Understanding practices of UK college governing: Rethinking strategy and accountability

Governance and governing

Some 25 years ago Rhodes explored both the popularity and imprecision of the term ‘governance’, setting out six different meanings and concluding that it was most helpfully conceived as ‘self-organizing, interorganizational networks’ (Rhodes, 1996: 660). The rise of network governance counterbalanced the retreat from bureaucratic and centralised government (the ‘hollowing out of the state’) and in the British case, accompanied Conservative reforms giving primacy to markets, competition and individualism. It would however be a mistake to regard this shift from ‘government to governance’ (Newman, 2005a) as either a replacement for prior models of hierarchical control and marketisation, or as some sort of diminution of the state's involvement in the affairs of public organisations and the lives of citizens. Writing specifically about further education in a slightly later period (during which a New Labour government had further developed the trends described by Rhodes – see for example Newman, 2001). Avis (2009) described an emerging central government recognition of the limits of target-driven performativity, but also argued that the ‘remedy’ of ‘new localism’ was never a simple empowering of organisations and communities. In the main, analyses of ‘governance’ have focused on the structures, flows of power and discursive elements that frame and position people and organisations in relation to the state, especially in the public sector. Newman has provided some of the most insightful work here, for example examining the socially constructed and contested nature of accountability for public service managers in landscapes that had been altered radically by the rise of both New Public Management and network governance (Newman, 2004). Related work investigated the discursive construction of new subjectivities for public sector managers, as ‘transformational leaders’, in a model gaining its appeal from both its origins in the USA and its association with private business (Newman, 2005b). Although educational leaders were not part of Newman's sample, the shifting expectations surrounding their roles have been re-drawn by the same forces. We return briefly to this point in our conclusion.

The continuing significance of the concept of governance for educational leadership and management was recently underlined by Wilkins and Gobby (2020), for whom governance represents a political and economic strategy of governing achieved ‘in the absence of any direct, coercive government intervention’ (314), signalling a change in dominant ideas about responsibility:

‘… matters of public interest including duties of care and responsibility for others and to the self … are purposely reimagined under governance as matters of private interest and individual responsibility … Governance therefore signals the abrogation of state responsibility and its reluctance to protect individuals and organizations against some of the worst excesses of unregulated markets’. (314)

Governance, in this broader sense of the means and ends of state-level government and how these are achieved, sets the context for governing and therefore provides some of the conceptual tools for understanding it. In this paper and the project on which it draws, the primary interest lies with governing, or more specifically, the processes and practices that can be seen in college governing. The governance/governing distinction is therefore important but is difficult to keep in mind partly because the terms are often used interchangeably or alongside one another as if they mean the same thing. For example, ‘governance’ appears in both senses in both the Independent Commission report and the White Paper mentioned earlier, where it is about the terms of the relationship between colleges and the state, but also about the more specific actions and arrangements of governors and GBs.

Governing and strategy

‘Strategy’ is frequently used in respect of the purposes, responsibilities and actions of GBs, and the board's involvement in it is seen by some as the key purpose of the Chair (Hill and James, 2017). Whilst the term's military connotations remain important, the main parallel for college GBs is with its use in business. Definitions of strategy vary in their compass. A relatively focused example has strategy as:

Here, strategy is focused on the ‘how’ of decision making, but also incorporates some attention to what might be called the ‘mission’ (the ‘what’), the vision (the ‘why’) and the value network (the ‘whom’) of the organisation. A more expansive concept is Mintzberg’s (1992) well known ‘5 Ps for strategy’ (Plan, Ploy, Pattern, Position and Perspective), all the elements of which can be seen in college GBs. In this conceptualisation, while strategy is often something consciously intended and made in advance (a plan), it can also or instead be a ploy, perhaps used to outwit rival organisations. It can however be more emergent or ‘realised’ through a series of actions, even if there was no clearly articulated intention (‘pattern’). Position is a more relational element, referring to the location of an organisation in a wider context or field. Finally, strategy can mean perspective, or something like collective mind or ‘world view’, where members of the organisation share a way of thinking and acting. Arguably, the latter three meanings could also be referred to as aspects of ‘organisational culture’, or in the case of a college, a ‘learning culture’ (Hodkinson et al., 2007).

