Ever wondered what makes a ‘great’ governor or trustee?

Many of us get into governance to make a difference and support our local school or trust, but it’s not always easy to understand how to be effective and have a positive impact.

A new book aims to help governors and trustees to make the most of their contribution by identifying some of the key attributes of great governance volunteers.

Experienced governor and author of ‘How to be a great GoaT’, Ian Phillips, spoke to us at The Hoot to explain why those attributes are so important, as well as the fundamental importance of strategy.

First of all Ian, could you tell us a bit about you and your professional background?

Well, as you can tell I've got a few miles on the clock so it depends on how far you want to go back. My last job before retirement was as a speechwriter for senior European business people who had to deliver speeches in English when it wasn’t their native language.

And how did you get into governance?

I became a governor for the first time in spring of 2002 in my son’s sixth form college, becoming chair four years later. That was from 2006 to 2018, and in 2014 I became a National Leader of Governance.  

I was asked to go and support a single academy trust primary school. I'd never done anything like that before but I decided to take it on the basis that I really, really, for the first time in my life, couldn't make things worse! I could only really make things better. It was very interesting and we were able to successfully turn the school around in two terms and then brokered it into a new MAT, of which I am still a Trust Member.

After that I was asked to oversee the merger of an infant school and a junior school and become the chair as a neutral outsider. I did that for a couple of years and that also went well. I was then asked to go and help close a very small infant school which was no longer viable. The decision had already been made but the board just needed a bit of governance support which I was able to provide. There have been several other schools I’ve supported as well.

You have a section on ‘attributes’ and what it means to be a great governor or trustee. So much of our role is focused on compliance but it’s these softer skills that we can find harder to grasp sometimes. Why did you feel that was important to include?

There are a number of books on process or how to have a good meeting and what a good set of minutes looks like and that kind of stuff. This book includes some of that too but I think sometimes it can be difficult for governors to realise the profundity of the role and how existential it can be when schools are, for whatever reason, stricken.

You may be familiar with the Tolstoy quote at the start of Anna Karenina which is that “all happy families are happy in the same way, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own particular ways”, and the same applies to schools and colleges. 

You have to accept that schools are individual; the headteachers will be individual, the kids will be individual, the families will be individual and the governors or trustees will be individual. And what I try to do in the book is extract what is common to us where it's gone well or where it hasn't and see what we can learn from that. 

Can you give us a summary of how you have helped to turn a school around using this approach?

To take a recent example, it took a term to sort out the headship, sort out the legacy issues, steady the ship - all just by being there - and then releasing the acting headteacher to lead the pedagogy of the school and let the board sort out the business side. Term two was about developing a meaningful sustainable strategy, including finding a new head. 

This school wanted to join a multi-academy trust and so we looked at our options and chose one. We could do this fairly quickly because the school was already a single academy trust and didn’t need to go through a protracted conversion process.

The staff wanted someone to put an arm around them and say, it's going to be okay. You teach. We will do the rest.

It strikes me that your success has also been achieved through really effective chairing. How would you advise governors to issue challenge in some of these challenging situations you describe?

I think it’s important for governors to be ambitious as to how they can be better, and do things better, and to be curious about what they’re being told by the school.

I've tried to seed the book with things where you can issue challenges politely and not adversarially. I know some people are nervous about confronting headteachers because we all remember what the headteacher was like when we were at school and they're sort of on a pedestal. But they're just regular people trying to do an unbelievably difficult job in unbelievably trying circumstances. 

As I say in the book, we employ the headteacher, not the other way around.

At the end of the book you’ve got some practical, handy tools that will be useful for governors. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

I thought it might be interesting for people to see some of the things that I'm talking about throughout the book. So, there’s a very simple form we used when a board I was on wanted to get solar panels and one of our more ferocious governors said, ‘What's the business case for this?’ and ultimately, there wasn’t one. So I went away and, along with a colleague, designed a pro forma that captured all the details of a particular proposal in a single sheet.

When I’ve mentioned an approach in the book, I’ve also tried, where possible,  to accompany it with something useful in the appendix. So when I talk about primary school transformation, I’ve put the relevant flowchart in the appendix. 

I wanted to speak to schools that need help as I think that’s where I can add the most value. You forget how much time you put in as a governor. That's the thing, particularly when you're a chair of governors in a challenged school, you just don't count the hours. It’s a noble thing, being a governor, and I've tried to share that advice in a useful and simple way, making it very accessible linguistically and structurally.

That's the dream. And then I'll sell the film rights to Steven Spielberg! If I may, I’d like to share The GoaT mantra, It’s something that evolved while contemplating the book pre-publication. Many boards struggle with the imminence of difficulties and the hope of some knight on a white charger riding to the rescue. So I came up with this short epigram to focus the mind: “If not now, when? If not us, who?” It rather encapsulates the spirit of the GoaT, I think.

Get of your copy of How to be a great GoaT

Buy now