A council’s education expert explains to Philip Bevan the impact of recent reforms to the schools system.
“I’ve worked in the school improvement team of a local authority for more than 10 years now; before that, I was a head teacher. Local authorities have a statutory duty to ensure that schools in their area are performing well, so our role is to support schools and challenge them to do better. Most of our work is with head teachers, senior leadership teams and governors; I spend about 60 per cent of my time working directly with schools.
Our local authority is in a very deprived area; one of the poorest in the country. The ‘pupil premium’ is supposed to provide extra resources to schools in such areas – but while the idea of subsidising schools teaching poorer kids is not a bad one, the way it works in our authority isn’t fair. Free school meals are used as a proxy for deprivation, but some of our most deprived primary schools have free school meals levels well below the national average. They have very high numbers of Asian heritage pupils – and many of these families regard taking free school meals as a stigma, so they don’t register. Some of our schools lose out massively as a result.
One of the main reforms in education in recent years has been the academies programme, and the current government is pushing that even more. In our area, relatively few schools have become academies so far; and those that have, have done so through choice. As an authority, our position is that we’re neutral where schools choose to become academies, but opposed to schools being forced to become academies.
Academies receive funding for various services, such as school improvement, directly, where previously that money would have gone to the local authority. They’re then free to choose where they buy those services from: that could be from the local authority, but it could also be from one of the large number of companies operating in the market, including big players like Capita and Serco.
Ultimately, if academies opt out, that can mean that a local authority doesn’t have enough funding to provide some services. For us, it will only take a couple more secondary schools converting before some services become unviable.
That could be awkward, because even if academies aren’t buying school improvement services, the local authority still has an obligation to ensure the success of all the pupils living in its area – so that includes pupils in every school. But it’s a grey area, because in theory that means we’ve always been responsible for pupils in independent schools, even though we’ve never been accountable for those schools.
In our authority, we want to maintain the link we have with schools that become academies so that they can work with our other schools; be part of our family of schools. So far, there’s been no suggestion that any of them want to break away from that. Our academies do buy some of their school improvement services from elsewhere, so it’s more of a light-touch approach with them. But it still allows us to maintain a relationship and have some understanding of what’s going on.
Academies still have to have Ofsted inspections, but to me that’s the biggest danger with the new system: by the time Ofsted come in and detect that a school’s failing, it’s too late. You’ve then got two years to turn it round. When local authorities did more school improvement work, early intervention was one of the things they did best – picking up on potential problems and heading them off before they even arose.
The government’s vision for education is that ultimately schools will provide their own school improvement services – if not entirely within themselves, then via chains of academies and a national network of teaching schools. It’s a massive leap from the traditional system and the end of local authority school improvement, and potentially also a move to provision of those services by large-scale companies. That means cutting out the middle tier between central government and individual schools completely and having a mass of individual institutions, from which will emerge some sort of organisational structure.
In my view, if as a local authority we abandon our responsibilities for education, then we’re not serving the people of the borough. There isn’t an education system in the world of the size and sophistication of the UK’s that doesn’t have a middle tier, so I’ve no doubt that something will emerge in the middle. Making a positive out of a negative then, because we’re moving from one system to another with no model for transition – because there’s a vacuum – there’s a fantastic opportunity for local authorities to carve out a role, particularly for those that have good, strong relationships with their schools. We’re very much exploring how we could work with schools as partners. That could be a whole new role.”