The parallel with company boardrooms is helpful in identifying the nature of involvement of college governors in strategy and how this may be understood. Hendry et al. (2010) indicate that studies of the strategic role of boards ‘… have largely followed the broader corporate governance research agenda, focusing mainly on structural aspects … especially board composition … In other words, their focus is on proxies for board involvement in strategy rather than on actual board behaviour’ (34). Recent studies have augmented this with more attention to process, activity and context, exemplified in the widely cited distinction between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ strategizing (e.g. Demb and Neubauer, 1992; McNulty and Pettigrew, 1999). Nevertheless, ‘… research in this area does not provide consistent or systematic insights into the impact of these factors on board involvement in strategy … (it) lacks an overall framework or lens through which this relationship may be considered’ (Hendry et al., 2010: 35). For these reasons, Hendry and colleagues adopt a ‘strategy as practice’ perspective. This views strategy rather differently, as ‘a situated or context-dependent, socially-accomplished activity directed towards the achievement of strategic goals and constructed through the actions and interactions of multiple actors or groups’ (36). Here, strategy is something that is ‘done’, and ‘strategising practices’ are the focus, including ‘… the flow of activities … such as strategic planning, decision making, resource allocation and strategic change’ (36).

Although Hendry and colleagues make no reference to it, their argument builds well on a more philosophical critique that appeared three years earlier. Chia and MacKay (2007) demonstrated how studies of strategy as a process (and indeed many of those declaring a ‘strategy as practice’ approach) had allowed the term practice to refer to a very wide range of activities. In turn, this lack of specificity had enabled a continued focus on the individual (or the individual organisation) as the prime and causal unit of analysis, for example, seeking to explain practices of strategy solely as the result of individual or joint intentions. Thus, a more thoroughgoing epistemological break was necessary to give primacy to ‘an immanent logic of practice rather than to actors and agents … it is this immanent logic emerging through practice which constitutes what we mean by strategy’ (Chia and Mackay, 2007: 219). Strong parallels are drawn with a Bourdieusian logic of practice and its capacity to straddle structure and agency (e.g. Bourdieu, 1990). In the research on which this article draws, a ‘strategy as practice’ perspective helps us to pay attention to both ‘manoeuvres’ and ‘room for manoeuvre’ in GBs.

Governing and accountability

The accountability functions of GBs are often framed as involving ‘scrutiny’, ‘monitoring’ and ‘challenge’, or more prosaically, ‘asking questions’. Like strategy, the term accountability appears to mean several different things in both official and casual discourse. One potential clarification is a distinction between public and private accountability. Writing about schools in England, West et al. state:

‘… public accountability can be seen as a range of systems by which organisations or people are held to account in the public sphere – through election (representative democracy), through dialogue (participative democracy, networks), through the courts and through audit. As such it is distinctive from the private accounts of private organisations (with consumers and with shareholders)’. (West et al., 2011: 41–42)

However, these authors acknowledge that the public/private distinction is much more difficult to make than it once was. Many analysts attribute this, directly or indirectly, to the rise of governance that we noted earlier. Writing in this journal, Ranson (2008) pointed to the significance of the replacement of post-war social democratic arrangements and assumptions, with mechanisms of choice and market competition, reducing the role of democratic accountability through local government. The effects include repositioning the public as individual consumers whilst promoting and enabling new combinations of public and private interests, especially in education (Locatelli, 2019; Wilkins, 2016).

Changes of this kind give rise to the need for a fresh conceptual approach. West et al. (2011) take some steps towards this, distinguishing seven ‘types of accountability: professional, hierarchical, market, contract, legal, network and participative’ (46). Their analysis considers the demands, effects and sanctions associated with each, yet also has puzzling features. Teachers are said to have ‘professional accountability’ to their peers and to the (now former, English) General Teaching Council, but there is no mention of their accountability to senior management, something that is far more likely to dominate their thoughts, practices and subjectivities (Ball, 2003). It is especially odd that although the GBs are rightly said to be accountable to several other agencies, no person, role or entity is signalled as being accountable to them. This omission may itself be a symptom of the rapid diversification of models and purposes of school GBs in England.

It is helpful to view GB accountability through a more sociological lens. Wilkins (2016) cites Charlton’s (2002) distinction between, on the one hand, technical or financial meanings (e.g. the presentation of auditable accounts), and on the other hand, managerial meanings, which refer to the subsuming of a wide range of activities in systems of audit. This point has strong affinity with Hoyle and Wallace’s (2005) earlier definition of managerialism and with more recent scholarship on ‘datafication’ in educational settings (Williamson, 2017; Wyatt-Smith et al., 2019). For Wilkins, governors (and we would add, those prescribing or commenting on their functions) often use ‘accountability’ to refer to both these things, interchangeably. Accountability has become largely synonymous with governance itself, where

As a result, governors may hold others to account but are themselves in a strong sense accountable, to the extent that what they do is largely defined by ‘formal calculative regimes’ and the governance of risks. This point was to become central in our analysis.

