Governing our Schools - A report by Business in the Community

Research carried out for Business in the Community by the University of Bath shows that greater responsibility has been devolved to schools, and Governing bodies therefore now carry more responsibility. The challenge is to ensure that the barriers that exist for employees to volunteer as school governors are removed, and this report gives recommendations on how this can happen.

Governing our schools publication front cover
Date published
October 2008
Governing our Schools - A report by Business in the Community [5042kb PDF]

The study found three principal barriers to greater involvement of employees in school governance:

  • The need for employers to give their employees more paid time off to participate as governors;
  • Misperceptions of who is eligible for participation in school governance (stereotyping governors as parents and older people);
  • A general misperception of the role of a school governor, which leads many potential volunteers to overestimate the work involved.

Our report makes a number of recommendations for ways in which the government can help to lift the barriers; and, if it does so, we believe that employers and their employees will respond.

The report includes a foreword by Bob Wigley, who at Business in the Community is Deputy Chairman and Education Leadership Chairman and a response by Barry O’Brien, Partner, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP,  who have generously sponsored this publication.

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