The National Governance Association's Annual Governance Survey is open again, and it closes at 5pm on Tuesday 30 June. It is now in its sixteenth year, which makes it the biggest survey of its kind in the country. If you sit on a governing board, or you clerk for one, you have a couple of weeks left to add your fifteen minutes to it.
I would encourage you to do it. The survey is one of the few moments in the year when the people who actually run school governance get to say what the job looks like from the inside, rather than having it described for them. This year the NGA is even looking back to its first survey in 2011 to map how governance has changed over fifteen years, and for the first time it is capturing the voice of governance professionals directly.
What the survey is really asking
The headline questions this year are interesting. The NGA says it is exploring whether schools are ready to deliver on the government's inclusion ambition, whether Ofsted's appetite for change is becoming reality, what is making staff recruitment and retention so hard, and what it means to govern locally inside a multi-academy trust right now. There is also a question I keep coming back to: who are the people shaping governance in 2026?
That last one matters more than it sounds. School governance has a long-standing problem with who is in the room. Boards have tended to skew older and less diverse than the communities they serve, and the gap between a governing board and its parents can be wider than anyone is comfortable admitting. The survey asks boards to reflect on this honestly. The harder part is what you do with the answer.
A survey measures what your board thinks. It does not measure what your board can prove.
Reflection is easy. Evidence is harder.
Here is the gap I see when I talk to schools. Most boards will tell you, with complete sincerity, that they listen to parents and represent their community. They mean it. But when you ask them to show you how, the answer is often a parent governor election that nobody really contested, a turnout figure nobody recorded, and a consultation that happened in a meeting room with the same dozen faces who always turn up.
The intention is good. The evidence is thin. And evidence is exactly what governance is moving towards. Ofsted's revised approach, the inclusion agenda, the expectations around stakeholder voice: all of it asks the same underlying question, which is not "do you listen?" but "can you show that you listen?"
A governing board that wants to answer the survey's representation question honestly needs more than a feeling. It needs to be able to point at something. How many parents stood for the last governor vacancy? How many voted? Could a parent who works shifts, or who does not speak English as a first language, actually take part? When did you last ask the wider parent body anything, and can you produce the result?
Three questions worth asking before you fill it in
If you are going to spend fifteen minutes reflecting on your board this month, it is worth spending a few more minutes on the practical side of representation. I would ask three things.
First, when you last filled a parent governor vacancy, was it an election or an appointment by default? A single nomination for a single seat is not a failure of interest. It is usually a failure of reach. If the only parents who knew the vacancy existed were the ones who read the newsletter to the bottom, you have not really asked the community, you have asked the most engaged slice of it.
Second, can the people you want to hear from actually take part? Paper ballots sent home in a child's bag, returned by a Friday deadline, quietly exclude a large group of parents. Online voting that works on a phone, in any language the household needs, at any hour, reaches people the bag-in-the-rucksack method never will. Accessibility is not a nice extra here. It is the difference between a board that represents its community and one that represents the parents who happened to be available.
Third, if an inspector or a trustee asked you to evidence your last election or consultation, what could you hand over? An audit trail of nominations, votes cast, and a clean result is a very different thing from "we think it went well." One of those answers stands up to scrutiny. The other does not.
The boards that come out of this survey well will not be the ones with the best intentions. They will be the ones who can show their working.
Fill in the survey, then close the gap
So please do complete the NGA survey before 30 June. The sector is better off when the people doing the work are the ones describing it, and the data genuinely shapes the support governance gets in the year ahead.
But treat it as a prompt, not just a chore. If filling it in makes you realise that your board talks about representation more confidently than it can demonstrate it, that is a useful thing to learn in June rather than during an inspection. A proper parent governor election, run so that every parent can take part and every vote is recorded, is not a heavy lift. It is the most basic piece of evidence a board can have that it represents the people it serves.
If you want to see how that looks in practice, including how to run a contested parent governor election that any parent can vote in from a phone and that leaves you with a clean audit trail, that is exactly what we built Choice Voting to do. Have a look at choicevoting.co.uk, or send me a note. I am always happy to talk through how a school can turn good intentions about representation into something it can actually show.