Newman (2005a) noted that typically, analyses of governance had adopted rather ‘thin’ concepts of the social. She argued that governance should be approached and understood as meaning making in circumstances that already make some strategies and courses of action thinkable and others unthinkable. Our study attempts to realise a similar goal. Our research approach to GBs in action, and to governing – which might be most simply expressed as ‘what is going on here in the name of governing, what does it achieve and why does it matter?’ – has a strong connection with previous work by some of the team on learning cultures in further education. This too incorporated a Bourdieusian perspective, and it took a similar questioning stance toward pre-constructed and official institutional definitions of the central concepts (see e.g. Colley et al., 2007; Hodkinson et al., 2007; James & Biesta, 2007).

College strategy in relation to HE provision

Our first example is the presentation of the news (in a senior manager's report to the GB) that a college was successful in a review process giving it the right to run courses at HE level. A governor who works in HE had worked with a small team of senior teaching staff (some of whom were GB members) to devise various required evaluation measures and prepare to respond to questions likely to be asked during external scrutiny.

The presentation made it clear that preparing for and achieving this status had been a strategically important activity invested in by the senior team for at least 2 years. Board members then asked questions, and responses were given by the CEO and Chair. In these responses, the pursuit of the opportunity was portrayed as unavoidable, and the successful outcome was described as a thoroughly positive development which could only benefit the college.

Following the presentation, the GB Vice Chair asked what the future strategy was, and whether the college would be able to deliver degrees. Fundamental features of the strategy were revealed in the CEO's answer to this question; the CEO explained that the focus would be on areas that universities did not cover and where the college had recognised expertise and historical precedents, such as HNCs and HNDs. As it was the Vice Chair who asked the question, it appears unlikely that this area of strategy had been discussed in a GB meeting, and still less likely that there was a firm sense of GB ownership. Whilst the preparations had been discussed in one of the GB committees, the questions and answers revealed that the wider GB itself was not party to quite fundamental elements of strategy and some members were unaware of the completed preparatory work.

A time-sensitive opportunity

Our second vignette sees a GB presented with an opportunity to lease a nearby building that had been used by another FE college for teaching purposes. The other college was nearing the end of its lease on the building and had approached this college to see if they wanted to use it. However, it was a time-sensitive offer, and its urgency meant that members of the finance committee were emailed for responses in-between that committee's regular meeting dates. The item was explained to the GB in a 10-min presentation from the Chief Operating Officer (COO) as part of a ‘strategy and update report'. The rationale centred on the college growing student numbers and being able to access funding, based on projections of the increasing size of college enrolment. The COO explained that the new building would enable more students to be taught, thus extending the college's capacity, and that there was a bonus, in that the building also had features conducive to the specialised nature of the teaching that would take place there.

The COO explained that the 80 students already enrolled with the other college had been told that negotiations were underway to provide them with a course, but they had to know for certain by the summer (the GB meeting was held in the Spring). Toward the end of the presentation, the CEO also contributed, to confirm that the long-term goal was to try to grow numbers, in line with the college's values and strategy, in which this particular area of curriculum had been identified as up and coming.

The ensuing discussion lasted around 20 min. The GB was asked to approve accepting the offer, rather than to approve signing the lease itself. The Chair of the Finance Committee summarised the two main queries raised by the committee's members. One was about the feasibility of using an existing college building instead; the other was a check that the financial commitment would not place the college in any financial difficulty. The GB Chair stressed: ‘Speed is of the essence here. We’ve got 80 students being held in abeyance’. Only one other Governor challenged this. They spoke twice, the first time stating that ‘we are effectively being asked to agree to let you sign up to a lease without knowing if it pays’. At the end, when the Chair asked for agreement, after assuring the board that there would be another chance to scrutinise the matter in Finance Committee, the same governor stated: ‘I think we should record the fact that Finance has agreed this outside the normal circle, otherwise we are just being asked to agree something without a plan’. In the event, the deal was agreed and endorsed by the Finance committee (which met a fortnight later), and the building was open for business in the following September.

We now consider how these two episodes relate to prescriptions for governing, before turning to our account of them as practices.

Prescriptions

Prescriptions for what college governing should encompass, and indeed the characteristics and qualities thought necessary in governors themselves, come in three main forms: (a) general government or ministerial guidance (e.g. Northern Ireland Department for the Economy, 2019; Scottish Government, 2014); (b) diagnostic reviews, sometimes motivated by specific failures (e.g. Greatbatch and Tate, 2018; Humphreys, 2011; Ney, 2019; Scottish Government, 2016); and (c) codes of practice, especially from bodies representing colleges themselves (e.g. AoC, 2019).

