Schools, community and local authorities
I attended Wandsworth’s Education & Standards Group (ESG) last Wednesday (22/10/14). It is an attempt by the Tory Council to maintain some kind of role in our fractured education system. Given the competent, conscientious set of Tory members on the Group, the review seems to be working but I am sure it is an illusion! It is all based on the “magician’s smoke and mirrors”.
Until 1997, the British (actually English and Welsh) education system was a largely coherent, local government controlled system. The Blair Government decided to add to this mix “independent” academies and faith schools, where independent meant funded by national government but run by largely autonomous organisations. But then in 2010 the truly Jacobin Michael Gove became the Secretary of State and he set about introducing academies, faith and free schools as quickly as possible. He made it impossible for local authorities to build new schools, even in areas of fast population growth like London and he forced any school with a poor inspection report out of the state system. This haste was a naked attempt to destroy the traditional structure by the time of the coming 2015 General Election.
But I happen to believe that Wandsworth Tories see the dangers of this policy and are using the ESG (and its similar Free Schools and Academies Commission) to try and mitigate the worst effects of Govian chaos. The Group’s main function is interviewing the Heads and Chairs of Governors, usually of two schools in an evening, in a four yearly cycle. The purpose is to assess the school’s performance and to help schools to improve or to maintain it. The role is, however, largely advisory, since Ofsted clearly makes the inspections and the assessments that really count.
This lack of a formal role may not matter too much with schools operating well, where a few words of encouragement and appreciation from the local authority are all that is required. But what if the school has difficulties? One school we saw last week, according to Ofsted, “requires improvement” and “is not good because”, amongst other things, “teaching across the school requires improvement”. To be fair that assessment was made in 2012 and, since then the school has a new governing board and has been taken over by the Chapel Street Schools – a new group of academies. Nonetheless Wandsworth’s own education officer, and indeed the councillors, were clearly not convinced that the performance is improving sufficiently rapidly to be of much help to the current cohort of school kids.
Chapel Street Schools Trust, according to its website, is linked to the Salvation Army. There are eight such schools although two of them are not due to become Chapel Street Schools until 2015 or 2016 and two others, including the Wandsworth school, have only become Chapel Street schools this year, having been forced out of the local authority structure by the Government. The Trust did not even exist in January, 2012.
Do Chapel Street Schools have any experience in getting a school, required to improve, in fact to improve? Do their seven staff (again apparently and according to their website) have any relevant experience? Well one or two of them have been teachers but that’s about it. As the discussion about the school’s progress developed, I couldn’t help but wonder what the Council’s education officer and his inspector colleague thought of the matter. They after all are only responsible for running 85 schools most of which now achieve Ofsted ratings of “outstanding” or “good”!
What can we do about our concerns? Can we help the school through its difficult patch? Can we help with skilled resources? Apparently not as it is no longer a local authority school. We can, however, ask to go and visit the appropriate Regional Schools Commissioner and tell him our concerns.
Who you might well ask is s/he? Well in Wandsworth’s case it is the South London and South East Commissioner to whom we should turn. He is one Dominic Herrington, who until recently was a senior civil servant and Director of the DFE’s Academies Group. As far as I can tell Mr. Herrington is solely accountable to the Secretary of State. Nothing in the structure has anything remotely to do with the public or elected authorities, except of course that the Secretary of State is an elected MP but appointed to the job by the Prime Minister. Herrington’s appointment was announced, without fanfare, in a Departmental press release in September, 2014.
The Commissioners for the other regions are: two Chief Executive Officers of Academy Trusts; Essex’s Director of Education; the Heads of two grammar schools and of two Academy schools. The trenchant views of the General Secretary of the NUT are worth reading at http://teachers.org.uk/node/21434.
None of these regional commissioners seem to have anything remotely like democratic legitimacy. Yet between them they control, or at least oversee, millions and millions of public money. David Cameron, and his Education Secretary Michael Gove (most of the damage was done prior to the Cabinet re-shuffle), have successfully led an assault on much of local democracy and local accountability.
Academies, faith and free schools are all, of course, overwhelmingly funded by us, the taxpayers yet they are free from any democratic overview except at the rarefied national, Secretary of State level. Will a Labour Government have the courage to restore a coherent, democratic education system? Will the on-the-ground experience of councillors, who regularly visit and oversee schools, be lost from the system, to be replaced by faceless non-elected commissioners?
Great headline in the Guardian today, 30/4/14! “Labour vows to rub out Gove era in education”.
That gave me an unexpectedly great start to the day and what is more the analysis is spot on, with David Blunkett accusing Gove of creating an unmanageable “Kafkaesque” education system. Tristram Hunt goes on to say that atomised schools (by which he means Free Schools, academies, maintained schools) leave a landscape of incoherence, confusion and lack of accountability. Good stuff.
Until, unfortunately, we get to the bit about Labour’s alternative; its recipe for success – independent directors appointed by local authorities on a fixed-term five-year contract from a short-list approved by the education department, by which is obviously meant the Whitehall Education Department and not the local authorities’.
So where is Labour’s case for coherence and clarity and most particularly transparent accountability when we consider local government – gone, caput, nowhere?
