Introduction

As Chapter Three reflected, education is not a top priority for newspaper editors and stories on education are often squeezed out in order to give priority to areas such as health, social care or immigration. In terms of journalistic reporting, as one ex-education editor put it in May 2014: “[You] are more likely to find education reporters that are or have been school governors than have reported on it” – a fact borne out by this particular analysis.

Using the key search terms ‘school governor’ or ‘school governors anywhere in the article’ within the Lexis Nexis news database, and focusing on the category National Newspapers, I was interested to find that there had, indeed, been very few reports on school governors within the period 2008–09, with only 67 reports appearing in print and a mere 16 online. However, from 2010 onwards, this changed quite dramatically in terms of the number of print articles, with 249 appearing in print and 14 online. The period from 2012 to 2013 saw a drop in print-based articles (with only 98), combined with a substantial rise in online articles (121). However, the largest increase in both categories undoubtedly occurred within the final period under scrutiny, with 339 online and a huge rise in print articles that saw numbers rise to 749 (see Table 4.1). Taking each category in turn, this chapter looks to contextualise this reporting while also drawing on a sample from each period to take a more granular approach to investigating the changes in the ways in which school governing was framed during these periods.

2008–09

The reports showed two distinct patterns of governor representation within the period under investigation. The first period from 2008 to the beginning of 2009 predominantly portrays governors as ‘pillars of the community’, often using the role as an add-on to bring a character to life – to reflect their standing or former standing in the community. Many of the articles make reference to an individual being (or having been) a school governor in cases where there has been some sort of transgression – a fall from grace. Such as this example from The Sun (30 August 2008), where a woman whose husband turned out to be a paedophile was reported as remarking: ‘In the police station it was horror.