Remember that sinking feeling of early 2020?

Most of us in the world of school leadership and governance can recall the dawning of a new reality that Covid confronted us with.

I remember with a slight shiver the moment we realised that the old ways of doing things - the regular round of face to face meetings - were no longer possible.

From our back bedrooms, kitchen tables and home offices, we familiarised ourselves with Microsoft Teams and Zoom and, in the ensuing months, kept the business of school governance going, supporting our schools through a stressful time and doing what we were there to do to the very best of our abilities.

And yet, like thousands of governing boards across the country, we handled it. We stripped things back; getting rid of complex structures of sub-committees and merging them into more frequent main board meetings.

Getting on with the job at hand 

There was a greater emphasis on focused agendas and pre-reading, asking our colleagues to deal with the complexities and nuances of policy documents in different ways.

Instead of spending a lot of time discussing changes to these documents in meetings, we asked our fellow governors to input their suggestions into shared online documents beforehand and agree to changes that could then be ratified in the meeting.

Another innovation adopted by many governing boards that helped to reduce the governance burden for everyone involved was to stop asking school leaders to produce documents solely for governance meetings.

Instead, we’ve asked them to share documents that they used in their day-to-day job.

This may have been part of a report or a selection of the full data available, but it saved them time and also gave governors an accurate oversight of the workings of their schools.

These improvised approaches have helped governing boards deal with a jarring new reality and, as we have gone along, we have formalised these new ways of working into what has become a really effective operation that requires governors and school leaders to commit less time to actual meetings.

Let’s stay innovative

For me and many governors, these new working practices offer us a new direction and I don’t want to see a return to the days of lengthy in-person meetings and complex sub-committees, and I don’t think many of my colleagues do either.

We should retain at least some online meetings because it is a more efficient use of our time. Or to quote an old but effective idiom, not throw the baby out with the bathwater as we learn to live with Covid.

Approaches such as flat, zero committee structures and shared document working outside of meetings mean that we can make decisions quicker, gives governors a better understanding of every aspect of the work of a governing board and demand less of the time of our hard-pressed school leaders.

Indeed, a survey carried out in the run-up to National School Governors’ Awareness Day held on 22 February, in which I’ll be speaking, reinforces that sense that the new ways of working should stay.

A hybrid future - if we want it

For example, more than 80 per cent of respondents agreed that virtual meetings had worked well.

Just 18 per cent of those surveyed said the pandemic had had a negative impact on the effectiveness of governance in their school - 63 per cent said that it had been unaffected and 19 per cent said that it had actually improved.

And most of the 212 governors who responded to our survey agreed that the pandemic had freed up time that could be invested in their own training and development; 60 per cent said it had made attending training easier.

A third (32 per cent) of respondents said they had attended three to five hours of training since September 2021, with 22 per cent attending between 6-8 hours.

While we don’t envisage governing bodies and trust boards maintaining a 100 per cent online approach over the coming months there is much to be said for a blended approach, mixing online meetings with some face-to-face full board meetings, and maintaining a flat structure, with no committees.

The experiences of the past two years have changed us all in some way. It would be a mistake now to forget that and try to go back to the old ways of working. We are in a new era that requires a new approach to school governance.

Steve Barker is head of governance services at Strictly Education and a governor with more than 30 years’ experience. He is a speaker at the inaugural National School Governors’ Awareness Day on 22 February 2022, a free to attend online event to be held on 22 February and available to view afterwards