Help! My Governors Are Too Operational!

A playbook for headteachers navigating the boardroom

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If you are a headteacher and you have ever spent your evenings writing board reports, preparing presentations, and anticipating every question governors might ask, only to sit in the meeting that follows feeling like none of it made any difference, this book is for you.

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Many headteachers know the feeling. Governors who get stuck in the operational detail. Meetings that cover a lot and move nothing forward. Challenge that either doesn’t come at all, or comes from the wrong place for the wrong reasons. The sense, that governance is something to be tolerated rather than something that could actually help.

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And yet, in a climate of increasing complexity, rising accountability, and the kinds of decisions that no single person should have to carry alone, an effective governing board has never mattered more. The question is how to start building one.

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Help! My Governors Are Too Operational! starts from a simple idea: the quality of your governance is shaped less by who your governors are than by what you, as a headteacher, bring to the boardroom. Change that, and you change everything: the conversations, the challenge, and the relationship.

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Drawn entirely from the real experiences of headteachers navigating their own boardrooms, this is a book for headteachers who are ready to stop managing their board and start leading with them. Honest about the difficulty and practical about the way through, it is a guide to building a governance relationship that is worth showing up for — with the board you actually have.