Reimagining academic staff governors’ role in further education college governance

Abstract

This paper aims to explore Academic Staff Governor (ASG) roles at three further education colleges in England. Uniquely, the research focuses on ASG activities, the understanding of ASG roles, and aspects of the role that can be reimagined, which may be of benefit to practising governors, particularly ASGs such as further education (FE) teacher governors. The study draws upon relevant literature to identify concepts related to governors' roles and activities. An interpretivist stance is used to collect predominantly qualitative data through a combined methods approach, and to engage with ASGs and external governors. During fieldwork, qualitative and quantitative evidence was analysed from semi-structured interviews, questionnaire responses, observations of governance meetings and governance documents. Findings suggest that ASGs' insiderness, their affiliation with other groups and decision-making circumstances may influence their governing activities. Activities rooted in operational settings such as professional-information giving were highly valued by other governors, while there were uncertainties about the benefit of having managerial staff as ASGs. There was evidence indicating uncertainty among the college staff regarding the role of an ASG in the colleges' boards. As a result of the study, to conceptualise an ASG's role in FE colleges, 'The 3 RaPs (Roles as Position/Perceived/Practice) Framework' for an ASG's role has been developed. The research recommends clear and specific role descriptions for ASG posts; action to allow more opportunities for ASGs to act as governors in order to transform the scope of the role. Finally, several recommendations are set out in order to address ASGs' insiderness, to promote ASGs' professional profiles in the FE sector and to improve the methodological approach for use in similar future research.

Academic staff governors’ power and professional status in the governance of further education colleges in England

“…According to the Principal of Y-College, she had not realised the potential ASGs contributed until she became an active participant in the research project while discussing the interim findings. As already, alluded to in the above findings, how ASGs feel and how they see themselves within a given governing board could also determine their professional status, Role-as-Perceived (Sodiq and Abbott 2018) and this aspect of the role is invariably linked to the Role-as-Practised in a circular manner: what one does or is enabled to do through governance protocols, Role-as-Position (Sodiq and Abbott 2018), for instance being barred from certain activities results in a perception of the role and vice-versa. Naturally, even though the role maybe understood homogeneously across colleges, in reality what is observed to be an ASG's role is notably heterogeneous amongst the colleges as illustrated in the table and the differences can be attributable to a variety of professional status factors of the ASGs.…”

“…What the above findings and discussions mean is that despite the ASGs' individual professional status, what constituted a professional governor status was the variety of actual professional activities the ASGs' engaged in using their TLA and subject-specific expertiseencapsulated as Role-as-Practised in the author's earlier work (Sodiq and Abbott 2018). ASGs' capacity as educators to endow insight to other governors in their practice was identified as a particularly valuable resource for governance.…”

“…Earley and Creese (2001) established that TGs do make an invaluable contribution to governance through their educational expertise and by communicating teachers' opinions to governors. In FE governance, ASGs' professional information may range from their awareness of learners' educational needs as well as relatively less expected and valued knowledge such as ASGs' management expertise (Sodiq and Abbott 2018). Furthermore, as already highlighted in the introduction, there is a drive in national policy to ensure post-16 education experience in FE college boards (DfE 2021) and this elevates the professional status of ASGs in FE governance.…”

“…In England, an FE college's governing body typically may consist of both internal governors and external governors; the internal governors may consist of the Principal (the Chief Executive), one or two student governors and up to three staff governors. The staff governors may be composed of teaching staff governors (known as Academic Staff Governors or ASGs) and/or non-teaching staff governors (Business Support Staff Governors) elected by college staff as representatives of staff (Sodiq and Abbott 2018;Sodiq 2012;Hill 2012). External governors may be searched for and appointed because of their specialist expertise and skills in college governance (Schofield, Matthews, and Shaw 2009).…”

“…While research into ASGs in FE governance in England is notably absent and limited to ASGs' role complexity and activities reported by Sodiq and Abbott (2018), similarly, one has to go as far back as three decades for similar research into school teacher governors (TGs). The term 'TGs' in schools is used synonymously with 'ASGs' and TG roles are equivalent role in schools (Linter 2001;Earley and Creese 2000).…”