Fix the governance or fix the governors?

One was a few weeks after I’d appeared in the Bristol Evening Post to discuss student hardship. One of the lay governors took to me one side and said I’d “brought shame on the institution”. You can imagine how that went down.

The other was my last meeting as the SU’s President, when I’d asked a series of questions about the university’s “House Services” operation during the VC’s report – and, it being the last meeting and all, I just refused to be fobbed off and dug in.

I don’t remember his name – but during the break, a well-to-do man in his seventies sidled up to me and said “Thank God you asked that. We never would.”

I was on my third glass of wine at that point, so I took the bait. “Why? What’s stopping you? Aren’t we all supposed to ask difficult questions?”

He looked me right in the eye, chuckled, and said “We’d have to understand what’s going on first.”

Quiet crisis

I was recalling that evening when reading a terrific new report from former student governor and SU Education Officer Darcie Jones on the “quiet crisis” in university governance – silenced student voices.

Rethinking Student Voice: How higher education must design effective student governance (HEPI) is based on semi-structured interviews with former student governors, SU CEOs, senior university staff, and board chairs – and it’s a fascinating contribution to a conversation that few really want to have.

Student governors, Jones finds, frequently feel marginalised in institutional oversight. They face invisible barriers – opaque jargon, unwritten practices, and exclusive social norms that inhibit meaningful contribution. Their development needs are overlooked. Boards are demographically narrow and unreflective of the student body they’re meant to serve.

One student governor at a Russell Group institution describes the frustration:

I don’t think there’s anything more frustrating than knowing that you disagree with something but not being able to articulate it in the language of a governing body, to a governing body. They’re not always interested in the political or moral argument. They want the argument in legal terms or financially. And I, as a 20-year-old, was not a legal expert.

Another captures the sense of futility:

The meetings are very odd places, we don’t have any input at all on anything. Everything that comes to the Court is finished, and our job seems to be to politely probe what is in front of us.

For anyone who’s spent time listening to student leaders describe their governance experiences – as I have for well over a quarter of a century now – none of this will be surprising. But having it documented systematically, with recommendations attached, is valuable.

The catalogue

The report works through the issues methodically. On recruitment, it notes that student leaders officers often don’t realise until they’re elected that being a governor is part of the job – leaving them unprepared for a role with serious legal responsibilities.

On training, it finds that induction is often “information overload” delivered at the wrong time, too generic, and disconnected from institutional context. One student described training that:

…completely went in one ear and out the other… because those people didn’t really know how to speak to students.

On culture, the findings are sharper still. Board cultures that favour “passive student representation” – where students are expected to observe rather than shape decisions. Formal debate styles and complex language that disadvantage those without prior governance experience.

Networking events centred on alcohol and evening dinners that exclude those with caring responsibilities, jobs, or religious observances. A “sink or swim” dynamic where students either disengage or conform to cultures described, accurately, as “exclusionary and sometimes elitist.”

The report also documents what it calls a “vulnerability economy” – where students from underrepresented backgrounds reported feeling they had to offer personal trauma to be taken seriously:

To get them to listen, I had to tell personal stories like ‘I’ve had this horrendous experience’. It’s kind of humiliating to have to sit in a room full of rich people and be like ‘Look how poor I am’.

This, the report notes, turns student vulnerability into “a form of currency” – something students must trade for their contributions to be viewed as meaningful.

Good practice exists

Credit where it’s due – the report identifies real examples of good practice. Newcastle University’s speed-networking exercises that bring student and lay governors together in student spaces is highlighted, as are chairs who actively seek student perspectives and model openness.

There’s still a handful of universities where student governors are told they can’t discuss the papers confidentially with the SU CEO – the only purpose of which must be to disempower the governor. Not doing that is identified as good practice, as are “focus slots” where students co-lead discussions on key institutional issues.

There’s also welcome attention to diversity. HESA data shows boards remain disproportionately older, whiter, and more able-bodied compared to student populations. The percentage of Black and Asian governors has doubled since 2018/19 – progress, though still far from representative. The report sensibly argues that diversifying recruitment without changing board culture simply invites more people into spaces that will marginalise them.

The recommendations

There’s then a decent set of recommendations spanning recruitment, training, representation, and diversity. Universities should work with SUs to ensure transparent recruitment processes, and training should be student-centred, spread over time, and aligned with SU induction.

Boards should facilitate mentoring between experienced governors and students, students should sit on committees where decisions are actually shaped, governor link schemes should spread the burden of providing student insight beyond student governors alone, and remuneration of governors should be explored to broaden access.

But I did keep coming back to the age old WP question. Fix the student or fix the board?

The bulk of the recommendations focus on equipping students to succeed within existing structures – training and skills development, skills matrices and competency mapping, mentoring to help students cope with unfamiliar cultures, and teaching students to translate their concerns into “governance language.”

The implicit assumption is that boards operate as they should, and that the task is preparing students adequately to participate in them.

