Stephen Twigg, as shadow education secretary, has asked for responses to his consultation on the future of the ‘middle tier’. This is an important piece of consultation about where Labour might be going in terms of education policy. I hope as many people as possible respond. Hereafter follows my comments to Stephen.

I have spent 30 years working in the education system in a wide range of roles including classroom teacher, local authority education officer and – most recently – principal of a high-performing sixth form college. I have also taught abroad, in Sweden. All my experience leaves me in no doubt that the quality of work being done for young people now is much higher than it was 30 years ago. We do have the best ever education workforce – of that I have no doubt. Initiatives begun under the Thatcher government such as providing additional monies to areas to innovate and drive forward technical and science education plus the delegation of financial autonomy and other freedoms to schools have made a real contribution to this. Add to this the investment in workforce development, capital improvement and investment in curriculum development that characterised Labour’s years in office and were proof positive that our priority really was education, education, education.

While these improvements took place, however, schools and colleges had to make sense of an avalanche of nonsense emanating from central government. One of the immense skills of head teachers and their governing bodies is to make sense of nonsense. Take the money for some mad scheme and appear to deliver an unreasonable agenda set by Westminster but use the money for a more sensible, necessary purpose.

What the education business needs more than anything else is some policy stability. Endless change often driven by politicians who’ve never done a ‘proper job’ in the real world obsessing with structures merely creates another workstream to manage. Would that the time and energy spent on this was spent instead on giving young people a better deal. That’s the lesson to learn from the Finns – stable policy. There are only really two things that make a difference to the performance of a school or college: quality of teaching and learning and the quality of leadership and management. So that’s where we should focus our remorseless effort.

Labour will inherit a fragmented landscape – academies, maintained schools, university technical colleges, free schools and all manner of whatnot!  A landscape riddled with initiativitis where a thousand flowers grow but few bloom. The Tories have replaced an education agenda built on investment, challenge, cooperation and success with one whose watchwords are competition, chaos and failure. So much of current energy is focused on the performance of the top 25 per cent – the recent nonsense about O levels is part of this agenda as too is the daftness of the English Baccalaureate. In reality the English and Welsh education system has always done pretty well by the top 25 per cent. The young people that our system consistently fails have been the weakest 25 per cent.

So what we need going forward is not more change of institutional structures. Institutions should be able to retain the structures they have. They should retain the freedoms they have and – where possible and appropriate – have more devolved to them. But with freedoms come responsibilities. And these responsibilities shouldn’t simply be for the young people in their own institutions. Of course they should be responsible for them but to solely focus on them promotes behaviour around admissions, exclusions and marketing that benefits some students at the expense of others. All education institutions in a locality should a share responsibility for the performance of all the young people in that locality. And somewhere in the locality there has to be a body that is the local champion for all young people in the area and have to account to the national government for the performance of all those young people. For that body to be anything other than the local authority would be absurd. Local authorities are understood by local people and accountable to them. By rejecting mayors in so many English cities in the recent Westminster-imposed referendums local people blew a loud raspberry at personality cult politics. Their view of personality-driven governance around the cult of a Boris or a Ken was rejected in favour of a more tried and tested model of collective accountability personified in that most British of institutions, local government. So farewell Americanised school commissioners!

But new-look local authorities will be framed for the future not the past and will be, therefore, very different from those paternalistic , domineering leviathans of the past. They will be slick, modern organisations responsible for those things that schools and colleges can’t do on their own and it is inappropriate to have delivered by Whitehall. I rather like the idea of as little as possible being left to Whitehall – a remote institution keen to impose London solutions to London problems on the  rest of the country. So what should our modern local authority do?  Here’s starter for debate, agreement, challenge:

SEN provision, school improvement, transport, admissions, governor support, parent and community engagement, impartial information advice and guidance, new teacher training induction and support (with a link to teacher supply?), planning and provision of places, quality assurance.

And if we include quality assurance why not make local authorities responsible for inspecting their schools and colleges instead of Ofsted? Then Ofsted could inspect local authorities and within their inspections inspect a range of institutions in the locality to ensure the local authority’s inspection judgements were accurate. This would put quality assurance closer to the community it serves while ensuring that rigour was maintained by making Ofsted assure the process. And why shouldn’t national government set national standards for an area to achieve and judge the area’s performance accordingly. Rewards to the area might be driven by the area’s performance on, for example, reducing NEETs and progression into employment or higher education at 18.  Such an approach would focus attention on how to raise the performance of those young people most likely to fail or be failed by the system. And if we focused time and resource on them our performance in relation to them would improve – the young people and UK plc would both be winners.

—————————————————————————————

Nic Dakin is MP for Scunthorpe. He tweets @nicdakinmp

—————————————————————————————

Photo: AngusKirk