Dear Ms Morgan
I have three units (sorry, children) currently at primary school. Actually, they're at a primary academy, since our Local Authority withdrew its education function five years ago and forced a wholesale conversion throughout the borough.
It's a good one, I'll give you that. We have a dedicated and visionary head, who's doing Good Things from a business perspective while, crucially, remembering that her stock in trade is the lives and hopes of several hundred small people. Of course she's bound by the double-entry book keeping of finance and performance figures, but she manages to give the impression that remembering the names of the children in her care and turning up to sing in Assembly matter just as much.
I was a parent governor for a while, approached on the grounds of several qualifications, the most important of which was being a person in a cagoule at the coal-face of the playground and the classroom door. It was hard work: both the meetings and the rightly rigorous training, but it was also an honour to do it and I was disappointed when a potential conflict of interest meant I had to step down.
It sounds like the chances of me doing it again are minimal, since you've announced that mandatory parent governors are to be scrapped in favour of skilled individuals (the two, apparently, being mutually exclusive). Thankfully, though, you've reassured us parents that we won't be silenced: we will still be "consulted" when the school is making decisions, and, after all, we can still "vote with our feet" if we're not happy.
I agree with you that the present system isn't perfect. If the parent governors are voted for, they too often tend to be those who win a popularity contest. If they're co-opted, it's usually because they're the conspicuous, conscientious type who look like they might have a particular skill and the wherewithal to make meetings. Parent governors aren't representative in any other capacity than that of being, crucially, parents. They anchor the governing body to what should always be the primary consideration of any school: the experiences of the children who attend it, not its relative position on a performance table.
As for "consultation", I will give you the benefit of the doubt and accept that you wholeheartedly believe this is a functional and democratic way of engaging the families of children at school. Sadly, experience shows that it is no such thing. On the one hand, most parents are either too busy or too apathetic to give a shit. When we converted to an academy, the consultation process involved a handful of responses. Perhaps it's natural, since people see consultations elsewhere on matters that concern them - from planning applications to cuts to local services - providing little more than a fig leaf before the process continues in line with the decision makers' wishes. Perhaps it's just a sign of increasing individualism. Have you tried getting people involved in a local initiative recently, Ms Morgan?
The notion of voting with our feet as the ultimate veto is entirely of a piece with this notion of choice in education. The thing is, even as a sharp-elbowed, well-informed, middle-class mother with oodles of options, I don't really want choice. Most of us don't. We want our children to go to their local school, with the children who live around them, in the community to which they belong. We want our children to scramble into a little learning and a whole lot of socialisation; to acquire skills and knowledge and ambition that will steer them as they grow older, not forced tall and pale like so many little sticks of rhubarb ready to be judged at an allotment show.
We don't want our children to go to the best school, we want them to do their best at their school. We don't want to sit, each August, in front of a data dashboard of outputs of all the local educational establishments deciding where little Philomena will go in September. These are our children, not the supplier of our electricity or the insurance we buy for our car. We want to commit to schools and see our children grow and flourish where they are, not uproot them to pot them on in some whimsical pursuit of perfection.
And, of course, "voting with our feet" isn't as easy as it sounds. Where I live, there is no secondary school within safe walking distance, which means free transport has to be provided. The council recently decided that this free transport would only be available to the school which is infinitesimally nearer than that to which 99% of children have gone and continue to go since...well, forever. That it's woefully undersubscribed and serially failing is, I am sure, a coincidence, although it does mean that the council's spend on secondary school transport is effectively minimal - demand for that school is met by a daily taxi, while parents spend £500/year to send their child off with their friends on the same fleet of buses that have always run. Precious little choice, however, if you can't find the cash.
Please stop and think. Please listen. Not everyone who is complaining about the direction of education policy in this country is a refusenik who fails to see any benefits in your proposed changes. I think encouraging entrepreneurialism in schools is a good idea. Helping them capitalise on their assets in a sustainable manner makes sense. But education cannot and must never be turned into an entirely free market. This isn't creating a level field. It's allowing a lucky few to build a Noah's Ark and leaving the rest to deal with the flood as best they can.