2025 Leadership trends: Why governance should be a top priority in schools.
GOVERNANCE! It may not be something we typically think of in our day-to-day work, but it is always there! Governance ensures that we are ethical in our work, that we understand our responsibilities and that we are held to account for our professional decisions and actions. But whilst these are important and necessary components, governance has a whole lot more to offer our schools!
Governance systems within education are typically siloed with mechanisms of governance having often been ‘the way things have been done’ for a long time. It may be an individual with a particular skillset who has developed systems to ensure a school or trusts compliance or it may be a legacy process that has evolved relying on outdated practices or informal arrangements. While these approaches may work in the short term, they often lack cohesion, scalability, and the ability to adapt to new challenges such as regulatory changes, technological advancements, or growing organisational complexity.
Key questions we need to be asking:
How well is that information shared and communicated across an organisation?
How does everyone know what they should be doing, when they should be doing it and where the gaps and best practice lies?
How effectively does our governance system align with the strategic goals and mission of our school or trust?
How are we ensuring sustainability and succession through our governance practices?
In this blog we explore the core principles of good governance; a governance system solution and why governance should be a top priority for schools and trusts this year.
Why focus on Governance?
Great governance adds significant value to an organisation; not only is it ethical and ensures compliance; it complements and contributes to strategy, significantly reduces workload by automating processes and thus allows people to focus on working with people. Good governance drives best outcomes for all stakeholders.
Research has shown that the perception of good governance among employees can lead to increased job satisfaction and higher retention rates (Hijazi, 2020) with data from Gallup highlighting the role of good governance in fostering a supportive work environment to improve retention; and this only scratches the surface of the multitude of financial gains possible through robust governance.
So how can education organisations take their governance practice forward?
Governance is an essential component of an effective organisation; but it is equally essential that there is an effective governance system in place to monitor; update; to co-ordinate the analysis of live data coming in, make it digestible and available to the individuals who can harness it into operations and strategy.
Core components of governance
At its most basic level, governance systems include mechanisms for:
Transparency: decisions and information (as appropriate) should be visible to build trust with stakeholders
Accountability: everyone within an organisation should be held accountable for their decisions and their actions
Role clarity: all stakeholders should understand their roles and responsibilities within specific projects and the organisation more widely
Risk and compliance: there should be a robust system for identifying, assessing and mitigating risks with alert and monitoring systems in place
We argue that an education governance system should also provide the following:
Application of the organisation’s core values: a good governance system should stem from the organisation’s core values to promote a practice and culture that lives those values
Strategic insights: a great governance system should be able to collate and provide relevant data analysis of the information to inform decision-making relevant to the long-term strategy it should also support alignment with the organisation’s mission, vision and values
Alignment across key areas: processes and projects should be able to talk to each other – there is so much cross-over between school areas whether this be across department working practices, innovation ideas or implementing policy, a system should be able to co-ordinate this as relevant.
Organisational effectiveness: governance should prevent fragmentation, where operations and compliance can occur in silos, a great governance system should ensure integration across connected areas and provide scope for an organisation to scale.
Frameworks: good governance systems should provide clear frameworks for supporting decision making and compliance processes for alignment with strategy and ethical practices.
Stakeholder voice: stakeholder voice should be actively sought and incorporated into governance – providing diverse perspectives this can support leaders and project leaders to make better informed decisions.
Tracking and monitoring: a system should track and monitor organisational activities, processes and projects automatically to indicate progress and prompt action should potential issues be flagged.
Responses to needs: the governance system should cater to the needs of the stakeholders (both those using and complying with the system; but also those affected by the organisation) and the organisation; it should be flexible and adaptable to operate in a format that the organisation needs.
Reporting: information viewing as well as all summaries and reports should be concise and accessible. This means that the people who are implementing practice and change ‘on the ground’ can make the best use of the information available.
Opportunity identification: its not about identifying and mitigating risk but taking this further to consider, what are the gaps and what might be the opportunities?
But with the ever-changing demands for schools to keep up with trends, provide a top quality education and do so with fewer resources on an ever decreasing budget; the above can feel like a big ask and updating governance operations can become less of a priority, despite, being a key component to addressing these exact issues.
Why its worth investing in a great governance system
A good governance system is robust in ensuring that an organisation has transparency, the individuals, teams and systems that operate within it are compliant and that all are held to account for their responsibilities but also that an organisation is efficient, spending its budget in the best possible and effective way. A great governance system is integrated; allowing the different components of projects and stakeholder voice to speak to each other to better predict gaps, shortfall and areas of best practice that drive strategy implementation.
A great governance system supports stakeholders at all levels from gathering and incorporating student and parent voice to inform policy implementation, identifying gaps in structures or accountability, facilitating project sequences of reviewing strategy. Streamlining and automating these processes saves time, energy and money. This leaves staff to do what they do best – work with people to provide the best education possible.
Whilst it is no secret that robust governance systems are commonplace within the business world; they are less common in education. There is a gap, and therefore an opportunity for the education sector to reap the many operational benefits from corporate governance principles, apply them to their organisations whilst preserving the people centred essence of education.
What are the solutions?
As we have written in our previous blogs, education is a ‘wicked problem’ meaning that it is multi-dimensional, has multiple causes, multiple symptoms and (no surprises…) multiple solutions.
The solution we offer is a governance platform that has roots in the best practice in business but has been tailored for education. This solution provides an adaptable digital system which takes different components of school governance, for example, Ofsted compliance and runs it through an expert developed model; – What are the areas of compliance for Ofsted? What are the key pieces of evidence that are needed? What data should be collected and when? What do we have up to date and what is missing? Who is responsible for this area? What are the actions?
This allows leaders to move beyond administration; making decisions on all the collated evidence, have clear rationale for why those decisions have been made and then have tracking and target outcomes for any such decisions which are monitored, recorded and evaluated in a comprehensive system.
We are by no means suggesting that schools need a complete overhaul of their governance processes all at once as undoubtedly there is good practice already in place. What we are suggesting however, is that education leaders should be considering what operational areas would benefit from a centralised digital system and how this can be made accessible to staff so that the distribution of responsibility is redirected to the most appropriate team or individual. This then creates the space and capacity for staff to further embrace their role and responsibilities and take ownership of driving innovation, improving student outcomes, and contributing to the overall success and culture of the school.
Governance is not just about compliance or ticking boxes - it’s about empowering schools to think strategically, operate efficiently, and make a lasting impact on their students and communities. With robust and innovative governance, schools can confidently tackle the challenges of today while building a brighter, more sustainable future.
Our solution is Glass House Governance by TransformED.
Let’s bring education’s infrastructure into the future.
If you are interested in exploring cutting edge governance and development opportunities, we would be delighted to discuss options further. Please book an introductory call or contact us at info@glasshouselab.com.
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References:
Kemp, A. (2024). Employee wellbeing hinges on management, not work mode. Gallup. Online. Accessed: 20 January 2025. Available from: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/648500/employee-wellbeing-hinges-management-not-work-mode.aspx
Hijazi, H. A. (2021).The Impact of Applying Good Governance Principles on Job Satisfaction among Public Sector Employees in Jordan. Open Journal of Business and Management. Online. Accessed: 20 January 2025. Available from: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=104679