E-Governors: web-enabled support for knowledge management in school governance
Mike Fuller, Canterbury Business School, University of Kent, <m.f.fuller@ukc.ac.uk>
Ursula Fuller, Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, <u.d.fuller@ukc.ac.uk>
Roger Cooley,
Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, <r.e.cooley@ukc.ac.uk>
ABSTRACT: School governors in England are volunteers asked to provide a strategic steer to their school, focussing on school improvement, monitoring the school’s achievements and representing its local community. These roles imply a wide range of information needs, support and advice. This paper uses ideas of knowledge management to assess both present offline and ICT based support for governors, and to develop ideas for enhancing web enabled support for school governors.
KEY WORDS: school governors; knowledge management; e-government
In Section 2, school governors are identified as volunteers who undertake substantial tasks. At a time of rapid educational change, they have major information needs, including some unusual aspects. Knowledge management, as outlined in Section 3, provides tools for identifying, analysing and meeting these needs. In Section 4 current provision is reviewed, suggestions for future development are made in Section 5, and conclusions briefly drawn in Section 6.
This paper focuses on the situation in England, but information needs of school governors are broadly similar in other parts of the United Kingdom. Volunteer activity, particularly by parents, is also important in the governance of schools elsewhere (SSBA, 2000).
The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) has an e-business strategy (DfES 2001) prepared in response to the United Kingdom e-government initiative (Cabinet Office 2000). School governors and their needs are mentioned twice in the DfES document, along with other groups that the department wishes to reach. However, by the time of writing, the DfES had created an extensive governors’ website (see Section 4.2.1).
School governors are unpaid volunteers who nevertheless have substantial formal powers when working together as the governing body of a school. There are over 300,000 governors in England (NGC 2001) representing parents, school staff, Local Education Authorities (LEAs) and other community groups, including religious organizations in some cases. Governors play a major role in overseeing a large element of delegated public expenditure in school budgets, currently around £20 billion per year. Similar governing body arrangements exist for schools in Wales and Northern Ireland, and volunteers also serve on Scottish school boards, which have less wide ranging financial delegation than governing bodies do elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Responsibility for education is devolved to national / provincial bodies in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, but for England is in the brief of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). Devolution seems likely to mean that school governance will vary rather more widely across the United Kingdom in the future.
Governors are far from being a random sample of the adult population, though the requirement to have parent representatives helps involve younger adults with dependent children. Bradbury (2000) shows that participants in his survey included only 2% aged 18-30, 46% aged 31-45, 41% aged 46-60 and 11% over 60. 52% of his sample were female. 48% had a degree or equivalent. 62% were in full time employment and a further 20% in part time employment. Only 3% specified themselves as in an ethnic minority.
This suggests governors are a relatively privileged group. This view is reinforced by the reported recruitment difficulties in securing governors for inner city schools in deprived areas. The average governor vacancy rate is thought by the DfES to be about 10-15%. Retention of governors is also sometimes seen as a problem, though in fact 50% of Bradbury’s respondents had served for more than three years. (Governors are usually elected or appointed for a four year term, but may be re-elected or re-appointed if still eligible.) Turnover of governors seems not all that different to that of teaching staff, though teachers may well be more likely to move to another school than are governors.
The old catchphrase from the 1944 Education Act described the school system in England as a “national service, locally delivered”. The DfES and its various predecessors determine national policy for schools in England. Local Education Authorities (well over 100 English borough, county and unitary authorities are now LEAs) also have a major responsibility for delivering school based education in their areas. However since the introduction of local management of schools following the 1988 Education Reform Act, schools themselves increasingly allocate funds and implement national initiatives directly, with responsibilities formally placed on governing bodies. For some aspects of educational provision though, such as special educational needs (SEN), LEAs still have a highly significant role, though their powers in relation to admissions policies and school organisation and planning have been shared with other stakeholders.
