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John Harrox Primary School John Harrox Primary School

John Harrox Primary School

Governor Message

The Governors of Moulton John Harrox are a diverse group of individuals that come from the local community.  To the role we bring our respective experiences and talents. The board of governors is comprised of individuals bringing their experience from their diverse day jobs. We are an independent elected group of people who freely give our time to try to ensure that Moulton John Harrox School is run smoothly, efficiently and correctly by setting the strategy for the school and acting as a critical friend to the head teacher.  Our governance encompasses many aspects of school life: financial, health and safety, employment and educational standards to name but a few important areas.

All Governors form the Full Governing Body and are expected to attend all Full Governors Committee meetings. These are held 3 times a year at the end of each full term, in order to receive the reports of the sub committees and set the strategy and direction for the school including the yearly objectives for the Governors Action Plan and ratifying the approach and direction of the School Development Plan.  

All Governors are also elected to one of the two sub-committees, either The Standards or The Resources Committee.  The sub-committees sit once every mini term i.e. 6 times a year.  In total there are approximately 12 meetings to attend each academic year.

The focus of The Resources Committee is finance, personnel and pay, health and safety and food standards.

The focus of The Standards Committee is on Educational Standards within the School, which necessitates governors being trained to understand and review school data showing attainment and progress against previous years and national standards. The governors on the Standards committee regularly ask staff for updates on specific curriculum areas and visit the school to carry out monitoring in line with the priorities in the school development plan. We also undertake pupil view discussions with the children to understand issues from their perspective (our favourite part of the role!) and to speak to staff to understand their views. Our observations are fed back to the full governing body for discussion and action.

As the Governing Body's role is a strategic one, individual governors are not empowered to discuss with parents issues regarding individual pupils. All such issues should be raised with either the class teacher or the head teacher. We would encourage early communication of any concerns or worries with the school in this way.

Whilst our role is not to discuss specific issues relating to individual children, governors are keen to engage with parents who are one of the school’s main stakeholders. We need your views and feedback to help set the agenda for any changes required from the parent’s perspective.  The current Governing body have worked hard to increase and maintain communication between the governing body and parents by way of adding a section in the termly School News letter. We have also instituted parents evening surveys over the last 4 years and provided annual feedback on the key findings.  Your response to parents evening survey helps inform themes for the next year’s committee cycle and feeds in to the areas for school development.

In light of our ongoing commitment to improving communication we plan to continue carrying out surveys of parents views and will feed back any governor news in the school newsletters. We would encourage parents to fill in Parent View on the Ofsted website to express your views about the school. https://parentview.ofsted.gov.uk/.  Parents are also welcome to write to the governing body of the school at any stage with suggestions, comments or concerns on governance issues addressed to the clerk via the school office.