Squeezed in the middle – while, on the one hand, the DfE frets over national standards and school performance against international benchmarks, and on the other, the independence of academies brings decision making about curriculum delivery and pupil choice closer to the classroom frontline, what role is left for local authorities
Traditionally, local authorities have had important education roles in addition to the management of maintained schools: school place planning, setting up new schools (currently under the presumption under the Education Act 2011 that a new school will be an academy, and only if no suitable academy proposal comes forward can the local authority proceed with a new maintained school), school admissions, school improvement, special education services and school support services such as catering, cleaning, facilities management, governor services, acting as financial muscle in competitive procurement, and convenor of the local Schools Forum.
In reality, delegation of budgets to schools has meant that local authorities have been selling many of their services into maintained schools for several years. The services are usually for sale to academies also. However, academies tend to be more discriminating customers, much less susceptible to being leant on to renew their purchase if service quality is mediocre. Also significant is the local authority regulatory function by exercise of intervention powers.
Both main political parties have signalled support for continuing the current wave of academisation following the next General Election. This is spurring the remaining maintained schools to consider academy conversion afresh. If the trend continues, inevitably the local authority education machine, increasingly starved of funding as maintained school numbers fall, will need to be reshaped into a smaller sustainable form.
In a hypothetical non-political utopia, the quality of education would be uniformly excellent and parental choice in the style of education delivery (faith or non-faith school, academic or practical skills focus, full educational enrichment everywhere) would be broad. There would be no barriers to choice. A local authority might have a useful role as a comprehensive and unbiased information source for prospective parents, matching pupils to the places in which they would be most likely to thrive. Or as a commissioner, by buying places at fee-paying schools. There would not be much, if any, need for a regulatory function. When buildings needed repair or replacement, funds would somehow become available.
Paradoxically, on a socio-economic level playing field of zero deprivation, zero discrimination and no barriers to achievement, all educational attainments should be equal suggesting this utopia might begin to look more like George Orwell’s 1984.
In reality, the sustainable form of the local authority of the future needs to be determined by firstly spinning out services to match those offered in the commercial market; second, identifying those roles unavailable commercially which cannot be fulfilled satisfactorily at individual school/academy level and, third, selecting from those roles, those unlikely to be satisfactorily achieved without detailed knowledge of local culture, preferences and sensitivities.
There would be little point in local authorities trying to reclaim a role where a centralised government service produces truly efficient value for money procurement of acceptable quality based on up the size of projects to achieve good discounts eg volume of construction such as in the Priority School Building Programme. Likewise, where they would merely collect data which needs to be collated and interpreted at national level.
However, it would make sense to allocate to local authorities roles requiring a whole community approach, whether brokering external support for schools or academies where overall effectiveness is falling, or exercising intervention powers to take back management. Similarly, local authorities should have a major role in prioritising best use of available resources, in a way which avoids bias in favour of the local authority as an interested party for its own maintained schools - a point touched on in the James Review of Education Capital in 2011.
The local authority is also a natural candidate for exercising the quasi-regulatory role of ensuring a fair system of admissions as this involves dealing with place allocations for oversubscribed and undersubscribed schools/academies and ensuring that schools co-operate.
Peter Hill is senior associate at Geldards LLP
