What role should councils have in education?

By Richard Watts / @richardwatts01

It was kind of Michael Gove to write to all councillors in charge of children’s services asking for our thoughts on how local authorities can play a “strong strategic role” in education. Indeed he goes as far as to say to councils that strong local authorities are “central to our plans to improve education.”

This rhetoric is rather different from Mr Gove’s media appearances where he announced he was going to free schools from the clutches of the “bureaucrats and politicians” in councils.

As an elected councillor I have to plead guilty to the charge of being a politician. But I am angry that professional and hard working council staff are airily dismissed at ‘bureaucrats’.

Islington’s schools have improved enormously over the last 13 years. Although there is still much to be done, council staff have played an important role to support the work of schools and teachers to drive that improvement. This work has been made easier by massive increases in funding and new buildings from the Labour government, but it is a myth that local authorities are some kind of ‘dead hand’ on schools.

Islington’s newly elected Labour administration decided to write back to Mr Gove setting out our view of what a council’s ‘strong strategic role’ should be.

In our view, the Con-Lib Dem government must give councils the power to do the following:

• Challenge schools to improve and support the process of improvement;

• Regulate fair admissions and exclusions;

• Ensure that enough places are available for local children, which means it is vital that councils retain some power to plan strategically and co-ordinate places;

• Take action to resolve problems in failing schools; and

• Ensure that children are kept safe and that schools are playing their part in the child protection system.

There is a common misunderstanding that councils run schools. We don’t and haven’t done for many years. Schools are, rightly, self governing institutions managed by the headteacher and overseen by the governors. No one should want to go back to the days when local authorities could meddle in the day-to-day running of schools.

The list of powers we are asking to keep will ensure that good schools are supported to improve while children in underperforming schools are not denied the once in a lifetime chance of a good education.

The power to regulate admissions and exclusions will mean that individuals and groups can’t be unfairly treated and that all schools take their fair share of difficult pupils.

Schools are a vital component of the child protection system. Teachers will often be the first to recognise the signs that a child is being mistreated and it should go without saying that children must be safe in school. A core principle of the child protection system is oversight and councils are ideally placed to provide this for schools.

Britain has taken the view that all children have the right to an education since the 1870 Education Act. councils therefore have a basic duty to ensure that there are enough places for all of their children. In order to do this, councils need to retain the right to be able to plan for places across their area and, I would argue, ensure the school system remains financially sustainable by taking action to remove surplus places when necessary.

This is actually more controversial than it sounds. A key tenant of government policy seems to be that generating surplus places will create the competition that will drive improvement. One assumes the unspoken aim of the policy is also for competition to drive unpopular schools ‘out of business’. A pamphlet article on LEA’s by Sam Freedman, who is now Michael Gove’s special advisor, gives a fascinating insight into their thinking. We are arguing for the powers to manage the market so that children do not become the victims of market forces pushing their school to the wall.

Our letter to Mr Gove makes a series of other points that we can touch on in future weeks, and we hope it provides a Labour response to the challenges posed by the Con-Lib government.

Interestingly, Islington Lib Dems backed the letter with some minor amendments, which goes to show just how divided their party is about this most Tory-dominated area of government policy.