For many years now, there has been a strong focus in education on the leadership and management of institutions. Matters of governance have been relatively neglected. Some years ago, I wrote that generalisations were frequently made about the features associated with effective school leadership, with little or no account being taken of the specific and diverse frameworks of policy and governance within which that leadership was exercised.

That narrow approach has proved increasingly unsustainable in the light of the transformative changes that policymakers have imposed on school systems in many countries, perhaps most notably in England. The concept of governance is not just about the steering of individual institutions, but refers to the entire set of arrangements under which a school system is organised and regulated. An important feature of this valuable and insightful book is that, drawing on a wide range of literature, it places school governing in a broad political and social context.

The position of school governing bodies in the English system has long been ambiguous. They have few parallels in other countries and are an expression of a cultural commitment to the idea of a school as a distinct and separate entity rather than as a part of a national system. From the 1970s onwards, this historic legacy was given a more modern, democratic aspect by including on governing bodies representatives of staff, parents, local employers, students and the wider community – the so-called ‘stakeholder’ model.

This model has come under pressure from the increasing devolution of responsibilities to schools and, in particular, the growing policy emphasis upon the idea of the ‘independent state school’. This was heavily promoted by former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair and was based on his experience of, and evident attachment to, the uniquely British model of the fee-charging independent or ‘public’ school, a prestigious institution running itself with minimal regulation and responsible mainly to its own governing body, its survival determined by its success in recruiting the children of wealthy parents. He assumed that these features could readily and successfully be transferred to the very much larger publicly funded sector, with its much wider set of accountabilities.