According to the DfES, governing bodies have a wide range of responsibilities and powers (DfES 2002a). They:
·
help to raise standards of pupil achievement
·
plan the school's future direction
·
select the head teacher
·
make decisions on the school's budget and staffing
·
establish and implement a performance management
policy for appraising all staff
·
make sure the National Curriculum is taught
·
decide how the school can encourage pupils'
spiritual, moral and cultural development
·
make sure the school provides for all its pupils,
including those with special needs
· are accountable for the performance of the school to parents and the wider community.
In addition, governing bodies of foundation and voluntary aided schools employ the school’s staff and have primary responsibility for admissions. In community and voluntary controlled schools the LEA undertakes these tasks. The LEA is also the landlord for community schools, owning the site and buildings. In other schools the landlord is either the governing body or a charitable foundation that usually has overlapping membership with the governing body. Voluntary aided and controlled schools usually have a religious character that is reflected in the composition of the governing body.
In carrying out their wide range of tasks, governing bodies are increasingly being asked to take a more strategic approach – summarised as “Steering not Rowing” (DfES 2002b). Day to day management of schools is seen as the province of headteachers and their professional staff. Governing bodies provide a strategic steer, and are a forum for accountability and monitoring in which governors act as “critical friends” of the school. In playing this role they have professional support and advice from their headteacher and senior management team, and also from external sources, for example in the LEA. An OFSTED (2001, p.37) report states:
'Governors are key people … they give constructive support to
school improvement, have a proper say in how the school is to move forward and
a clear view about the school's priorities.
They are kept well informed about the impact of developments and know
how well the school is performing. They
ask pertinent questions of senior management to check that everything is being
done to ensure that the pupils receive a good education'.
Governing
bodies’ range of responsibilities is such that the public interest requires
that they operate effectively. This has
been the focus of some concern in recent years. Drawing on experience from school inspections, particularly
follow up work with schools previously found to have weaknesses in their
governance, OFSTED (2001, p 4) identify a number of characteristics of the
effective governing body:
·
governors
are clear about the aims of the school, and the values they wish to promote
·
the
governing body and all its committees, have clear terms of reference, and an
inter-related programme of meetings
·
governors
bring a wide range of expertise and experience, and attend meetings regularly
·
the chair of
governors gives a clear lead
·
meetings are
chaired well, and efficiently clerked
·
there is a
clear school plan, understood by all, which focuses on improving the school
·
relationships
between the governors and the staff are open and honest
·
governors’
training is linked to the school’s priorities, and the needs of individual
governors
·
individual
governors are clear about their role
·
the school’s
documentation is systematically reviewed
·
governors have rigorous systems for monitoring and
evaluating the school’s work.
In carrying out these roles
governors typically meet as a full governing body only once (or at most twice)
in a school term, though committees with responsibilities for areas such as the
curriculum, finance, premises and staffing will meet with a similar frequency.
It can be seen from this list
that there are high expectations of volunteer school governors.
In schools where special
measures are needed to improve poor standards, or where serious weaknesses are
identified, it is possible that experienced people may be appointed as additional
governors to strengthen the work of the governing body. This provides an exception to the usual rule
that governors may serve on no more than two governing bodies. In practice most governors are involved with
only one school at any one time - 85% in Bradbury’s (2000) sample.
The varied tasks
of governors raise challenges with implications for their information
needs. Although some needs are similar
to those of people working in a business context, there are special
features. The need to work collectively
with fellow governors is one of these:
· Making the governing body a community of practice that all governors belong to, with a shared culture and values; this raises issues of the management of collective knowledge
· Sustaining culture, values and knowledge across sparse meetings and turnover of members – raising know what and know how issues
· Being clear about individual and collective roles – know how
Other issues are more individual in character:
· Knowing about the school through visits and from discussion and documentation – know what – in this case individual knowledge, though again as part of a shared background to decision making
· Knowing about the legislative framework, national and local education perspectives, training needs, personnel matters - further individual know what issues, and in terms of where to go for advice, know who questions, but again making knowledge available for collective decision making
· Monitoring – access to comparative know what information for similar schools, mainly from DfES, OFSTED and the LEA, and knowing how to use it
· Transferring knowledge from other contexts (governors are valued in part for the wide range of expertise and experience within the group) including on occasions from other schools, especially in the case of additional governors – raising know how needs, and the issue of hard to transfer sticky knowledge
Legislation mostly places responsibilities on governing bodies as a whole, with limited recognition of the role of an individual governor. In practice though governing bodies are composed of individuals, some of whom may make a greater contribution to discussion and decision making than others. To what extent do governors act individually rather than collectively?
