Assessing the work of the Governors for Schools charity

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National education charity Governors for Schools exists to improve educational standards in schools across the UK through effective governance. As well as pairing governors and trustees with schools – working with over 11,000 governors and 8000 schools in the last 5 years – the organisation offers a range of resources and support for both governors and schools.

Governors for Schools’ 3-year strategy to 2020 included "Measure and Report our impact" as the second objective, and to this end, the charity approached Pro Bono Economics with the aim of understanding the outcomes it achieves through its activities, as well as examining KPIs for continued improvement.

We matched volunteers Tom Punton and David Wirth from Ashurst and Beverley Bishop from the Health & Safety Executive with this project, who set about looking into the findings from Governors for Schools’ 2018 survey of the volunteers and schools they have worked with to identify successes and areas for improvement, all with the ultimate aim of improving the charity’s evidence base. The team also sought to estimate the monetary value of the Governors for Schools volunteers’ time, as well as providing advice on the work of the charity and its data collection moving forward.

The report shows that the majority of volunteers (87%) had a positive experience as a governor, and 64% perceived their work to be of high or very high value. Schools themselves were also satisfied, with 89% reporting they were either happy or delighted with the governors provided by Governors for Schools. This is especially important when one considers that 67% of schools stated they had found it either hard or almost impossible to recruit governors.

We would like to thank the volunteers for all their hard work on this report, which can be downloaded by clicking the link below and filling out the short survey.