Environmental interventions are thinner. Plain language in papers and surfacing unwritten norms might help. But these feel secondary to the main thrust, which is about making students more capable of operating in boards as currently constituted.

The training paradox is a fun one to play with. The report repeatedly identifies that students struggle with “legalese,” formal debate styles, and unwritten codes. Its solution is more training to help students master these conventions.

But if a student governor’s value is their proximity to current student reality, training them to translate that reality into boardroom language necessarily filters and distorts it. The student quoted earlier knew they disagreed – they just couldn’t say it in the “right” way. The response is – teach them the language. An alternative response would be – why does disagreement need to be expressed in that language to be heard?

The skills matrix recommendation is revealing. It proposes mapping student governors against the same competency frameworks used for external governors – people recruited precisely for professional expertise students don’t have. This frames the gap as a deficit in students rather than asking whether boards are configured to value what students distinctively bring.

What boards are for

As I’ve argued on here before, most boards operate primarily in fiduciary mode (overseeing budgets, ensuring compliance) or strategic mode (setting priorities, deploying resources).

They are modes that crowd out what governance experts call the “generative mode” – critical thinking, questioning assumptions, and framing problems in insightful ways.

Generative governance asks probing questions – like “What is our fundamental purpose?” and “How does this decision align with our core values?” It involves scenario planning, digging into root causes rather than symptoms, and actively considering ethical implications beyond legal compliance.

It’s where staff, student, and community governors could add most value – yet it’s often where their contributions are most dismissed as inappropriate, political or “operational.”

If the report has a failing, it’s that it’s oriented toward fiduciary and strategic work – the skills it wants students to develop are orthodox professional governor skills. But if students were valued for generative contributions – for questioning assumptions, surfacing what’s really happening, connecting decisions to lived experience – the skills gap would look different, and so would the solutions.

As Mark Leach said a few weeks back in Earning the license – it’s not as if Dundee had a shortage of orthodox professional governors.

Similarly, the report’s Hartpury case study involves a student governor who wanted Hartpury degrees rather than UWE-validated ones. I don’t doubt they did – but that aligned perfectly with institutional interests – independent degree-awarding powers bring prestige and market differentiation. The student was pushing on an open door.

What it isn’t evidence of is that student voice can challenge. It’s evidence that student voice is welcomed when it reinforces what leadership already wants. A more telling case study would be a student governor substantially modifying something the executive proposed, or changing the way the governing body thought about purpose or performance. The report doesn’t offer one – because, I suspect, such examples are vanishingly rare.

Our own survey of student governors following the Dundee governance failures found that 68 per cent doubted their governing body’s ability to identify and respond appropriately to serious institutional risks. One respondent put it like this:

We’re not governors. We’re an audience.

Another described being told at the start of their term that the previous student president hadn’t been “constructive” – an implicit threat to play nice or be frozen out.

The pre-screening finding in the HEPI report – where student questions are resolved in pre-meets before reaching the board – is a case in point. The report correctly identifies this as suppressing student voice. But its recommendation is carefully hedged – students should still have:

…the opportunity to raise issues or seek clarification ahead of meetings through appropriate channels.”

The line between “guidance and mentoring” and “pre-screening” is left to institutions to draw. Given the power dynamics involved, that line may collapse in practice.

Widening participation parallels

The “fix the participants versus fix the environment” distinction is, of course, central to widening participation work. For decades, the debate has been whether you change disadvantaged students to fit university systems (more preparation, bridging programmes, study skills training) or change university systems to be accessible to students as they are (inclusive curriculum, flexible provision, different assessment methods).

The best WP practice has moved decisively toward the latter. We’ve learned that asking students to assimilate to environments designed for someone else doesn’t work – it exhausts them, filters out their distinctive contributions, and reproduces the inequalities it claims to address. Real inclusion means redesigning the environment.

If governing bodies can’t grasp this distinction in their own composition and practice – if their response to marginalised student governors is “more training” rather than “different governance” – what hope is there that they’ll understand it when it comes to access and participation in the institution they govern?

The demographic mismatch the report identifies isn’t incidental. Boards that are older, whiter, and less disabled than their student populations aren’t just unrepresentative – they’re boards composed of people for whom the existing environment worked for. Of course they’ll assume students need to adapt. That’s been their experience of every institution they’ve ever been in.

Ironically, as Mark points out in Earning the license, what the Dutch example tells us is that it’s not orthodox governance skills that provide the most robust challenge or illuminating strategic insight. It’s being committed to proper participation of stakeholders rather than asking them to set their stake aside when they dress up for the meeting.

And anyway, let’s not assume that it’s only students that struggle. I’ve had plenty of conversations over the years with lay governors that are similar to that one with the man in his seventies in 1999. My theory has long been that the thing about student and staff governors is that they are able to admit they don’t understand. The great and the good tapped on the shoulder to be there wouldn’t dare.