Governors’ Virtual Office is a cloud-based tool designed specifically for school and college governing bodies.

GVO: Supporting Your Journey to Outstanding Governance

A brief video that shows how Governors’ Virtual Office can help you improve your quality of governance (click on image to start video)

Case studies

Here are some examples of schools and colleges that are using Governors’ Virtual Office to support thier outstanding governance. Click on the logos to learn more.

Features Overview

ONLINE LIBRARY

An online storage facility - designed to your needs - that allows documents to be deposited which can then be accessed by governors whenever they need.

Gives governors access to all relevant papers and documents in one place.

Ability to control access to individual documents to nominated governors only.

Collaborate between meetings by asking and answering questions using the comment function - available on every document, task and event in GVO. By subscribing to a document, users can be alerted automatically to new comments.  

MEETINGS MANAGEMENT

A facility to help schedule meetings for the Governing Body and for sub-committees and to prepare and distribute meeting packs.

Link meeting papers to the agenda.

Distribute agenda and papers electronically without governors having to handle multiple attachments.

Make virtual meetings easier and more effective by using the Comment function to ask and answer questions on documents. 

Work offline using the function to generate and download a single consolidated PDF of all the meeting papers, each with its own associated comment thread.

Use the meeting attendance register to capture indented participation in a meeting and verify as fact once the meeting has taken place.  Produce reports of meeting attendance for full Board and committee meetings for statutory reporting and publication.

POLICIES

An online repository for all the school or college policies where they can be accessed when needed without having to refer to the Clerk.

Reminder system highlighting which policies need review.

Policy owner can make new or amended policies available for review.

Governors can add comments, suggestions and questions that all governors can see.

On line ratification or rejection by Governors.

Publish public polices directly to the school website through a unique URL for each school/Board - ensuring one unique version of a document.

Calendar/NEWS

An online calendar that can be maintained and accessed via the world wide web.

Links to the meetings management function to allow governors access to information for each meeting.

News facility where governors with specific responsibilities can keep one another informed between meetings

Governors can hold online discussion on subjects of mutual interest.

Can be used to solicit governors' views on a topic.

GOVERNOR & TRAINING RECORDS

Maintain governor records including: governor type, appointing body, term dates, roles, committees and boards. Produce reports to meet statutory requirements. 

Create, store, manage and report training records for your Governing Body or Board.  Allows the GVO Manager or dedicated Training Manager to add/manage training courses, record attendance and mark mandatory training requirements - highlighting when mandatory training is due to expire and/or needs refreshing.

Training records for each governor, as well as the entire Board, can be exported for reporting purposes.

TASKS/PROJECTS

An online tool to help manage delegated tasks within the Governing Body.

Create a record of tasks that have been allocated to nominated individuals or groups (e.g. sub-committees).

Develop a comprehensive task 'folder' that contains all relevant material.

Track progress towards completion with updates from the nominated task manager.

Generate automatic prompts for tasks that are becoming due.

Governors’ Virtual Office is especially relevant to Multi Academy Trusts.

The following short video shows how to use GVO most effectively within a Multi Academy Trust (click on image to start video):

Details of Pricing for GVO are shown

here: