For good or bad, the role of local authorities in the oversight and running of our schools in the last 15 years has been eroded. The rise of trust schools, the recent boom in academies, and now the emergence of free schools is leaving some local authorities with no direct stake in the running of state education at all. This is giving many schools greater control over their budgets and encouraging creativity. But it also raises problems with the polarisation of power to either a headteacher or Whitehall. Decisions about future school places and accountability, not to mention training and development, are either being centralised or left in the hands of a scattered group of overstretched headteachers.
This is where powerful school commissioners could help. School commissioner zones, similar in scale to police authorities, should be created with high-profile and powerful appointments and a small team that relentlessly work to champion great teaching, pool the strengths of great schools in an area, and provide some scrutiny and oversight for future places and performance. These school commissioners would be able to identify priorities and create specific and expert-led responses. Take, for example, high teenage pregnancy rates in some parts of Greater Manchester. A school commissioner would be able to pool budgets, fund a school to give training on sexual health to other teachers, organise outreach work, and share work on communicating with parents across a number of schools to help drive down the specific problems of teenage pregnancy in Rochdale and Oldham. This would stop the duplication, poor resourcing and inertia of projects. This shift towards pooling resources and trusting excellent teachers in schools to train others would help schools tackle long-standing complex problems in a way that local authorities don’t. To back this work up, school commissioners could fund teacher bonuses to promote and recognise the best teachers in an area. Giving the commissioner ultimate firing powers over underperforming headteachers should be considered as part of this move.
The practicalities of this are also straightforward. The appointments should be decided by local mayors or local authorities and the candidates should be proven as excellent teachers or leaders in education. This would give local government some meaningful role in education compared to the erroneous calls for local councillors to be on every school governing body. Commissioners should have autonomous control over appointing their own small team of expert staff and using their budgets. Funding for programmes like Greater Manchester Challenge, Aim Higher (when they both existed) and training and development budgets could be pooled to give the positions real power in dedicating resources to solve regional or local educational problems. It would also build capacity in a system where many schools work in silos trying to deal with challenges on their doorstep rather than build networks and collaborations to solve the wider problems. This would not require any extra funding but would instead be a decentralisation of funding from Whitehall and quangos.
It is important to stress that these roles should not recreate the bureaucracy of local educational authorities. Instead they should be promoting and sharing excellent practice within the schools system. It would be refreshing to have a local education initiative that was about using excellence in the system to overcome long-term problems rather than having expensive and sometimes detached teams in each local authority area. This would be a chance to use budgets to fund teachers to get out of their school and share best practice, observe and train one another, offer peer school improvement and set up joint initiatives that offer creative solutions to major social problems.
Small agile school commissioner teams with high-profile leadership and big pooled budgets would be able to make a significant impact in dealing with local and regional educational challenges whether they be inadequate teaching, educational disadvantage or substance misuse. This would be an example of modern Labour public service reform that is about devolving power and having creative and flexible solutions in a time of austerity.
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Josh MacAlister is a teacher and has previously written for Progress here
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What naive crap.
Some interesting ideas I thought Ray. Don’t agree with regional teachers bonuses, it sounds a little close to the Tories concept of regionalising pay scales for my liking. I’d also have concerns about the type of individuals potentially appointed to such a role. This shouldn’t be a job for so called ‘superheads’. It would need to include rank and file teachers, not simply those who are able to carry favour from political masters in authorities. Such individuals should be as close to the chalk-face as possible to bring the profession along with them.
I’m not sure top-slicing school budgets to fund a central bureaucracy is going to fly. The trend even under Blairite Labour government was devolving more control to the school level. Now, under pressure of forced academisation, schools are grouping together to form purchasing clusters. One consequence of this is to dilute the absolute power that some Headteachers hold creating a more collegiate structure. Allowing the very flexibility and creativity that you seek. Only last week a cluster of schools met in Manchester to share best practice and do all things you suggest we need a Schools Commissioner to get going.
Frankly, all that is happening in respect of schools ‘grouping together to form purchasing clusters’ is the recreation of LEAs.
Only this time, instead of being democratically accountable, they are a self-selecting self-serving, elitist group of philanthropists – or hard nosed businessmen (and It *is* usually men) rather than politicians.
In November we’ll have Police Commssioners. John MacAlister’s proposals would further fragment local governance with another directly elected individual with responsbility for a key service. What next? An elected Health and Social Care Commisioner? A Transport Commissioner? An Arts and Recreation Commissioner? All with separate mandates and , presumably, tax raising powers. We need strong, efficient, properly resourced elected local councils as responsive , accountable community leaders, with more , not less , influence over the policies and services which shape the future of their citizens and localities.
Jeremy Beecham House of Lords and Newcastle City Council
Congratulations, Josh, on your article. It is an excellent example of “Management Officialise” or “Corporate Obscurantism”. Why not, as you do, sidestep reality by generating ‘responses’ that sound impressive but, on closer examination, have no meaningful justification in logic or common sense. Phrases like “great teaching”, “peer school improvement”, “inadequate teaching”, “high profile leadership” and “flexible solutions in a time of austerity” have no reality without context – which is blatently lacking in this article. What constitutes ‘high profile leadership’ and who justifiably expert enough to assess someone as a ‘great teacher’ or an ‘inadequate teacher’? As a teacher, I have experienced the full gamut of effective/ineffective teaching in my lessons. The fond memories I have of pupils sponstaneously applauding my efforts at the end of a lesson is in sad opposition to the lessons where I clearly had little educational impact or, even worse, met with open hostility.
I believe that teaching is the most demanding of all professions but the least appreciated-name, for example, another profession that has to treat many people/clients/patients at the same time or can assume that a ‘diagnosis’ is sufficient to fullfil professional obligations: in the teaching profession, diagnosis is usually just the first of many stages. Your assumption that ‘education commissioners’ will substantially cure the problems in our schools is frankly ludicrous.
Does our education system need improving? Sure. Does it need to be improved via the diktats of people like you and Stephen Twigg? Absolutely not!