Ian Courtney,Chair of the National Governance Association

Ian Courtney MBE is currently the Chair of the single governing body of a cross-phase federation of seven schools in West Devon and of the Co-operative Trust that they sit within, along with three other local primary schools. Ian has been an NGA Trustee since November 2011 and was re-elected to the board in November 2015. He was re-elected Chair on 10 December 2015. He was awarded an MBE for Services to Education in the 2015 New Year Honours List.

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Ian Courtney

Ian talks to Chris Oates about how a background in banking has influenced his approach to governance, and describes a model which puts people – both students and staff – at the heart of decision-making.

Ian, can you start by giving a brief background of your business career and any key influences on your professional practice which you have found useful in your role as a school governor?

I worked in the banking sector for 38 years, mainly on the business side, but also in personnel and training. The last eight years were spent in ‘special situations’ working with businesses which were really in trouble due to the recession – with people under extreme stress. I was trying to do the right thing while still working within the framework of bank structures. There’s a real parallel with education: we went through a very rosy funding period, but now funding is tight and there are tough decisions to make. So, I suppose I’ve always been more interested in people than in processes and systems.

The personnel skills and an understanding of financial management are important as well, but I’ve always approached finance from a pupil perspective – if that makes any sense. In my job, I would look at a business and say, what can I do to help the people, and it’s the same with a school – how is this going to help pupils and staff – and I just think that this gives you the guidance on how best to use the money, and if you keep on coming back to people all the time – as opposed to a system or an audit or what would Ofsted want – you won’t usually go too far wrong.

Can you expand on that?

Yes – for example, the last item on every governing body agenda and those of major committees is what difference has our meeting today made to our pupils? We discuss that, rather than just spending our whole time talking about policies and structures. Also, I have used my training in conflict negotiation and resolution to run courses for staff and governors, and the feedback I get is that this has been really useful, because it’s not something teachers are usually trained in.

How did you first become involved in school governance?

The classic way I suppose. My daughter started at secondary school and I was elected as a parent governor. That was in 1999, and I’ve been involved ever since.

How are the challenges you faced then different from those of school governance today?

Immensely, back then you could spend hours talking about policies, looking at everything three times over. Now, of course, there’s the increased use of data, but I’d rather focus on the staffing changes – we went through a period of very generous funding under the Blair governments, and we used that to ensure that class sizes remained small, and to this day 16 years later we’ve managed just by our coat-tails to hang on to that. We’ve also invested in infrastructure, building a skills centre to serve the local community – we worked hard to raise the funds, and our approach to tendering challenged the existing local authority model. I like to think that the support of the governing body was a key factor in achieving an outcome which ensured that we got the building at a sensible price, and it’s still in use today. So, to summarize, then we had the challenge of spending generous funding wisely – now it’s more about achieving the same outcomes with much less.

…and what qualities do you think a school governor needs to meet these challenges?

Resilience and that willingness to challenge the status quo, to challenge authority – I’m not an advocate that the private sector gets everything right and the public sector is slow and disorganized, but it is more risk-averse, and I think somewhere in between the two is a compromise. So, with a mix of those two quite different approaches we can usually find a middle way that is going to work and that we’re comfortable with and that the governors will back.

On the National Governance Association (NGA) website your top tip is: ‘What you want to achieve is far more important than how you are organised.’ Can you expand on that – perhaps with a practical example?

Yes, absolutely. Go back all the time to how this will help the experience of our students – I want our schools to be nice places for our people to be, whether they be pupils or staff. I want staff to have pride that they have ‘I worked for the Federation’ on their CV. I just want people to turn up every day and I want people to know that we value them. Sometimes you have to show this by your actions – even if it’s something simple like abolishing a 50p charge for coffee at break times.

I honestly don’t believe that whether we’re a standalone local authority school or academy or a cooperative trust school makes a jot of difference – what makes a difference is if we work closely with another school in a proper partnership that will make us stronger if we do it right. I put more trust in schools working in partnership. The Federation is a legal structure: we have one governing body and we can do what we need to do to drive that pupil experience, that staff inner well-being, and that then makes the whole thing work more efficiently and you get value at the same time.

For example, the job of a head teacher in a small primary school where you’ve got 40, 50, 60 kids – that’s pretty much the norm in our part of the world – that job where they’re teaching 0.6, even in some cases 0.8, and they’ve got all the headship responsibilities. That is clearly not working – people are burning out. So, you look at things and say right, we wouldn’t start here – what would we do? So, we designed a system with an executive head teacher over a group of primaries. Each primary has a Head of School. They run that school, as far as the parents are concerned; they know the children, they line-manage the staff, they have a little bit of say over the budget, and they can choose what to spend on curriculum and resources – they are responsible for the teaching and learning, which actually makes so much sense. It also makes the job of the governors much easier. You standardize all of the systems and processes without standardizing the schools. It’s a really positive model of cooperative working.

Finally, the OECD has stated: ‘Governing multi-level education systems requires governance models that balance responsiveness to local diversity with the ability to ensure national objectives. This delicate equilibrium is difficult to achieve given the complexity of many education systems. Countries are therefore increasingly looking for examples of good practice and models of effective modern governance that they can adapt to their own needs’ (OECD, 2016). Do you have a model of good practice which you can share with our international readership?

That’s easy – a relentless focus on the people. What on earth is the point otherwise? It’s just a set of accounts and a load of data.