have governors got the bottle to remove poor headteachers? I would say no, but this is more a question of lack of resources than lack of bottle. In schools functioning well, the head and chair (and other governors) have a relationship of mutual respect, with both support and challenge. Here performance problems would be challenged and action taken. In all probability, action against the head would not be necessary because s/he is already addressing the problem. Would this happen where the head is already the problem? Probably not. Would it have happened with more LA involvement? Probably not. What would make it more likely to happen in the future? External support to governors not routed though the headteacher would help. The National Leaders of Governance system has the potential to evolve into this but we must always bear in mind that, at present, neither the governors not the NLGs are remunerated for their efforts and this will limit the amount of time and effort they will be able to dedicate to these activities. Having the Clerk contractually responsible direct to the governors would assist too - providing they too had access to data, expert support and some administrative resources. It would be interesting to hear from governors in schools where they have this kind of clerking support if this does actually empower them.
Governors might be weak in holding headteachers to account, in advance of major failure, but they are no weaker than all the other actors in the system. Our system of school governance is like democracy which, as Churchill famously said "is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".
Paul Crisp