Diversity and inclusion

Governors for Schools is committed to promoting and prioritising diversity and inclusion. We encourage school governing boards to recognise the benefits of diversity and appoint governors from a variety of backgrounds.

Last year, 31% of the volunteers we placed were from ethnic minorities, 55% were female, and 38% were under 35. However, we understand that more needs to be done to increase representation on governing boards and we are 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 want to ensure that boards retain volunteers. To support this, we have created resources to help boards throughout the process of recruiting new governors, and the strategies they can put into place to ensure all governors feel included to improve retention.

Driving change externally starts from within, and 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 – we’ll need to keep looking at what we do and scrutinising our practise.

To help us recruit and retain diverse employees, we have reviewed our internal processes and implemented the following changes:

• Involving all employees in reviewing our recruitment practices to ensure we are reaching a diverse pool of applicants.
• Running unconscious bias training for all members of staff, and additional DEI training for senior team members.
• Giving all staff the option to take an NVQ in Equality and Diversity.

As Chief Executive of Governors for Schools, I commit to ACEVO’s eight principles to address the diversity deficit in charity leadership. I look forward to continuing my learning about racial bias and how this impacts the decisions we make, and working to make the changes we need to see.