ABSTRACT
It is based on the belief that people have a right to run the organizations which affect their lives. In order to do that effectively, we have to understand the context in which governing bodies have come about. This means that the history is important. Governing bodies have been described as having ‘responsibility without power’. Without knowing why there were lay governors in the early days of state education, how they became disempowered, why both major political parties eventually became committed to lay governance-‘ordinary people’ may be overawed by the systems, and so less effective than they should be.
