It all began when I visited the local priest to discuss arrangements for my wedding. After a preliminary exchange of baptismal certificates and pleasantries, the priest leant back in his chair, breathed in the damp scent of fading papal encyclicals, looked at his brogues and muttered: “Have you ever thought of becoming a school governor?” Using the ruse of working late and being allergic to organisation, I parried the suggestion. Not hard enough, it seemed, as he came back with a list of all the good things that could come from being involved with a local school and then an even longer list of all the vacancies that had to be filled. With complete dishonesty, I promised to think about it.

This was a wrong move, as from that day on he appeared everywhere I walked. And each time, as I tried to sidle past, I was asked if I had “thought any more about it”, with the clear implication that my civic duty was being severely neglected.

Once married, I decided to return to another much-mocked institution, the Labour party. Feeling less than zealous, I set off to make contact with my local ward, and no sooner had been welcomed by the handful of elderly chainsmokers who constituted the monthly meeting, than another list of schools was produced with another sales pitch on the joys of governing.

When I mumbled something about it being a great responsibility, this reluctance seemed to be taken as evidence of coyness, as the chair of the meeting then suggested I might like to be a governor of not one but two schools, all this on the strength of one meeting and a home phone number.

There were no inquiries as to what I did for a living, whether I had any experience of education, whether I had any suitability for the task or even any outstanding convictions.

From this cursory encounter I was considered ready to play an important part in the educational well-being of hundreds of children.

Once more I made my excuses and left. Apart from a not unreasonable reluctance to take on an unpaid evening job, I was also wary of the stories I had been hearing about governors. Only that day I had been told of a governing body in a local school where phone calls were weaving conspiracies against the headteacher, where factions were developing and where governors without any educational experience were meeting privately to discuss reading schemes and classroom management.

In other schools, governors who had got over the novelty of having power now wanted to make their presence felt, again at the expense of the school staff.

It’s hard to imagine another professional group being overseen in such a direct manner by people recruited in this way. It would be more than surprising if I had walked in off the street to the ward meeting and had been invited to monitor civil engineers building a new bridge or to take financial responsibility for the local police station.

If I had put my name forward to be a governor, there would have been an interview process with the school. But even if they had found me to be of sound mind and previous good character, what tests are there to make sure that a would-be governor isn’t a pain in the backside or the kind of person who takes pleasure in interfering in other people’s working lives?

Schools gain much from governors, but any relationship in which professionals and amateurs have to work together is going to have its tensions. For the system to work, a balance of personalities is needed among governors, with a range of people representing the local community.

But what happens when the public institutions that are meant to reflect the community are themselves unrepresentative? Political parties, churches, trade unions, local business and community groups are often under-attended and ripe to be taken over by anyone willing to attend a couple of meetings. Through these wide-open doors, it seems almost anyone can walk through to a position of great trust, raising the prospect of all kinds of scandals ahead.

And if you’re reading this, Father, yes, I’m still thinking about it, really.

Howard Hughes is not a governor.