FE Governance Evaluations need to go beyond the Boardroom

The challenge to FE Boards
The UK Further Education Colleges are being subject to increased governance scrutiny and the Department for Education (DfE) are highlighting that effective governance reviews need to go beyond the Board; it needs to interrogate deeper inside the College.

The DfE want to see the effect of Board culture on the culture and tone of the organisation. This represents a significant shift. No longer is it acceptable, or even possible, to review college governance by simply involving the board- the requirement is to go much deeper and at the same time consider the impact of the prevailing culture on the cascading governance at departmental level.

This shift reflects a broader recognition that governance is linked to organisational resilience and performance, prompting the DfE to advocate for evaluations that include college management in assessments. They want to see Governors, Chairs, governance professionals, and senior leadership team dynamics in action and therefore the expectations on reviewers is equally challenging.

The advantage of early adopters
There is a significant upside though, by adopting new, innovative and robust quantitative and qualitative evaluation processes, colleges not only comply with regulatory demands but also position themselves as leaders in governance practice, ultimately enhancing their effectiveness and contributing to sustainable purpose and strategy.

The challenges and solutions
Governance, though, is inherently very difficult to measure (Darko et al, 2014) and the codification of corporate governance has also led organisations and therefore colleges to slide towards a ‘tick box’ approach, despite best efforts.

The measures that do exist are simply not enough, and in fact, don’t really get at the heart of the question, “how well are both the organisation, and the people within the organisation, ‘being steered’ and how well are they ‘steering’?”.

Most measures of governance focus on compliance related issues. Numerous rating models also seem to focus on the inputs of governance, such as the composition of boards and the separation of the CEO and chairman roles and diversity. All important, but the heart of the issue as described by Argüden (2010), who argues that these measures simply do not pay sufficient attention to the quality of information, decision-making processes, nor do they link the effectiveness of governance to output measures such as the brand image, employee and customer satisfaction indices, or profitability and value creation.

So, this leaves a challenge for us. How we meet the understandable shift by the DfE, whilst at the same time being confident that we're carrying out evaluations with validity and impact. This has been the focus of CoSteer's work and research for over 5-years. Our work with organisations uses both technology and decades of expertise to evaluate the dynamics across whole organisations.

Our proprietary technology - GovQ+, takes responses from participants across the college environment, collates them and then uses AI and machine learning to produce key understanding about the dynamics across these groups and 27-aspects of good governance. GovQ+ is specifically interested in the interrelationships between culture and governance. The outputs from our reports can be used directly to instigate developmental improvement plans and the beauty of technology is that we can then monitor progress against measurable quantitative data.

Governance and board evaluations are changing, they still involve much of what's familiar, observations, interviews and documentation reviews, but there's new innovation in the boardroom. This innovation is music to the DfE's ears, as their expectations can be met - the quality of governance can be understood beyond the boardroom.

If this resonates with you - If your college wants to understand their governance in a deeper more impactful way, please do get in touch.