Neil Carmichael MP: School Governors and governance - time to step up delivery

Neil Carmichael is the Member of Parliament for Stroud and a member of the Education Select Committee. Follow Neil on Twitter.

School governors and governance are now high on the policy agenda. The Education Select Committee is conducting a significant inquiry, Sir Michael Wilshaw, Chief Inspector of Schools, has focused OFSTED onto ‘school leadership and governance’ and our new All Party Parliamentary Group on School Leadership and Governance is holding regular meetings ar which standing room only is available to late comers. Ministers, too, are engaging with this debate.

Individual writers and contributors are also highlighting the need for reform, most notably and recently, Lord Adonis is his book “Education, Education, Education”. Longstanding organisations, including the National Governors Association. are turning up the volume in this increasingly robust debate.

There are two linked drivers behind this momentum. Firstly, governors and governance has hardly changed in generations. The battle over the control of schools has, up until now, been between local authorities and central government, characterised by such policies as represented by the Butler Education Act 1944, Circular 10/65 (Anthony Crosland’s request to local authorities to move to comprehensive schools) and the Education Act 1988 introducing, among other highlights, ‘Local Management of Schools’. None of these or other measures addressed the actual leadership and management of individual schools but, because of the impact of league tables and the spotlight now on failing schools, governance is becoming fair game for increasingly concerned parents, policy makers and public agencies.

The second driver is more specific and contemporary. Academies are springing up all over the country with their structures and, in particular, autonomy fuelling a debate about school accountability, role of sponsors and performance management issues for head teachers. Gone are the days when governors spent most of their time ratifying local authority derived policies.

Neil Carmichael MP: The Coalition has rightly embraced Lord Heseltine's industrial policy

Neil Carmichael is the Member of Parliament for Stroud and a member of the Education Select Committee. Follow Neil on Twitter.

Thirty years ago, Edward Heath asserted “Britain cannot rely on doing other peoples washing”. His meaning was plain; we were in danger of becoming a service economy at the expense of manufacturing and engineering. Today, the Coalition Government is facing up to the consequences of successive governments (especially the last one) having failed to understand the implications of ignoring many such warnings.

Rebalancing the economy is proving difficult, not least because of the huge cultural change necessary to support the reversal of several now ingrained assumptions and the impact of complacency. To make matters worse, we are operating in a global economy where new emerging economies – some are former colonies and several others we virtually ignored – are powering ahead as their middle classes expand, continental links are forged, and investors find easy opportunities.

Domestically, we are badly hampered by the deficit and overall debt. We must secure a sound financial footing because the risks of high interest rates and an endemic lack of confidence in our economy could be fatal. To sum up the challenge we confront, it is a mixture of structural failures in the real economy, robust competition from unexpected quarters and a debt ridden financial system.

Game changing action is called for and this should comprise of a boost to infrastructure investment, radical rethink about strategies for exporting, creation of conditions for small and medium sized firms to gain sufficient critical mass to become bigger market players, developing ‘banks for business’, tackling regional underperformance, and redoubling efforts to reform education and the labour market.

Neil Carmichael MP: Reporting back from Antarctica

Neil Carmichael is the Member of Parliament for Stroud and a member of the Education Select Committee. Follow Neil on Twitter.

This January I joined the British Antarctic Survey for a week’s visit to their station in the Antarctic.  The background to this visit was my Private Members Bill and the work behind-the-scenes with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Reaching the continent is not easy, and often impossible, but also necessary to ensure appropriate support for people based there for lengthy periods of time. I was moved by the reception we got and also by the obvious commitment of our scientists and logistics teams to promoting our interests in such an isolated place.

My first objective was to learn more about the likely implementation and impact of my Antarctic Bill. Focussing as it does on protecting the environment and strengthening international commitments, I was impressed by the level of support for the Bill from those directly involved in day to day work in Antarctica.

Our scientists are working in extreme conditions and are exploring some fundamentally important questions as we confront and debate climate change. We are fortunate to have so many scientific disciplines represented and supported in Antarctica. It was a privilege to meet them as a representative of our Parliament.

Neil Carmichael MP: Is the asylum system meeting children’s needs?

Neil Carmichael is the Member of Parliament for Stroud and a member of the Education Select Committee. He is currently on the panel of the inquiry into asylum support and its effects on children.

Asylum is often a controversial subject and the experiences of children within this context are often lost in the debate. I am currently part of a parliamentary inquiry examining the support provided to asylum seeking families and whether it is sufficient to protect children and young people’s welfare.

It is all too easy to forget that Britain has a long and glorious tradition of providing safety to those fleeing violence, persecution and turmoil of which we should be proud.  Forty years ago, a Conservative Government enabled fleeing Ugandan Asians to come to Britain, a matter highlighted recently in the House of Commons.

Neil Carmichael MP: It's not enough to cut the deficit, we need to strengthen the 'real' economy too

Neil Carmichael is Member of Parliament for Stroud.

