A Labour government could hand oversight of academies back to local authorities, Ed Miliband has suggested.
Speaking at a ‘question time style’ event yesterday, the Labour leader said ‘you cannot run thousands of schools from Whitehall’ in direct reference to former education secretary Michael Gove’s controversial academies programme.
Responding to a question from the audience, Mr Miliband said: ‘The alphabet soup of different kinds of schools – free schools, academies, trust schools and all that – is not helping our kids.
‘You have got to have proper local accountability. You cannot run thousands of schools from Whitehall – Michael Gove has certainly proved that. You can’t run all these schools from central government.’
A spokesman for the Labour Party said ‘the point Ed Miliband was trying to make yesterday was there’s a lack of oversight in the current system’.
One of the Party’s manifesto commitments is to introduce a system of local directors of school standards.
A Conservative Party spokesman said: ‘Labour's education policy is in complete chaos. They have no plan to raise standards in our schools. In fact, we now know that Ed Miliband wants to turn the clock back and undo everything that has been achieved under this government.’
