Nick Raynsford says that the secretary of state for education has wielded a heavy-handed and centralist stick which shows scant regard for the role and concerns of elected councils.
Education is one of the areas where the tensions between the coalition government’s localist rhetoric and its centralist inclinations are already most in evidence.| "Policy decisions on education are clearly going to come from the centre, and their implementation will show scant regard for the role and concerns of elected councils." |
Whether it is a question of the governance model for academies, the criteria for opening and funding ‘free schools’, or the closure of the Building Schools for the Future programme, the messages coming out of the Department for Education over the past two months have been, frankly, contemptuous of local authorities.
Policy decisions on education are clearly going to come from the centre, and their implementation will show scant regard for the role and concerns of elected councils. In one sense, this should not come as a surprise.
Throughout the lifetime of the Labour Government, there was tension between the education department and the CLG – as well as its predecessors – over the powers and funding, respectively, of local authorities and schools.
At a time when CLG was pressing for less ring-fencing of budgets and more discretion for local authorities, the Department of Education sought greater control over the allocation of schools’ funding. And the first year of the last parliament was dominated by rows over an Education White Paper which was widely seen as a move to restrict the remit of local councils and allow greater freedom for schools to determine their admission policies and capacity.
The difference this time, however, is the absence of any sign of ‘give and take’ between the two sides. Whereas the rows over the Education White Paper ended in compromise, there is absolutely no evidence that Mr Gove intends making any concessions to the localist case. Equally, there is as yet no sign of an emerging body of opinion among those on the Government’s back-benches willing to take up the cudgels, as their Labour counterparts did in 2005-6, on behalf of local authorities’ against the centralising tendencies of their frontbench colleagues.
This is all the more surprising, given the presence of a substantial body of Liberal Democrat MPs who cannot have imagined in advance of the election that they would be voting to support the emasculation of local authorities’ powers in respect of new school openings, or the brutal termination of 700 new school building projects.
The termination of the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme is not just evidence of heavy-handed centralism. It is also an indication of the faultline at the heart of the Government’s economic policies. In his Budget statement in June, the chancellor, George Osborne, made clear his wish to see capital investment programmes protected from the full rigours of the spending cuts. This was, of course, prompted by an understanding that cuts in capital programmes would have serious adverse effects on the prospects of recovery from the recession, as well as leading to substantial increases in unemployment in the construction industry.
But whatever Mr Osborne might have hoped for, Mr Gove has a different agenda. Apart from projects which have already reached fi nancial close, where the contractual liabilities of cancellation would have been fi - nancially catastrophic, the BSF programme has been ended – other than in the case of academies, where Mr Gove’s ideologicallydriven agenda has prevailed.
The tragedy is that this has come at a time when BSF, after a slow start, had reached a point where it was delivering a very substantial programme of investment in an effective and well-co-ordinated way. Far from being a bureaucratic nightmare, as Mr Gove implied, Partnership for Schools had resolved most of the key problems which had initially inhibited BSF’s output – problems which are inevitable in such a complex programme involving the procurement of thousands of schools across more than 140 local authorities.
Balancing the need for local discretion, initiative, and ownership of the project with the equally-important obligations to secure costeffective and high-quality design, construction and environmental performance, is never going to be easy. What is remarkable is the way in which the programme had been transformed to a point where it was capable of delivering a sustained output of high-quality buildings which, in turn, would help transform educational attainment in all parts of the country.
A heavy-handed and profoundly-misguided central diktat has essentially dashed the hopes and expectations of thousands of communities that they would see the benefi t of new or improved schools in their area.
The long-term consequences in economic, social and education terms will be severe.
Nick Raynsford is a former local government minister
