AS snow fell on the Cumbrian moor, Andrew Morsman slipped a CD-Rom into his personal computer and began refreshing his expertise as a school governor.

Most people would have thought twice about travelling 20 miles to a training course as the weather settled in. It was not a day to be out and about.

The difficulty of training governors in rural areas has always been recognised. A drive across the Cumbrian fells to attend a two-hour course, for instance, can turn into a major expedition.

Now the Department for Education and Skills, with a number of education authorities, has developed a distance learning package.

The package, including a CD-Rom and a series of videos, aims to help governors in remote locations. Cumbria, for example, is the second most sparsely populated county in England.

The disk contains three inter-active quizzes to test your knowledge of procedures and practice relating to governance issues. It gives the right answers, too.

The questions cover powers and duties, visiting a school, and the composition and procedure of governing bodies. The video has clips of relevant situations.

Cumbria local education authority is piloting the disk on 12 governors who have a variety of experience, technological skills and difficulty getting around.

Distance learning obviously helps governors in remote areas. Some argue that it also useful because so many governors lead busy lives and cannot easily make time for an evening course.

Andy Morsman, for instance, is deputy chair at Samuel King’s secondary school on Alston Moor, and sales manager for a multinational company. He finds himself on the road quite a lot.

“If I’m spending the evening in a hotel room,” he says, “I can use my time creatively to build up my knowledge using this system.”

He finds the programme “very clear and simple without being simplistic. The fact that the book is already on the CD-Rom is useful, although some people do prefer a hard copy book to leaf through.”

Morsman is clued up on IT and his community is too. Free on-line access is currently being introduced to every household in Alston Moor, one of England’s highest and remotest communities, as part of a community-building experiment.

But governors who do not have IT facilities can use the CD-Rom through their schools’ systems.

There is also plenty of back-up in the content of the package. Governors can sign up for different levels of personal support from the local education authority, depending on their knowledge of school governance.

They can also join an online forum with others who use the system - overcoming fears that cyber-training will remove the human contact governors find so valuable.

Trudy Ralph, governor development officer, insists that this contact will not disappear. “At the moment we offer a one-day conference for all new governors two or three times a year at venues around the county. Networking is such a valuable way to boost their confidence. You meet people who are also feeling daunted.”

But she also confirms that distance is not the only factor in the new package.

Helping people to juggle their time is important: “People who serve as governors have a strong sense of community and are often doing lots of other voluntary work. They have many things on in the evening.”

Many have day jobs too. Joanne Tomlin, a foundation governor at St Mary’s primary in Kirkby Lonsdale, has served for just six months. She faces both professional and domestic pressures. Ms Tomlin is a single parent, and also had to take a day off work to attend the introductory course. “All the evening courses are on the same night of the week. To go to these I would have had to take more time off and find someone to cover for me,” she said.

“I thought twice about becoming a governor. But I have always been involved in things and I think you should put something back in.”

Other rural LEAs recognise the difficulties, but are some way from the Cumbrian pilot.

A spokeswoman for Lincolnshire governor support said a “fair number” of farmers served on boards, and harvest could often interfere with duties and training. But there were no plans at present to develop CD-Rom distance learning.

In Norfolk there are proposals to allow online booking for training courses. The governors’ support section puts on between 120 and 150 sessions a year on about 25 topics, and believes the new facility will boost the take-up.

Cumbria plans to run its pilot until June, and then decide whether to make the scheme available throughout the county from September.

The harvest, unfortunately, will be just ending by then. But the timing will be perfect for the onset of the winter freeze.