Two prescient Blogs from 2014
I was just trawling through some old blogs and I came across two, of which I am pretty proud. Just scroll down the right side of this screen to July 14, 2014 and October 7, 2014 and take a look.
The first is titled School Governance and Governors, and it bemoans the demise of local councillor representation on school governing bodies and the rise of the technocrat. I didn’t know it but it presaged last week’s announcement of the “end” of parent governors. After all parents don’t know anything about running schools, their expertise being merely to have kids and local councillors equally don’t know much about running schools – all they know about it is the local community and the need to plan for school provision and school places. Obviously just the kind of people that Cameron/Osborne would want to kick out of school administration: parents and local representatives! The Tory version is, of course, to have technocrats and the private sector under the pseudo-guise of educational charitable institutions.
The second was titled The Tory Party faces a disaster called Europe. The one thing I got wrong in that blog was the date of the crisis, which I had down for 2017. I didn’t know that Cameron was going to plump for June 23, 2016 as the Referendum Day. I predicted Tory division and disaster and potentially its demise for a generation. I hope that I am right. It is beginning to look that way!
And my punt for 2016? Against all the punditry and all the apparent trends, the economic problems and climate change issues demand a collective solution. So my prediction is that 2016 sees the start of the rejuvenation of social democracy.
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?
School Governors & governance.2
Hilary writes to tell me that I am wrong (see blog earlier this month). She tells me that skills are necessary in the modern governing board and that the time of the stakeholder is past. Well I agree on the last point but that is a regret and I need to thank Hilary for forcing me to make my point more clearly.
It is actually worse than I relayed. Now that we are looking for skill sets and not stakeholders we are also handing over most of the appointment process to the Head. The end result is not likely to be people in a very strong position to challenge either head or school.
In my considerable experience as a governor, it was mainly the stakeholders, who had the self-confidence and frankly the clout to challenge the head or the school’s ingrained modus operandi. In future as more and more governors are appointed through school controlled mechanisms there will be, in my submission, less and less, not more and more, challenge.
As once a technician and for a long-time a councillor, I think I know, which was the more likely to be a challenger. Give me the councillor over a financial whizz any day.
School Governance & Governors
A recent Wandsworth Council report blithely announced that governing bodies are being shifted from a stakeholder model to one based on skill sets. There was clearly a presumption that this was not only the Government’s intention but also a “good thing”. Well as a semi-detached governor of some 20/30 years standing, I have a rather different view.
I take it that the stakeholder model refers to school governing bodies dominated by local authority nominees, or local politicians, community representatives, teachers, trade unions and others with a “stakeholder” involvement with the school. I am further assuming that the move towards skill sets refers to knowledge of budgets, of HR skills, and the thousand and one other skills that could be said to make up the requirements of a managing board. I suppose the polite way of describing this is calling it a professionalization of the governing body role.
Could anything be worse! Surely the point of the governing body is not to do the work of the professional staff, or to be unpaid accountants and treasurers, or to stand in for what the local authority once did, or to manipulate spreadsheets, but to make the school part of the community. It is really important that the community should have a say in its local schools, but under this Government schools are becoming independent businesses run by and frequently in the interests of the heads.
Let’s hope that it is not too late for an incoming Government to stop and indeed reverse this trend.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 