The National Governance Association refreshed its guidance on electing a chair and vice chair this week, on 22 June. The timing is no accident. The summer term is winding down, and when boards come back in September one of the very first things most of them have to do is choose the people who will lead them for the year ahead.
It is easy to treat this as a formality. A quick show of hands, a name in the minutes, on with the meeting. But it is a real election, with real rules behind it, and the way you run it says a lot about how seriously your board treats every other vote it is responsible for.
The one election every board runs itself
Schools run more elections than most people stop to count. Parent governor elections. Staff governor elections. Student council votes. Sometimes a contested resolution at a trust members' meeting. Most of these involve an electorate outside the room, which is why they tend to get proper attention.
The chair and vice chair election is different. It happens inside the boardroom, run by the board, for the board. There is no external electorate watching, no parent inbox to answer to. That is exactly why it slips so easily into autopilot, and exactly why it is worth doing well.
What the rules actually ask of you
The headline requirement is simple. A maintained school's governing board must elect a chair and a vice chair. It is not optional, and it is not a role you can quietly appoint behind the scenes.
Every governor is eligible to stand, with three exceptions: the headteacher or principal, anyone who is also employed at the school, and any registered pupil. The board decides the term of office before the vote takes place, so that everyone standing knows exactly what they are putting themselves forward for.
On timing, the convention is the first meeting of the autumn term, though it does not have to be the first item on the agenda. Plenty of boards hold it as the last item, so the outgoing chair can run the meeting they prepared and the newly elected chair can begin with a clean slate. That is a sensible bit of housekeeping, not a rule, but it shows the difference between a board that has thought about the process and one that has not.
A chair election is not a box to tick. It is the board choosing its own leadership, and it deserves to be done with care.
Where it quietly goes wrong
The most common failure here is not fraud or fallout. It is drift. Nobody is formally nominated. The sitting chair is reappointed by default because raising an alternative feels awkward. The vote, if there even is one, happens by a show of hands in a room where everyone can see precisely who is backing whom. And the entry in the minutes says little more than "re-elected".
None of that is unlawful. But it is thin, and thin processes have a habit of being exposed at the worst possible moment. If a decision is ever questioned, "we always just keep the same chair" is not much of an answer. The point of running an election properly is not suspicion. It is being able to show, calmly and clearly, that the board made a real choice.
Run it like the election it is
If only one person stands, the board can appoint them and minute it clearly. That is perfectly proper, and there is no need to invent a contest that does not exist.
If more than one person stands, hold a genuine vote. Where the choice is at all sensitive, and a contested chair election usually is, a secret ballot protects everyone involved. People can vote honestly without worrying about who is sitting opposite them. The clerk or governance professional should run the ballot, confirm the result, and record it properly: who was nominated, how the vote was conducted, and what the outcome was. A few lines in the minutes now can save a great deal of awkwardness later.
A secret ballot is not a sign of mistrust. It is what lets people vote honestly.
Why the small elections matter as much as the big ones
This is where the wider picture comes in. The NGA has spent this year making the case that governance is under more scrutiny than it has ever been, particularly as more schools move into trusts and the system pushes towards consistent standards across the board. Inspectors, trustees and parents increasingly want evidence that governance processes are sound, not just an assurance that they happened. An election nobody can explain after the fact is a weak link in that chain.
The principle does not change with the size of the electorate. Whether you are electing a chair around a table of ten, or running a parent governor ballot across a school of a thousand families, the same three things matter: a nomination process people can see, a vote people can trust, and a record you can stand behind months later if anyone asks. Get that right for the small internal election and the habit is already in place for the bigger ones.
A few minutes well spent
So when your board meets in September, give the chair election the handful of extra minutes it deserves. Decide the term of office in advance. Invite nominations properly rather than waiting for a name to emerge from the silence. If it is contested, hold a secret ballot and let your clerk run it. Write down what happened.
None of this is hard, and none of it takes long. It simply treats the vote as what it is: a proper election that sets the tone for the year. If you would like that same rigour and a clear audit trail for your parent governor elections, staff ballots or student council votes, that is exactly what we built Choice Voting to do. You can see how it works at choicevoting.co.uk.