One special case is that of the chair of governors. The chair may take action on grounds of urgency, and is likely to be particularly influential in shaping the governors’ agenda, and perhaps decisions. The chair of governors needs different knowledge and access to different networks. This may also be true of other governors who are assigned special monitoring roles - for special educational needs, health and safety, literacy, numeracy, training needs, areas of the curriculum, and so on.
The balance between the more proactive role of the governing body in relation to change and innovation, or its more reactive roles of monitoring and representation will also have an effect. There is evidence (Earley et al 2002) that heads and chairs of governors have markedly different views on the extent to which governing bodies should play a role in the strategic leadership of the school (22% of heads and 57% of chairs of governors think that governing bodies should play a major role). There is a similar contrast in terms of governing bodies’ actual performance in relation to strategic leadership (13% of heads and 29% of chairs seeing their governing body as having a major role in practice).
To what extent then can governors perform these strategic tasks better with appropriate support, including use of information and communications technologies (ICT)?
Knowledge Management is used to describe a range of activities designed to improve the workings of organisations. These activities are concerned to make relevant information, skills and knowledge available in a timely fashion. Knowledge management within commerce and industry has attracted considerable attention during the last decade. Some of the literature focusses on economic factors and competitiveness, (Drucker 1993), (Davenport, De Long et al 1998), (Teece 1998), some on personnel factors (Scarbrough and Carter, 2000), or quality assurance, (Kwang, Pervaiz et al 1999), or external information flows, (Kahru 2001) etc. Practically no facet of business life has escaped attention. Though governing a school is not the same as running a business, it does involve the need for relevant and timely information, skills and knowledge for communication and access to information, and for collective memory and cooperative activity. These needs can, at least in part, be addressed by the provision of help with knowledge management.
The study of knowledge management is concerned with mechanisms for creation, transmission, storage, retrieval and application of knowledge. This is facilitated by the categorization of knowledge using a number of dichotomies. The first of these is the distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge (Lam 2000) also referred to as ‘know what’ and ‘know how’. There is debate about the extent to which these are separate and discrete in practice. Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) consider that it is possible to convert tacit knowledge into an explicit form, whereas for Cook and Brown (1999) they are fundamentally different types of knowledge.
A second dichotomy is that between individual and collective knowledge. Both are essential for any organization and, as with explicit and tacit knowledge, they are fundamentally different and both are necessary. The term collective knowledge refers to shared knowledge that persists independently of any individual within an organization (Walsh 1991) (Nonaka 1994). Brown and Duguid (1998) point out that its generation is heavily social in character and that the hard work of organizing knowledge is a critical aspect of what firms and other organisations do. Because the processes of developing knowledge and the community are interdependent, it is particularly hard to isolate and automate the management of collective knowledge.
The two categorizations of knowledge given above can be combined (Lam 2000), (Cook 1999) and the type of knowledge in each cell named, as shown in Table 1.
|
|
Individual |
Collective |
|
Explicit |
Embrained |
Encoded |
|
Tacit |
Embodied |
Embedded |
Table 1: Categorisation of Types of Knowledge
Lam goes on to relate these types of knowledge to Mintzberg’s four ‘ideal’ forms of organization, as follows
· Professional Bureaucracy which relies on the skills and knowledge of its professional employees, and which predominantly exploits embrained knowledge;
· Operating Adhocracy in which there is little formalisation of behaviour and a tendency to form project teams, and which predominantly exploits embodied knowledge;
· Machine Bureaucracy in which most work is simple and repetitive, and which predominantly exploits encoded knowledge; and
· The J-firm predominantly exploiting embedded knowledge, which derives its capability from knowledge that is embedded in its operating routines and shared culture.
