History and Achievements

Governors and trustees in our schools play a vital role in helping to ensure that all young people receive a high-quality education regardless of their background. Working with headteachers and senior leadership teams, they drive the strategic development of schools, set the vision, agree the budget, and appoint the head and senior leadership.

Yet finding skilled people to fulfil this role is often challenging, especially for struggling schools in less advantaged parts of the country. These schools can often find it harder to recruit independent people who can help support and challenge them to improve. That is why our charity created a massive national database of governor volunteers all schools could access – giving every school the same opportunities to find highly skilled, diverse, willing volunteers that schools in affluent professional catchments with high social capital can more readily access.

For eight years between 2016 and 2024 our charity successfully delivered the well-respected Inspiring Governance – school governor and academy trustee recruitment service. This was a contract funded by the Department for Education as part of their support for governor recruitment.

Over eight years of service, Inspiring Governance delivered the following:

9,000 highly skilled governors and trustees recruited into the school system – all supported by quality online training/ guidance from the National Governance Association.
Over 1,000 bespoke appointments made – Chairs of Governors and independent skilled governors placed in schools and academies with ‘inadequate’ or ‘requires improvement’ Ofsted judgements (or referred to us for urgent support by their local authorities or academy trusts).
Over 30+% of our governor appointments made were from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds – helping diversify school decision making bodies across England.
Over 80% of our placed governors were under 50 years of age, with 45% being under 35 years of age – we brought new, younger voices onto governing boards and leave a legacy of life-long contributions to governance in our schools.
Quarterly volunteer and recruiter satisfaction surveys with the Inspiring Governance service routinely exceeded 95% satisfaction or above.
We conservatively estimate that (through our recruited governors) in the last year of the contract alone we have contributed £5 million annually of unpaid professional services into supporting the running of England’s schools.

“Dear Inspiring Governance, just to say, “thank you” for all that you have done for the school governance sector in the time you have been in operation. As a governance clerk for the past 20 years, you have provided the schools I have worked for with an invaluable service.”

Campaigns

Together with the National Governance Association, Inspiring Governance ran two influential joint campaigns to recruit new governors from 2018-2024:

Everyone on Board – this was a campaign to encourage more volunteers from Black and global majority backgrounds to become school governors. It also focused on challenging existing governing boards to reflect on their current composition, encouraging them to actively diversify their membership to make better informed decisions for all pupils. We were supported by Operation Black Vote, the Black Young Professionals network, and the brilliant Civil Service Race Forum, whose co-chair Justin Placide featured in our second campaign video.

Educators on Board – this was a joint campaign that also harnessed the support of organisations like the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) and the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) to encourage more volunteers from all levels of the education sector to bring their education expertise onto school governing boards. This included placing Department for Education (DfE) policy officials, right through to volunteers from HEIs, FE colleges, independent schools, exam boards, education charities, and school leaders and classroom teachers themselves. All volunteers have themselves gained valuable cross-sector CPD in the process, better informing their work in the education system at multiple levels.

Both campaigns were very successful, with Inspiring Governance appointing 30% of its governors from Black and global majority backgrounds and making over a thousand appointments from the education sector, including over 250 from the Department for Education itself.

Employers and School Governor Champions

Over the eight-year life of the Inspiring Governance service, we worked alongside hundreds of brilliant public employers, private sector businesses, and professional membership bodies to promote the role of school governor/ trustee. We are very appreciative and thankful for their support.

These education and employer partnerships enabled us to speak in depth with interested volunteers about the realities, commitments, and benefits of the school governor role. We regularly targeted employers and associations who had the skill sets most sought after by school governing boards. We also focused on securing independent, skilled, diverse volunteers that could support schools most in need; those with the least social capital from which to readily draw governors onto their boards from the local area.

Part of the attraction for employers to promote the governing role to staff was highlighted very clearly in our Value of Volunteering research in 2021, which laid out the clear benefits from professional skill development, productivity and motivation gains, to the health and well-being benefits of making a difference in local communities.

A Technological Approach

Inspiring Governance was delivered using our unique proprietary technology, which combines the world leading functionality of Salesforce customer relationship management software and the searchability of Ordnance Survey mapping. Schools looking to recruit governors across the country could search our database of tens of thousands of volunteers by skill set and geography, able to instantly look at a wide range of volunteers on a map of their local area. Volunteers in turn could search for governor vacancies at local schools and each party could express interest via the chat functionality of the secure online platform. Power and choice were in the hands of the user.

Customer feedback

“IG has been so valued by me as governor that was found by three schools this way and by me as chair finding four governors. This closure will be a huge loss. Thank you”

“Inspiring Governance is SO helpful to Academy Trusts…Wishing you the very best of luck – you will be sorely missed.”

“Thank you very much for your excellent service, very sorry to see it go. Best wishes for the future to all involved. From a Clerk (who is always having to look for new governors on behalf of the boards I work for!)”

“Just trying to get my details out there before your brilliant service closes. Thank you for all the help you have provided over the past year or so. You will be greatly missed.”

“Sorry to see this really valuable service closing, it has proved exceptionally helpful to us for finding volunteers.”

“Thank you to the team for the work done in the last 8 years – the platform and experience was very positive and got me involved in schools in a way that I otherwise would have been very unlikely to realise.”

Closure

The service closed at the end of September 2024 with the ending of Department for Education funding for governor recruitment services. This followed a pattern of central government funding also ending for governor professional development and the national leaders of governance programme. It will be the first time in 25 years that the DfE has not provided support for governor recruitment. The closure was covered in both the education press and national media.

History

Inspiring Governance emerged from the campaigning activity of the Inspiring Governors Alliance, first launched by Education and Employers in 2014 and designed to encourage more volunteers from employers and business into schools. The Inspiring Governors Alliance formed in tandem with a 2014 follow up research report into governance undertaken by Professor Chris James at the University of Bath. The report looked at how governance had changed in response to significant changes to education policy, including the introduction of academies and free schools, which increase the significance and impact of governing bodies.

The original Governing our Schools report was written in 2008 by Education and Employers’ CEO Nick Chambers (then Director of Education at Business in the Community) for the National Council for Educational Excellence ,which was chaired by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The Governing our Schools report recommendations included clarifying and simplifying the purpose of school governing boards, enhancing their status, and reducing the range of their responsibilities, allowing them to concentrate on scrutiny and strategic development.

The report and its recommendations were based on a specially commissioned report by the University of Bath led by Professor Chris James. The School Governance Study examined the effectiveness of school governance and presented findings from a survey of school governors across England about the roles and responsibilities of school governing bodies. The researchers concluded that although school governing is a crucial and valuable aspect of education in England, the role of the governor and the process of governing was:

“Overloaded, overcomplicated, and overlooked.”

Education and Employers revisited the original research a decade on in the Governing our Schools: 10 years on report, part written by their Deputy CEO Dominic Judge.

After competitively winning a contract from the DfE to deliver the service in 2016, the charity secured a further extension under the contract before securing a continuity of service extension for a further year during Covid. At this point the budget was reduced by 45% but with reduced KPIs.

A year later Education and Employers won a new competitive tender to deliver at the start of 2022. This contract continued at 45% reduced funding (but on doubled KPIs) and lasted for a further two years, being extended for six months, before the service finally closed on 30^th September 2024. This, due to the DfE ceasing to directly fund any governor recruitment support for schools.