These documents vary a great deal in tone, intended audience, and quality. For example, where the Welsh review (Humphreys, 2011) was broad, seeking to define and restate the purpose of FE colleges to present recommendations to government about governance structures and cultures, the more recent English one (Greatbatch and Tate, 2018) was narrow, driven by a recognition that the English FE sector was already amid a fundamental reform programme. ⁷ It identified a need for more ‘high quality and high performing governors’ (11), at the same time acknowledging great ambiguity and variation in the purposes of FE college governance (64). Disappointingly, the report presented these two matters as if they were unrelated.

Variations of this kind should not however blind us to the strong substantive similarities between such documents. Good College Governance: The Report of the Education Secretary's Task Group (Scottish Government, 2016) is an example of our second form, drawing upon three cases of governance failure in Scotland. It would be equally at home in the other three countries. Its foreword, written by the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, states the centrality of effective governance and the role of cultural and structural aspects:

Effective governance is fundamental in supporting colleges to improve the life chances of their students and the performance of businesses. And good corporate governance demands an unswerving focus on culture, values and people – and strong systems and processes underpinning decision-making and public accountability. (Scottish Government, 2016: 2).

A prominent example of our third form is the Code of Good Governance for English Colleges (AoC, 2019) offering nine ‘core values and expectations’ including ‘Providing strong leadership to both the senior team and the community the college serves’, ‘Setting the strategy and acting as guardians of the college's mission’, and ‘Demonstrating accountability to students, parents, staff, partners, employers, funders, trustees and other stakeholders, including publishing accurate and timely information on performance’ (AoC, 2019: 7–8). ⁸ The Code also presents a list of ‘principal responsibilities of good governance’, the first two of which read:

‘Formulate and agree the mission and strategy including defining the ethos of the college.

Strategy in practice

Both vignettes raise questions about the meaning, nature, location and ownership of strategy and, along with much of our data, they question the apparent straightforwardness of the concept. As a whole, our data show that there can sometimes be longstanding and fundamental elements of strategy about which GBs per se are largely ignorant, and about which there is no apparent sense of collective ownership by the GB.

In the first vignette, the board learns of the strategy as a fait accompli, when it is revealed to them as having been behind a long-planned but recent and significant achievement: they are relatively passive and are being inducted regarding a key strategic matter. In the second, GB members are more active, though the core process is one of persuasion: they are being asked to support something on the grounds that it is wise, desirable, and keeping with existing strategy (both the COO and the CEO frame the proposal as being consonant with broad strategic matters such as growing student numbers in an up-and-coming area of provision). Notably, the dialogue does not dwell on the strategic pros and cons of the proposal and is centred on risk, financial viability, and the discomfort of breaking with normal committee cycles.

In neither of these instances could strategy be described as a ‘clear roadmap’ of the sort outlined by Watkins (2007) or as conveyed in the prescriptions, wherein governors devise and articulate collective intentions, then monitor the realisation of them. Rather, GB strategy appears, simultaneously, to be both ‘planned’ and ‘emergent’ for different parts of the governance arrangements. This makes the classic ‘passive/active’ distinction of little help in the analysis of GB involvement. We know from our interviews with CEOs, Chairs and GPs, and other sources, that in many colleges these three individuals are in almost daily contact, forming an ‘inner triangle of governance’ where ongoing dialogue is likely to include a strongly shared sense of strategy. Given the high volume of activity, together with timescales and cycles that are much faster than the frequency of GB meetings, it is no surprise that many decisions and actions will initially bypass many or most GB members. This arrangement means that GBs often find themselves deliberating on actions and decisions already taken, building a post-hoc appreciation of strategy, or focusing on the legitimacy of what has already happened in their name. These practices, which are largely responses to the wider governance frame, are quite far removed from the prescriptions we introduced above.

Accountability in practice: lateral, inward-facing and outward-facing

Our analysis shows a range of accountability practices that reflect how different governors or different elements of the GB structure are accountable to each other. This lateral accountability is a crucial dimension in that it signals a collective identity and a sense of joint responsibility. Lateral accountability appears to be afforded or constrained by both structural and cultural elements. Structurally, these include terms of reference, reporting lines, membership of committees, the timing and sequencing of meetings. Culturally, they include the Chair's ‘style’ and the extent to which governors feel able to support, question or challenge each other. The first vignette illustrates something of this form of accountability, and it is central in the second, where the Finance Committee has worked closely with the COO, and together they give assurances, sufficient to secure conditional approval, to the GB. The matter in hand is progressed by finding a temporary work-around, bypassing the ‘normal’ relationship and sequencing of business between the GB and one of its committees: this suggests a high level of trust, but also that lateral accountability can remain significant even when the usual mechanism for achieving it can't be activated.