The description of the work of governing bodies in Section 2 above makes it clear that they fit most closely to the J-firm ideal form. However, some monitoring tasks can be seen as routine work, carried on in similar ways in every school, giving governors attributes of the machine bureaucracy. This means that collective knowledge, both explicit (encoded) and tacit (embrained), is of particular importance to governing bodies. The voluntary nature of governing bodies, the infrequency of meetings and relatively rapid turnover of membership conspire to provide conditions in which the maintenance of collective memory is particularly difficult.
At a time of accelerating change, organisations need both to accumulate a knowledge base that incorporates past experience and to ensure that they are learning beyond their core areas; in other words, knowledge creation as well as knowledge transfer is required (Quintas 2002). Individual, explicit knowledge is easy to share, whereas the know how that allows know-what to be converted into new knowledge is much ‘stickier’. This is because it is socially embedded and rooted in practice. Its transfer relies on shared understanding of context and on working together, rather than just the dissemination of written information. The Internet offers the possibility of transferring information over great distances but does not facilitate shared practice. On the other hand, it provides opportunities for lurking on the edges of discussions in a way that gives access to a far wider range of sources than could be achieved through personal contact.
This links to issues of trust: the ‘warrants’ that endorse knowledge and encourage people to rely on it. As volunteers, governors feel particularly vulnerable in deciding whether advice from the DfES, their LEA or independent organisations is impartial or reliable. Knowing who to trust is part of the collective knowledge of the governing body and is typically local and sticky. On the Internet, trust is a particular problem. High traffic, online discussion groups can establish the reputations of ‘gurus’ but this cannot occur where participation is occasional and there is no widely known national forum in which individuals can establish their reputations.
In response to ideas about Knowledge Management, a range of software systems have been developed. Networked computer systems are the common base of most systems. These facilitate communication by email and chat systems, and may be elaborated with bulletin board and news groups. Systems can provide access to stored information by providing browser access to online documents.
Several Knowledge Management tools have been developed to make web usage more convenient and effective. Autonomy (2002), which is the product of a company with the same name, monitors web usage and automatically constructs a taxonomy of concepts, which can be used to construct user profiles to improve the effectiveness of web browsing.
Web access can also be the foundation of systems designed to support cooperative work. IBM’s QuickPlace (2002) is a typical example. It provides a mechanism for users to add pages and attach documents to a web site in a controlled and organised manner, so that many individuals can collaborate even though separated in time and space. QuickPlace provides password protection and a shared calendar. It indexes and maintains contributions to the site, and it notifies users of new contributions by email. It can be used for purely project orientated work or collective decision making. Such products can also help maintain a community of practice by supporting the sharing of experience and knowledge amongst people with common interests.
Relatively simple databases can be used to maintain accessible information about the location of services and individuals who may be able to provide specialist information. Xerox’s askOnce (2002) is a typical example.
A common
feature of the systems discussed above is the ability to share amongst all who
might need it, information known, at least to some people at some time, within
an organisation. Ambitious integrative
systems for this provision may be called Organisational Memory Systems
(Ackerman 1998). These aim to “record
and transmit an organisation’s collective knowledge for:
·
facilitating solution reuse by preserving historical
decisions and their rationale
·
answering questions where it is sometimes hard to
find the right expert
·
reducing knowledge loss through staff turnover
·
increasing organisational knowledge
· reducing the load on experts of constantly asking repeated questions” .
Knowledge Management systems are clearly relevant to school governors.
