Businesses should order staff to become governors at their local schools, the Ofsted chief inspector has said.
Sir Michael Wilshaw said more professionalism was needed among school governors, and again suggested that some must be paid for his or her work.
His comments came as he announced every primary and secondary school in England could be handed an annual report card detailing their exam results and attendance rates.
The one-page overview will be made available to the general public so it may be utilized by parents to check schools.
The move came amid concerns by Ofsted that governors need additional info to carry their schools to account.
Wilshaw warned some school governors weren’t as much as scratch and would rather spend time ” the standard of lunches and never enough on maths and English”.
In a speech to the Policy Exchange in central London on Wednesday, he argued there had to be a “professional approach” among governing bodies, particularly within the most challenging schools.
He said: “For sure there’ll always be a spot for the volunteer and people from the community who desire to support their local school. That can always be the case. But where there’s a loss of capacity and where there are few volunteers without the mandatory skills, we have to consider radical solutions.
“I even have said it before and that i will say it again, we should always not rule out payment to governors with the mandatory expertise to challenge and support schools with a protracted legacy of under-performance.”
Wilshaw said he desired to issue a challenge to the private and non-private sectors to encourage their best people to become involved at school governance.
“For instance, all large and medium-sized companies could insist that their senior and middle managers join the governing bodies of local schools. i think Rolls-Royce strongly encourage their managers to do that.”
The new report card – the college data dashboard – will give information on how well a college is performing in test and exam results, in addition to attendance, compared with other similar schools.
Ofsted said it might publish the documents, updated annually, for greater than 20,000 state primary and secondary schools.
Wilshaw said governors have to have access to the proper information to realize and challenge their school, and not using a excuses for those who fail to take action.
“The faculty data dashboard i’m launching today raises the stakes,” he said. “Many governors know their school well already. But for people who don’t, there are actually no excuses. Inspectors may be very critical of governing bodies who, despite the dashboard, still do not know their school well enough.”
The 6,000 schools currently considered below good by Ofsted usually have issues with their leadership, including governors, Wilshaw said.
“Poor governance makes a speciality of the marginal instead of the main issues. In other words, an excessive amount of time spent taking a look at the standard of college lunches and never enough on maths and English.”
Brian Lightman, the overall secretary of the Association of faculty and school Leaders (ASCL), said: “It’s absolutely right that governors and oldsters should hold schools to account, and access to data is part of this.
“However, all data, especially ‘simple’ statistics, comes with a health warning. It’s going to encourage people to invite more questions, to not draw premature conclusions. Reciting statistics about how a college is performing is way different from really understanding its strong points and areas for development.”
The last Labour government set out proposals for a US-style report card in a white paper published in 2009. Under the plans, every school was to be ranked on lots of measures and given a last overall grade. The proposals were scrapped after the last election.
