Who governs and why it matters. An analysis of race equality and diversity in the composition of further education college governing bodies across the UK

Bathmaker, A-M and Pennacchia, J ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9700-2704, 2022. Who governs and why it matters. An analysis of race equality and diversity in the composition of further education college governing bodies across the UK. Journal of Vocational Education and Training. ISSN 1363-6820

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Abstract

Concerns about racism and race equality have been widely reported in the first decades of the 21st century, following the Black Lives Matter protests and campaigns such as ‘Rhodes Must Fall’. Yet ‘race’ remains largely absent from policy debate and research concerning further education colleges in the four countries of the UK, particularly in relationship to leadership and governance. The focus of this paper is on who governs and why it matters. Governors and trustees play an increasingly visible and significant role in public, private and charity sector organisations, but diversity on governing bodies of further education across the UK remains patchy and is seen as a major challenge. The paper reports on what is known about the composition of governing bodies and what this tells us about the involvement of governors from black and minority ethnic backgrounds at the present time, drawing on a three-year project which examined the processes and practices of governing in the four countries of the UK. The findings highlight the continuing absence of governors from black and minority ethnic backgrounds on college governing boards and suggest that normative, invisible assumptions of how governing gets done persist, with black and minority ethnic governors often little more than a token gesture of adding diversity to the faces on the board.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Journal of Vocational Education and Training
Creators:	Bathmaker, A.-M. and Pennacchia, J.
Publisher:	Informa UK Limited
Date:	2 October 2022
ISSN:	1363-6820
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1080/13636820.2022.2126878 DOI 1605813 Other
Rights:	© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Social Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Ward
Date Added:	04 Oct 2022 15:25
Last Modified:	04 Oct 2022 15:25
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/47209

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