I'm just going to quote this. I first found it via twitter on the excellent Clerk to Governors blog, where there is a link to the original Times Educational Supplement article by former Schools Minister Lord Jim Knight from which it is taken.
I went to school and began teaching in a world in which the vast majority of schools were maintained by the local education authority. The Director of Education was king (usually, rather than queen) of the local council castle. Consider now the educational world that is, according to Jim Knight, coming into being, as represented by his ideas here, Do-gooder governors must now do better:
"But as the government drives more school autonomy, with every school an academy, governors are being loaded with more responsibility. Simultaneously, local authorities' role in education is diminishing. The clear consequence of the move to free market schooling is an urgent need to improve school governance.
The move towards autonomy from local authorities is now unstoppable [my italics]. The trend is for schools to form themselves into clusters so that they can achieve economies of scale for procurement and specialist staffing. This too should be embraced, and every school should be required to join clusters of 10 to 20 schools, ideally with primary, secondary and special schools within them. This allows for more all-through and more inclusive education to develop.
These clusters should then become hard federations with a single governing body. This means that, rather than trying to have 25,000 governing bodies, we would be aiming at having just 1,500-2,500; each with high levels of skills for supporting and challenging school leaders.
No. I cannot resist a comment, just as the modern State cannot resist the temptation to compulsion. Consider the whole of this extract and then consider the force of the single word "required" in the middle of the penultimate sentence of the second paragraph.