A few years ago, it was possible to think that the Labour Party had a coherent strategy towards local government, its powers and its democratic legitimacy. The move in London to make Metropolitan Police Divisions co-terminous with the London Boroughs and then to do likewise with the Health Authority areas opened the opportunity for locally elected councillors, and hence the local electorate, to have more of a say in running these very important civic services.
Combined with the extant structure of local government, it made it possible to think of a local accountable unit with sufficient power and influence to encourage democratic participation in civic governance. OH, how we need to re-vivify local democracy and here was the possibility to do just that.
Of course in this highly centralised state called the UK, there was still a long, long way to go. No true, accountable local authority could flourish without some kind of independence from, or at least accommodation with, the financial control of Whitehall. Unfortunately it always suits the party in power to maintain that control, regardless of the honeyed words about localism – always a tempting illusion under governments of any persuasion – at least until now.
But there were signs that local democracy might be gaining traction – until the take-over of policy-making by instant populists. Tony Blair introduced the Mayoral system and pin-up politics first to London, and then to the rest of the country; and at a lower level David Cameron introduced his elected Police Commissioners. By any stretch of the imagination these reforms added to the atomisation of local authority services, confusion and lack of accountability. They were stimulated by an immediate appeal to the electorate at the price of any coherent view about local as opposed to national democracy.
It will be argued that Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson have made some sense out of London’s complex transport systems, but that was largely thanks to the coherent consolidation of power and responsibility across a massive urban area.
They will be better remembered for destroying any coherence, clarity or accountability across London’s planning system. Only this week London’s emerging skyline has been said by GLA planning Director, Colin Wilson, to be “very carefully planned. But we prefer to use a flexible framework” leaving us with what others have called an indiscriminate scattering of tall buildings across London.
The new skyline is far from universally popular, will undoubtedly change the look and feel of the city, will be irreversible, will make millions for some developers and will do almost nothing for London’s housing crisis, and it will be incoherent. As for whose responsibility it will have been – you’d need a degree in British local government practise to be able to answer that one.
The major problem is, of course, that people once trusted our local government service as dated but essentially competent and honest – indeed almost the envy of the western world – Westminster politicians now distrust it and abuse it. My suspicion is that Ed Milliband’s major task in domestic politics has to be to build a sensible local government structure into which directors of school standards and police Inspectors can be built. Such a structure would demand, and get, a genuine local political legitimacy. It would also encourage civically minded citizens to stand for local office.
Most important, it would increase election turn-out. The electorate are not stupid. They don’t vote much in local elections and why should they when local authorities are powerless and more and more an arm of national government. Let’s have a return to local government.
The Duck House – a comedy of modern politics, Vaudeville Theatre, 20/12/13
Sir Peter Viggers’ Duck House was almost certain to star in a comedy at some point and here it is in the eponymous play by Dan Patterson and Colin Swash. It appears on the Vaudeville stage along with hanging baskets (Margaret Beckett), wisteria (David Cameron), elephant lamps (Michael Gove), a glitter toilet seat (John Reid) and a massage chair (Shahid Malik).
The star of the show is Labour MP, Robert Houston, played enthusiastically and manically by Ben Miller. The story centres on his attempt to jump the Labour ship as the June, 2010, election approaches, hopefully to become a Tory Cabinet Minister under David Cameron. To do this he has, of course, to appear squeaky clean to Tory grandee, Sir Norman Cavendish.
Houston’s desire for a more sophisticated lifestyle compares the cultivation of his ambitions with the pathetically low aesthetic tastes of so much of the expenses saga – a glitter toilet seat – really! And it therefore becomes a beautiful target for farce especially when Sir Norman’s bizarre sexual habits are revealed.
It’s great slapstick stuff and well worth a visit, especially to see how many of today’s news stories appear in the script. We had amusing references to Nigella’s problems as a witness and to the current “recommendation” to raise MP salaries by 11% and the audience did have fun working out how many particular references they got. But how the German tourists sitting in the seats behind us were doing I couldn’t quite imagine.
But the amount of custard pie thrown at Sir Norman smacked a little of desperation. Both the play and the players found it difficult to keep a consistently high volume of laughs. I rather wonder whether this displayed a difficulty between the two authors. That obviously works well on occasions – see Frank Muir and Dennis Norden but the Duck House left me feeling that sometimes we were watching a not completely happy compromise between a subtle political satire and an uproarious Whitehall farce.
At the heart of the saga is the belief, of course, amongst many MPs (and residents of what Washington would call the Beltway – not exactly the metropolitan elite more the M25 Ringway) that they are under-paid and, since they deserve to get paid more, then clearly it is perfectly acceptable to buck the system. Indeed, as the curtain falls, Miller as the hapless Houston, his career falling apart, makes a very explicit plea for some decent objectivity from the audience.
But surely the problem is that most people do not think of £70K being a very low salary. Moreover, there is no evidence that the pay levels are seriously detracting from the numbers wishing to become MPs. And the script did not look at both sides of what is surely a valid debate. As a result, the audience was left feeling that, if anything, MPs as venal and incompetent as those on stage are over-paid and not under-paid.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 