The role of our School Governors
We are a team of volunteers who want to make sure the school provides every pupil with wonderful learning experience, opportunity to develop and have the best start in life. We want the school to continue to improve and grow. We do this by setting a clear vision, ethos and strategic direction for Sound school. We are the Governing board.
We take Mrs Minshall-Thomas’s advice on educational matters because this is her expertise, and constantly work together with her towards improving the School and making sure all the pupils at Sound are making as much progress as they possibly can and achieve the best they can. We discuss with Mrs Minshall-Thomas if the lessons are exciting enough. We ask ourselves: how many children are finding lessons a bit difficult or too easy? What can the school do to change this?
Other questions we ask: Is the schools money being well spent, be it to buy materials or pay for extra staff to help smaller groups progress? Do we have enough learning space? Are all our children safe and healthy at school so they can learn really well? Are we helping the teaching staff to develop their own careers so they are enthusiastic about teaching our children? Have we got the right staffing structure to help our pupils achieve? This sounds like a lot of discussion and decision-making, but it’s not always easy because the money Sound receives each year is decreasing and there’s not enough money to tackle everything.
You may think decision-making doesn’t sound like doing very much. Well, here are visible activities you may see us doing in School: Visiting the school to review the policies we have agreed to, are they working? is there anything we can do to improve? You may see us reviewing Mrs Minshall-Thomas’s progress ; writing reports from classroom visits and school trips; meeting with teachers or pupils; studying pupil progress data; checking health & safety around the school; speaking to parents and speaking to Ofsted about current trends in the School during an inspection. We all meet together each term and each committee meets once or twice a term. Governors don’t get paid for their work: they are volunteers. It would also be quite difficult to be an effective governor unless you had some flexi-time at work because it’s important to get into School regularly.