Governor support has been provided for many years by both governmental and non-governmental agencies. LEAs have a statutory duty to provide training and advice both to governing bodies and to individual governors. This duty is fulfilled via a governor support officer or team who run a programme of short courses for new and for experienced governors, organise termly briefing sessions for Chairs and other key governors, and send out newsletters. Governor support officers are linked as members of National Co-ordinators of Governors Support (NCOGS), which has 9 regional groupings to co-ordinate work more locally, and prevent professional isolation.
Governing bodies may also buy training from other providers, but most governing bodies continue to look primarily to their LEA. However the fact that funding for governor training is generally part of delegated budgets has altered perceptions, and LEAs must now make a positive case to schools that their training offer provides value for money. As well as a general training package, LEAs also offer bespoke development sessions to individual governing bodies, including sessions designed to encourage governing bodies to review their effectiveness in the light of the modern conception of their role.
The
DfES provides offline support mainly via literature and briefing papers to
headteachers and chairs of governors.
This approach relies on these key individuals to circulate documents to
other governors as relevant.
Voluntary
organisations of and for governors provide independent support at local and
national levels.
The
National Association of Governors and Managers (NAGM) publishes Governors’
News five times a year and has a well regarded
and regularly updated series of advice leaflets. It also has a research group that produces longer papers less
regularly. It has a few local groups
that concentrate on running one-day conferences with outside speakers, and
providing local newsletters for members.
NAGM’s membership mostly comprises governing bodies and some individual
governors.
The
National Governors’ Council consists of local associations of governing bodies
based in LEA areas. School governing
bodies elect members to their local associations and the associations elect the
executive of the NGC. Since its
inception NGC has received financial support from DfES, though in future this
will be on the basis of services provided.
NGC produces a Trigger Pack for
new governors (NGC, 2001). Both NGC and
NAGM make representations on behalf of governors to the DfES and other bodies.
In
each LEA the local governors’ association provides a meeting point for
representative governors to discuss common concerns. LEAs use the association in their area, to which they may well
provide some support for administration and in use of LEA facilities, as a
local forum for consultation on governor issues.
Telephone
support is also important to governors.
Building on volunteer based telephone helplines run by NAGM and NGC,
with financial support from the DfES, the current GovernorLine (2002) provides
a professional service staffed by governors.
Free advice is given on a wide range of problems facing governing
bodies. This can be particularly
important if governors feel that on a particular topic advice from the headteacher
or the LEA may not be entirely disinterested, and want a second, independent
opinion. Funding for GovernorLine comes
from the DfES, and it is managed by a committee including representatives of
governor organisations as well as the DfES.
The DfES has an extensive web site supporting governors (DfES 2002c). Many of the sections are well-structured, web-based versions of printed literature, for example Becoming a Governor or Information for Governors. There are also documents in PDF format for downloading, press releases and links to information issued by other providers. A very considerable proportion of the site is devoted to transmitting explicit knowledge to individual governors but there are also some attempts to support the transmission of know-how and collective knowledge. For example the Frequently Asked Questions section contains contributions on a range of topics, including hoary perennials like the Annual General Meeting for Parents and Appointment of Chair and Vice-Chair. The Discussion Forum provides access to a discussion board for registered users. While these are constructive, they come from a very small group of governors - no more than 100 or so – and very few themes attract more than one or two responses. The other resource on the DfES site that can be seen as supporting the collective knowledge of governing bodies is the Good Practice section. This contains contributions from more than a dozen schools, giving governing bodies access to a range of exemplars, which could perhaps be augmented by personal contact. The DfES has established a group of governors to provide feedback on its web site. Members of the group have informally reported themselves satisfied with the responsiveness of those maintaining the site to constructive suggestions for improvement.
As of July 2002, the DfES provided links to 47 LEA sites that it described as being ‘very useful’ for Governors and another 23 described as providing ‘basic information’. In practice, even the very useful sites mostly concentrate on providing generic ‘know-what’ information for individual governors, and few make any attempt to support collective governing body knowledge. An example of a site that does is Sandwell (Sandwell Council 2002), which for example provides a draft summer term agenda for Sandwell schools’ governors’ meetings as well as having a page for its School Governor representatives.
