Talking about school governance is tricky. It encompasses a variety of public and private actors and an array of interrelated processes, exchanges and activities. Visualising school governance is therefore important for 1) Capturing the scale of governance across different schools and differently federated (hard and soft) and non-federated governance arrangements, and 2) Mapping the relations of accountability through which school governance is mediated and enacted through different actors and organizations
I am in the process of writing a book for Routledge entitled Modernising School Governance and plan to include in the book a number of diagrams which might help explain the descriptive portion of the case study material collected and enable the reader to visualize school governance within Co-operative Trusts, Multi-Academy Trusts, Collaborative (‘soft’) and Umbrella (‘hard’) federations, maintained schools and free standing schools, e.g. free schools.
Take a look at the following and let me know your thoughts.
Diagram 1 below is a visualisation of school governance in a typical free standing, state-funded independent school – a free school or converter academy for example. (Click to enlarge)
Diagram 2 is a visualisation of school governance in a Co-operative Trust model. Note that the governance structure is widened beyond the single school to include a cluster arrangement of six schools which encircle a Trustees board made up of an elected chair (a headteacher from one of the partner schools), external partners and governors; a forum consisting of local community members (students, teachers and parents) whose views are fed back the board of trustees for consideration; and a board of cluster chairs which allows chairs from each school governing body to discuss the activity of the trust and issues mainly concerning delegation of funding.
