ABSTRACT
You will have realised by now that being a school governor is an occupation which involves many different activities. You may find yourself considering the school curriculum, or involved with the disciplining of children, or even becoming a pupil yourself for a while as you undergo governors’ training sessions. Faced with the multiplicity of tasks which have to be dealt with, some of them apparently irrelevant to your particular situation, it may have occurred to you to ask ‘Why do we have to spend all this time on this activity, when we could be getting on with something else which seems much more important?’ The reason that governors have to spend time dealing with certain tasks is that the role of school governor in a State school is one which is carefully regulated by the Law. This means, for example, that when the Annual Parents’ Meeting is organised, and the attendance is disappointingly low, governors cannot decide that this is a waste of their time and that they will abandon the practice in future, because holding such meetings is a legal requirement, laid down by section 31 of the Education (No. 2) Act 1986.