In the various prescriptions mentioned earlier, the idea of GB holding senior teams to account is prominent. Both vignettes include practices that constitute this kind of accountability, though in this respect they are unusual amongst our data. In the first, the CEO seeks to reassure GB members that the process of achieving the necessary recognition to run HE-level programmes was long-planned, had harnessed appropriate governor expertise and had been handled well. The question from the vice-chair results in a form of ‘holding to account’ in that it produces clarification of the significance and implications for the college, especially regarding opportunities opened up for specific types of higher education provision to be grown or expanded. This clarification also leads to a fresh articulation of an element of GB strategy, both verbal and in the minutes. In the second vignette, a more robust challenge to senior leaders includes an insistence that the matter is recorded in the minutes in a particular way. It is however important to underline the point that the GB were not being asked whether the college should proceed with the deal, but whether they would support a course of action that had to move quickly and in which it appeared negotiations were already well advanced. The ‘students being held in abeyance’ point underlined these governors’ limited room for manoeuvre as they confront a situation in which there has already been extensive progress on the part of senior leaders and a small sub-set of governors. We did see examples of this kind of ‘holding to account’ in our data, and we term it inward-facing accountability. However, contrary to its prominence in the prescriptions, it was relatively rare in GB meetings.

The GB members in our second vignette appeared to be ‘between a rock and a hard place’: they were being invited to discuss and support decisions already made by the CEO and senior leaders, who will have consulted the GB Chair already. With matters so far advanced, serious challenge could have been interpreted by others in the meeting as a reluctance to be supportive of the college. This brings us to the third dimension of accountability which our data show takes up a great deal of the attention of GBs. This form can be found in some of the prescriptions but in a way that conflates it with the ‘inward-facing’ variety. It concerns how GBs are themselves positioned as ‘of the college’, and must contribute to processes required by funders, government departments and agencies, quality assessment and assurance regimes, organisations with various accreditation interests and awarding bodies, amongst others. GBs are thus highly accountable, responding to external ‘performative’ demands, and this directs much of their time and energy, casting a powerful influence on such things as which committees are set up, how often they meet, and how such matters as learning, achievement and progression are conceived, operationalised, monitored or measured. As key outward-facing representatives of the institution, GBs respond to these external demands and agendas with and through senior leaders. We term such processes outward-facing accountability. In a highly competitive environment, corresponding to the shifts to ‘governance’ described earlier, such processes position governors as representing and defending the college and its reputation.

These second and third dimensions (inward- and outward-facing accountability) require rather different arrangements and relationships to be realised and effective. The successful achievement of outward-facing accountability requires strong governor identification with the college and perhaps with the senior executive team: loyal governorship is that which positively and generously supports the institution to succeed in an environment in which it is constantly measured and compared to other providers. It is also likely to demand increasingly specialised skills and expertise amongst governors to match increasingly specialised demands (Wilkins, 2017). By contrast, the achievement of inward-facing accountability begins from a different conceptual starting-point which sees the GB and the senior executive as separable entities. This may require similar levels of energy and commitment to that which faces outward, yet inward-facing accountability may also require a distinctive sense of criticality and independence. Although governors are heavily reliant upon senior executives for the information available to them (noted as ‘ironic’ by some, e.g. Farrell and Law, 1999; Wilkins, 2016), they must have the confidence, experience, and inclination to question and challenge plans, decisions, and performance. They must be prepared, should it be necessary, to engage in robust confrontation. As indicated in some of the ‘diagnostic’ accounts of the sort mentioned earlier, it is precisely this second form of accountability that has been found wanting in some UK college GBs, including those where the governance arrangements led to ‘failure’.

We suggest that these distinctions are pivotal in understanding the practices of college governing. A strong division of labour – across a committee structures, between individual governors, and in both the allocation of tasks and in specialist skills driving governor appointments – is an efficient (arguably, necessary) GB response to frequent, high-volume external demands. By contrast, where governor activity and responsibilities are highly fragmented, inward-facing accountability will be undermined and possibly compromised because it must rely on shared understanding, collective responsibility and a detailed and well-articulated sense of strategy. Thus, there may well be an accountability paradox or an ‘inverse law’ of sorts here, such that the better attuned the governance arrangements are for meeting external performative demands, the less well equipped those arrangements are for engagement in rigorous internal scrutiny of the senior executive.