Governing by Gender? School Governing Bodies After the Education Reform Act

Abstract

In this paper I am going to explore some of the ways in which gender relations influence the activities of school governing bodies. Many books and articles have been written about school governing bodies, but none of those writings emanating from Britain have taken the gender issues seriously. This is despite the fact that a recent National Foundation for Education Research (NFER) study of the 1988 recomposition of governing bodies pointed to an under-representation of women (Jefferies and Streatfield, 1989) and despite the Equal Opportunities Commission’s findings that in 1988 a number of successful sex discrimination cases taken to industrial tribunals concerned unlawful discrimination by school governors (EOC, 1989). As I will show in this paper, gender issues do quite frequently surface in the activities of school governing bodies and it is hard to make sense of what is going on in those bodies, particulary in relation to their power dynamics, without using an analysis at least partially based on gender and power.