MATification: Plurality, turbulence and effective school governance in England

Abstract

School governance in England has seen considerable change over the last decade as ongoing structural reform has produced a range of models affecting composition and roles of individual schools and the middle tier. Governance is important as school governing bodies have considerable powers and responsibilities for young peoples’ education (Young, 2017). There are some 300, 000 governors in England, the largest group of volunteers in England, whose work is prominently hidden from view but make a significant contribution not only to their schools, but also the educational system as a whole (James et al., 2010). The changes in particular have seen a move from a stakeholder to a skills-based model (Connolly et al., 2017), and are aligned with changes in school and middle tier structures (Bubb et al., 2019). We wish to argue that this turbulence, creating a series of crises which although centrally formed, are seemingly organic replicating differences across systems prohibits, or at least restricts, effective school governance. We argue this through an exploration of two vignette case studies of single Academy Trusts (SATS) and Multiple Academy Trusts (MATs), exploring changes in each and the vacillations in governance discourse.