Shrinking governing bodies
I noticed in the Guardian earlier on this week that the government is thinking about entering into a consultation period about whether school’s governing bodies should be made smaller. I guess this is partly in response to those areas where finding governors proves to be difficult - not something we tend to suffer from at my school (or in Bath generally I guess). Ignoring that particular issue though, I tend to think that, within reason, smaller and more focussed governing bodies tend to work more effectively than larger ones. We currently run with 16, for a primary school with ~420 pupils which I think works quite well. I certainly wouldn’t want it to be any bigger and I suspect that it would continue to work just as effectively at, say, 12 or so.
My only concern with getting much smaller than that is that it might tend to work against the efforts that schools are expected to make to become more involved in their local communities?