Volunteering in changing political contexts

School governors make up one of the largest volunteer bodies in the country, a body that has been referred to as the ‘biggest experiment in democratic governance ever undertaken’ (Ranson et al, 2005, p 225). There are no official statistics relating to how many school governors there are, their gender or their ethnicity; at the time of writing, there is no official national register. Based on the number of schools in England, numbers have unofficially been estimated at around 300,000.

In many ways, school governing is a unique type of volunteering – often not being thought of as such, even by governors themselves. As one governor put it:

Yet, volunteering it is, being subject to the same political and cultural influences as any other type of volunteering work, and the part that it plays in society is largely conditioned by government attitudes, policies and ideologies.

The number of people across Europe who volunteer is surprisingly large. A European Union (EU) study carried out in 2010 revealed that 92 million to 94 million people (22% to 23%) over the age of 15 living in the EU were involved in volunteering (GHK, 2010). The same study indicated that in most European countries, the number of active volunteers had increased since 2000.

Voluntary work is of considerable importance, not least because of its impact on and benefits for local communities, society in general and, of course, the volunteers themselves. It is also of considerable importance to government and is, in many ways, subject to the same vacillations and vagaries of government policy as those that prevail across the employment market. It should come as no surprise that the attitude of government towards volunteering and the part that it plays in a government’s vision of society has been shown to exert substantial influence on the ways in which the public themselves perceive volunteering, while also exerting a profound effect on the number of individuals putting themselves forward for voluntary work.