ABSTRACT
The first generation of school governors constituted in maintained schools in England and Wales under the terms of the 1986 Education (No. 2) Act completed its first four-year period of office in 1992. Among these three hundred thousand school governors were about seventy-five thousand parent governors. Thus those four years saw the entry on the educational stage of a new force of people in a renewed institution of school governorship. Both private and maintained schools have always had a local overseeing body of some kind. In the public sector primary school ‘managers’ and secondary school ‘governors’ were largely decorative bystanders to the functioning of the system until the 1980 Education Act (which required that every school should have its own individual governing body to include elected parents and teachers), the 1986 Education (No. 2) Act (which increased the representation of parents and extended governors’ powers over the curriculum and conduct of the school), and the 1988 Education Reform Act (which gready increased the responsibilities of governors in the local management of schools). Traditional ceremonial governorship with its vague and impotent spectatorship to the work of local education authorities (LEAs) and the teaching profession is now well and truly superseded.
