Politicians are eager to fly the flag for giving more power to local bodies. But any move towards this must be driven from the centre
Local government officials have attacked the Partnership for Schools quango, a Policy Exchange report claimed this week. The officials are feeling pressured into adopting academies and trust schools in return for a share of the government’s £55bn school building budget.
Their critique neatly illustrates the dilemma facing ministers as they look for new ways to devolve power to professionals in direct contact with parents, pupils or patients.
For academies and trusts are both designed to increase the independence of schools from local as well as central government. Yet they often require top-down pressure to get them established.
Recent trends have been contradictory when it comes to local government. Both Labour and the Conservatives want to give councils the chance to build more social housing, for example. ‘I think it’s localism,’ declared shadow housing minister Grant Shapps at the weekend.
But with schools it is different. Both parties want more independent academies, though Schools Secretary Ed Balls wants them to work more with local authorities while his Tory shadow Michael Gove believes that parents might want to help run his new academies.
In truth, most such schools are likely to come through ‘chains’ of like-minded schools, such as Ark or the Harris Trust, which already run several academies each. Instead of through councils or parent power, many schools are likely to develop as part of national brands.
But this reduction in local council power is coinciding with less national accountability. The government’s flagship literacy and numeracy strategies are to be abandoned (though Ofsted will still inspect for daily lessons in the 3Rs). Labour has ditched national tests for 14-year-olds, while the Tories would get secondary teachers to test and mark primary pupils in place of the national tests at age 11. And while both parties stress the need for more published information, there is a growing hostility to national targets.
In health, an incoming Conservative government would leave decisions on minimum waiting times to individual hospitals. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has recently announced plans for entitlements setting out treatment times for cancer patients and guaranteeing personal tuition to school children.
There were certainly too many targets, and some were clearly counter-productive: although quickly abandoned, targets to reduce school exclusions came to be seen as a cause of poor discipline, and skills targets focused on qualifications rather than what employers really wanted.
But centrally driven programmes, such as the literacy and numeracy strategies, did a lot to counter past failings. They reintroduced spelling, grammar and punctuation to writing lessons; they put times tables back into primary maths; and they used phonics to teach reading. And despite the decision to scrap the national programmes, both the national curriculum and Ofsted inspections mean that such traditional approaches are likely to remain whoever is in power.
Equally, with targets, the biggest successes came with what were called ‘floor targets’ or minimum entitlements. Maximum waits for operations and the number of poorly performing schools have been greatly reduced: the number of schools where less than 30% of pupils achieve five good GCSEs including English and mathematics is 400 today – down from 1,600 in 1997.
Professor Michael Barber, once head of Tony Blair’s delivery unit, has argued that such minimum standards are necessary to move from poor to adequate provision, but to turn a school or hospital from adequate to good requires more freedoms and less central regulation. Hence the growth of academies and foundation hospitals.
Yet, even here, arm-twisting from central government was required to encourage academy sponsors and to build the academies programme. And greater local freedoms require clear accountability, through inspection and published outcomes.
Moreover, the public and the media will still expect minimum levels of provision – and no matter how much power is devolved, ministers will still end up taking the rap when things go wrong.
So, nobody should be surprised if greater localism and freedoms for schools and hospitals require – whisper it – a strong push from the centre and an even stronger dose of central accountability.
Conor Ryan is a former senior education adviser to David Blunkett and Tony Blair