Tackling the deficit, securing low interest rates and reducing taxation for business are all necessary to create the preconditions for economic growth and, in ‘normal times’, they could even be sufficient. However, today’s circumstances require much more to ensure Britain has the capacity to overcome the challenges presented by an increasingly competitive but also volatile world economy, and, above all, the consequences of a reliance on an inadequately regulated financial services sector and an relatively underproductive real economy.

“Europe” can be blamed for many things but it is not the fundamental cause of Britain’s lack of competitiveness – the German manufacturing performance is proof enough that other factors count for more. Instead, we must foster a ‘can do’ attitude where our products and services are sought because of their quality, innovativeness and relevance. Depreciating currencies are all very well but unless they bring rapid changes in trade fortunes and are also accompanied by structural adjustments at home, ultimately only inflation will be stimulated, especially if monetary policy (Quantative Easing) is being deliberately slackened.

There are, at least, four economic policy tools already being sharpened by the Coalition Government but they now need to be deployed with increased coordination and rigour. The first challenge is to more accurately match education and skills output with the requirements of business. Already, the Department of Education is addressing many of the obvious shortcomings in our schools but the interface between business and education is inadequate, requiring, instead, more direct participation by business in establishing education priorities. In essence, this is about creating a more flexible, productive and innovation friendly workforce.

Neil Carmichael MP: How to merge the Climate Change Department and improve government at the same time

Neil Carmichael is MP for Stroud.

With talk of a reshuffle of the Coalition Government around every corner, it is also time to consider the structure of government departments.  Many Prime Ministers have shown considerable interest in arrangements for ministries, offices and departments, especially from 1940 to 1980. Examples of radical reforms include the formation of five new departments by Harold Wilson in 1964 including the infamous Department of Economic Affairs, amalgamations of ministries to create such structures as the Ministry of Agriculture and Food in 1955, Ministry of Defence in 1964 and the Department of Health and Social Security in 1968. Most of these changes were associated with “corporate Britain” and, consequently, rarely celebrated.

More recent restructures, particular during the Blair and Brown years were regarded as politically expedient, short-term and a form of ‘window dressing’. Gordon Brown’s ill-fated Department Innovation, Universities and Skills deserved all of these descriptions. Restructuring of departments has earned a bad reputation and is now considered to be expensive and disruptive.

Today, the case against restructuring is not so obvious albeit politically difficult because of the balance of portfolios held by ministers from the two coalition parties. To begin with, the tasks of government have evolved to meet new challenges and some departments are presiding over radical reforms, altering the scope and capacity of policy making and administration.

Neil Carmichael MP: School governors must be well managed, or key education reforms may not achieve full potential

Neil Carmichael is the Member of Parliament for Stroud, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Education Governance and Leadership, and a member of the Education Select Committee.

Last week newspapers reported on an apparent attack by Michael Gove on school governors. However, to anyone who read all of his speech this was far from the case. Michael emphasised that good schools need good governors. His emphasis was that because governance matters so much, the difference between good and bad governance matters so much. This is recognition of what so many good school governors know already.

It is a year since Edward Wild and I published our report, Who Governs the Governors? (Wild Research) on the challenges facing governing bodies of schools and colleges and offered some practical ways to improve the quality of governing bodies, which we summarised for ConservativeHome. Shortly afterwards I established the All Party Group on Education Governance and Leadership, supported by the National Governors Association.

Since then a great deal has been achieved to raise the profile of school governors, to address the key issues in the changing educational landscape and, most recently, to provide some practical guidelines for boards to consider and to apply.

We have hosted a number of meetings, most recently with Lord Bichard (former Permanent Secretary at DfES and now a Crossbencher), which have discussed the shared concerns and ways to improve both the recruitment to and effectiveness of governing bodies. A key theme has been the move away from representative boards to skills-based boards. The fact that more than 30,000 vacancies exist across the UK demonstrates the scale of the challenge. Lord Bichard has produced 20 key questions for governing bodies, which we hope, once finalised, will be widely used across the UK.

Neil Carmichael MP and Edward Wild: How to improve school governance

Neil Carmichael is MP for Stroud and a member of the Education Select Committee; Edward Wild is the Director of Wild Search, a headhunter specialising in executive and trustee appointments within non-profit organisations. They recently published Who Governs the Governors: A Fresh Approach to School Governance, which you can download by clicking here.

Applications for free schools and academy status have become a daily part of the Coalition era as ConHome readers will be well aware. Widening choice, removing stifling bureaucracy and creating new opportunities for our children are fundamental Conservative principles and are at the heart of the Education Bill.

Yet one area which is even more fundamental in the new landscape than before is the growing importance of school governors. And that is the issue we have addressed in our recently published report, Who Governs the Governors: A Fresh Approach to School Governance. Our report assesses the opportunities created by the 2010 White Paper and asks some fundamental questions about how the quality of boards can be enhanced and the appeal of joining them widened. More than fifty MPs, peers and leaders of schools and federations attended the launch event last month.