The fourth of five posts this week about who assures the quality of leadership in schools, and what happens when nobody does.
I’m in London, and yesterday was visiting Tower Bridge, where, inside, on one of the walls, there’s a panel that stopped me.
London has relied on Tower Bridge to keep its traffic moving since 1894, when it first opened to the public. It is as important to London today as it was then. If Tower Bridge failed to operate, traffic in London would come to a standstill.
I read it twice, because it isn’t how anyone talks about Tower Bridge. We talk about it as a photograph. It’s the thing on the postcards, the Victorian towers, the bit of London that looks like London. Ornamental. Ceremonial. A backdrop.
And that panel is quietly pointing out that it’s nothing of the sort. It’s working infrastructure. Take it out and the city stops.
What the bridge actually does
Here’s the thing about Tower Bridge that I hadn’t properly thought about until I was standing on it.
Its entire job is to let two things pass that would otherwise block each other.
Road traffic needs to cross the river. River traffic needs to get up the Thames. Those two demands are in direct competition, and every other solution would have meant one of them losing. A fixed bridge stops the ships. No bridge at all stops the road.
So they built something that does both. It holds the road up, and it opens to let the ships through, and it has been doing that for a hundred and thirty years.
That’s not decoration. That’s a piece of engineering solving a genuine conflict, every day, so that nobody has to notice there was ever a conflict.
Which brings me to governance
Governing bodies look ceremonial from outside.
There’s a formality to it. Committees, minutes, agendas, terms of reference, people gathering in a school classroom on a Tuesday evening. If you didn’t know what it was for, you’d assume it was procedural. Something the school does because the rules say so.
It is, in fact, the structure everything else rests on.
Governors appoint the headteacher. They’re responsible for the finances. They hold the strategy. They are the body a head is accountable to. And in the moments that matter most to a school, a serious complaint, a financial problem, a leadership crisis, the governing body is the mechanism that either works or doesn’t.
And like the bridge, the job involves holding two things at once that pull in opposite directions.
Governors have to hold a headteacher to account. Governors also have to enable that headteacher to lead. Push too hard on the first and you get a head who manages upwards instead of leading their school. Push too hard on the second and you get no scrutiny at all. Neither of those is the job.
The job is both. Simultaneously. In the same room, on the same evening, often about the same decision. That’s a genuinely difficult thing to do well, and when it’s done well, nobody notices there was ever a tension.
The maintenance question
Here’s what I keep coming back to.
Because everybody understands that Tower Bridge is load-bearing, it gets maintained. Constantly. There are engineers, inspection regimes, planned investment, a permanent team who understand the machinery. Nobody looks at it and says it’s managed fine since 1894, leave it alone.
Governance is load-bearing in exactly the same way, and it’s largely left to maintain itself.
I want to be clear that this isn’t a criticism of governors. I’ve worked with governing bodies who are exceptional, and a good chair is worth more to a headteacher than almost anything else in the job. I’ve had questions from governors that made me think properly about something I’d been coasting on, and that’s a service, not an inconvenience.
Rather, it’s an observation of how little we invest in the structure itself. We ask volunteers to hold the most consequential leadership responsibility in a school, in their evenings, alongside full-time jobs, and then the development available to them is variable, the induction is often light, and the training is offered rather than assured.
We wouldn’t maintain a bridge that way. We’d never say the engineering matters enormously and then leave it to whoever happened to volunteer.
What good would look like
Not much, honestly, and none of it exotic.
Treat governance as a leadership function rather than an oversight function, because that changes what development looks like. A committee that receives reports needs briefing. A leadership body needs developing.
Make the support systematic rather than optional. If it’s optional it gets taken up by the people who need it least.
And include it whenever anyone looks at how well a school is led. This is the part that has struck me most while writing this week’s posts. Governance sits outside almost every assessment of school leadership, despite being the place where the ultimate leadership accountability actually sits. That’s a strange thing to leave out.
When we came to build the framework I’ve been alluding to this week, governance went in as one of its strands for exactly that reason. Not to catch anybody out. Because a picture of a school’s leadership that stops short of the governing body isn’t a picture of the school’s leadership.
The panel on the wall
What I liked about that panel is how matter-of-fact it was. No drama, no warning, no appeal. Just a plain statement of what the thing does and what would happen without it.
Governance could use a panel like that. Something on the wall of every school hall where a governing body meets, pointing out that this apparently procedural gathering is holding up the road.
It is as important today as it ever was. And it works best when nobody has to notice it’s working.
Tomorrow, the last of these: what all of this actually costs, and who ends up paying.
Manx Maxim is the blog of Max Kelly – Executive Headteacher, Isle of Man. Built for leadership.