We’ll hear a great deal about ‘freedom’ in relation to schools over the next few months. ‘Every state school could have the chance to free itself from bureaucratic control,’ says the Tories’ schools spokesman, Michael Gove. At its most extreme we have his notion of ‘free’ schools which are supposed to be founded and run by parents, an idea which I think will unravel even before we get to the election. But at a more general level politicians have been talking about ‘freeing’ schools for a generation and Labour’s academy and trust school proponents have sometimes used similar language.
Local management of schools is here to stay and few who would wish to go back to having schools’ day to day running carried out by the local authority. All political parties agree that inspiring headteachers make the difference more than anything else between a good and a bad school. But based on my experience LAs are also important in providing the back-up and advice that help schools run effectively – if they didn’t exist then you would have to invent them. Here are a few examples:
1) School discipline: this is an issue that the Tories play up endlessly as part of their ‘broken Britain’ theme. I support robust discipline and headteachers’ right to exclude, but you also have to consider what happens to excluded children when they go out into the community. In this respect LA advisers are indispensable: they run the referral units to which some excluded children go, they can arrange managed transfers where applicable and they provide specialist advice for looked-after children.
2) Procurement: schools have to buy in supplies, catering services, IT equipment, software and more. LA procurement advice is valuable in preparing large tenders, in consolidating buying over several schools in order to save money, and providing benchmarking data to back up the tendering process. This isn’t ‘bureaucracy,’ it’s just good business practice.
3) Governor training: this is important and it gives an opportunity for governors from different schools to meet and swap ideas. Most of the attendees in my experience are parent governors from primary schools and they enjoy the sharing of knowledge and benefit from it. Again it’s the LA that provides this facility.
4) HR: even schools which employ their own staff such as academies, foundation schools and trusts, don’t support a dedicated HR function. From time to time specialist advice is needed. For example, I know of a teacher who was dismissed for misconduct and subsequently appealed on a technicality – the LA shouldered the legal bill for the complex case involved and they knew the right specialists to help.
5) Finance: many schools have recently been caught on the hop by a recession-related jump in post-16 numbers and their budgeting has suffered, so LAs have helped out with a loan. Is that such a bad thing?
Mr Gove talks of a need for: ‘a fundamental change in the role of local authorities… local bureaucrats will be on notice to justify their position, their power and their performance. Because we need money where it makes a difference – not on a bureaucrat’s desk but in the classroom.’ This is all good yah-boo stuff – there is nothing like repeating the jibe ‘bureaucrat’ if you want to appeal to right-wing prejudices.
But the reality is that all schools are part of a wider community. Democratically-elected LAs embody that community, and we should embrace this, not rail against it. Parents would be safer to stick with a Labour government that bases its education policies on facts – not on playground rhetoric.
James Valentine is a school governor and NPF member
30 years experience as a school governer (not one at the moment) tells me Heads have always been in control of Schools but have been constrained from excesses by LA’s – driven by their dogma the co-alition is hell bent on bringing market unstability into education – the fact that none of them has ever had any contact with the state system is probably a factor in their ignorence.