At the first full governors’ meeting of the year, we must elect a chair. We also chose a vice-chair and a link governor who looks after our training needs in partnership with other local schools. We review the membership of all our active committees, finance, health and safety, staffing and pay. Standing committees we hope never to use nevertheless have to be in place - staff grievance and disciplinary, exclusions, parental complaints. We designate a couple of governors to be on call for appointments panels and draw up a rota for pairs of governors to attend parents’ evenings. We remind the working parties on sex and religious education that they need to re-convene as part of our rolling programme of policy reviews and our parish council rep reports on his continuing heroic struggle against dog-fouling on the school grounds. We do not have a curriculum committee, preferring to delegate subject areas to individual governors. The literacy governor is statutory now of course, shortly to be followed by a numeracy governor. One of us also takes responsibility for special needs.

I keep thinking of the man I met last year at a chairs’ briefing who said he sometimes only has four governors at a meeting. I wonder how he manages?