The National Governors Council (NGC) has a modest web site, which contains useful information for individual governors and some good practice material that incorporates questions that could be discussed by a governing body. NGC also runs an email forum, ngc-general, which had about 300 members in July 2002 and which holds sporadic discussions about topics such as Exclusions and (inevitably) the Annual Parents Meeting.
The National Association of Governors and Managers also has a web site (NAGM 2002). This provides details of NAGM activities and publications. Since sales of publications are a major source of income for NAGM, and it does not yet have a capability to sell online, the text of NAGM documents is not generally available on the web site, though extracts from Governors’ News are accessible.
Both NAGM and NGC make substantial use of email facilities for internal management of their organisations, vital for rapid and cost-effective communication when executive members are drawn from across a wide geographical area.
At the local level, there are beginning to be web sites for local Governors associations that are independent from their LEA to a greater or lesser extent. An example is the Essex School Governors Association (ESGA 2002), which contains meeting minutes and links to some useful documents.
There are a number of other self-help resources available to governors on the Internet. These including the UK Governors Webgroup and a web site called ‘Govern Your School’ (Govern Your School 2002). The former requires users to register, and contains discussions with the strong tendency to ramble that is typical of unregulated online groups. Govern Your School is an extensive site, with a comprehensive set of links to good practice exemplars that might be of use to governing bodies collectively as well as to individual governors. An individual maintains this site, and so it is hard for a governor who stumbles on it by accident to evaluate its trustworthiness, though in fact it has high standards. It is also the case that efforts of this kind, dependent on very high levels of goodwill and commitment of time are difficult to sustain over the long term.
The DfES and LEAs have expended very substantial efforts to transmit explicit knowledge to governors. Given the wide-ranging information needs of governors this is clearly important. However the availability of online resources for supporting the creation and maintenance of collective knowledge is much more limited. Where they exist, in the form of online discussion forums, for example, their reach is limited, involving only a small fraction of governors, even as silent auditors of the discussions.
In LEAs the smaller area of responsibility and shorter distances make the use of traditional face to face networking in meetings a more substantial component of their work with as well as for governors than is possible at a national level.
Very little is known about the extent to which governing bodies make use of ICT to carry out their roles. Earley and his colleagues (2002, pp.65-66) found that only 29% of headteachers mentioned ICT of any kind as a “source of ideas and inspiration”; the figure for those on the National Professional Qualification for Headteachers was 46% however, showing the impact of training. The corresponding figure for chairs of governors was 21% - less than for headteachers, but not far behind. However this again focuses on the use of ICT by individuals rather than groups.
The need to improve the dissemination of explicit knowledge will continue to be a major task for information providers such as the DfES and LEAs. More information is needed about governors’ access to ICT. If the experience of headteachers is some guide, explicit training for governors in the use of ICT for their roles would raise awareness of the provision and stimulate actual use.
The use of web-enabled approaches by governing bodies in their collective roles would seem to be a good area for further work, though funding would be required to uncover the present position, and assess the extent to which the potential of the technology can be met. One potential vehicle for developing collaborative and co-operative work amongst governors is likely to be the use of stories as understood in the knowledge management literature as a way of transmitting learning (Quintas 2002)
Issues of access to IT are also important, and it is likely that it is in those areas where governors are most difficult to recruit and retain, their access to IT would be least favourable. This would make the provision of community based access to IT important, and schools themselves would need to play a part in meeting the needs of their governors.
The use of web-enabled and other ICT approaches to the support of school governors is a significant and substantial task. At present provision is largely concerned with dissemination of explicit knowledge. Given the collective nature of the work of governing bodies, it would be appropriate to look for future developments that fostered collaborative work within governing bodies and the wider community of school governors.
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