At Governors for Schools we’re committed to promoting and prioritising diversity, equality, equity, and inclusion through our work and culture. We encourage school governing boards to recognise the benefits of diversity and appoint school governors from a variety of backgrounds.
Last year, 31% of the volunteers we placed were from an ethnic minority group, 53% were female, and 68% were under 45. However, we understand that more needs to be done to increase representation on governing boards. We’re working to grow the networks we engage with to further this aim.
Getting people from diverse backgrounds onto boards is an important step, but we also want to ensure boards retain volunteers. To support this, we create resources to help boards throughout the process of recruitment. This also helps boards to implement policies that ensure all school governors feel included.
Diversity means including people of different ethnicities, genders, social backgrounds and abilities on governing boards. Having diversity of lived experience creates diversity of thought, allowing school governors to engage in meaningful conversation about the needs of all pupils and staff. Governing boards should reflect and represent their local communities, so everyone gets their voice heard.
At Governors for Schools, equality and equity are key guiding principles. While equality refers to offering people the same opportunities, equity acknowledges people with different lived experiences need different things to access those opportunities. We aim to equip volunteers with this understanding, so they can make an impact on the schools they serve.
Our Inclusive Governance campaign hosts a range of engaging resources exploring how people from different backgrounds can get involved with governance and make a difference in education. A range of voices on governing boards provides robust challenge and ensures a school’s community is represented.
We know that the charity sector as a whole is not as diverse as it needs to be. As a result, we regularly review our internal processes to change this. Since our formation, our recruitment processes have been restructured to minimise bias and be more inclusive. We also continue to review our internal processes to ensure an inclusive company culture. Here are a few of the steps we’ve taken:
Throughout our hiring process and internal operations, we don’t discriminate based on the grounds of age, sex, race, disability, pregnancy, marital status, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, and/or religious background.
Of course, there is still work to be done; as an organisation, we have reviewed what we need to do to benefit from the experiences and perspectives a more ethnically diverse workforce will bring. This is an ongoing process that we will continue to evolve and scrutinise.
It is our continued goal to make Governors for Schools an accessible work place, where people with different lived experiences can collaborate and excel. We believe that having diversity of thought and experience is the key to increasing our impact as a charity.
If you’re keen to join the team and make a difference, check our job vacancies page.
As part of our goal to diversify the governance landscape, we've created our 'Inclusive Governance' campaign to inspire a wider range of people into volunteer roles.