By Judith Ugwumadu | 19 September 2013
The government is yet to take control of the ‘absurd’ situation of the shortage of school places, a direct result of its mismanagement and ‘incoherent’ free schools programme the National Union of Teachers has claimed.
The NUT and Local Government Information Unit think-tank, this week published a review on the management of school places. They asked 95 directors of children’s services and lead members for children’s services to assess the effectiveness of the existing school place planning powers.
Of those surveyed, 91% said that a ‘middle tier’ was needed to provide strategic oversight of all schools, including academies and free schools. The respondents agreed that local government was best placed to perform this role.
NUT General Secretary Christine Blower said: ‘To ensure every child gets a decent education, school place planning needs to be returned to safe hands.’
Academy conversions are making it harder for local authorises to achieve the 10% extra places required and reducing the influence and resources of local government in education, the report said. Blower said local authorities have the knowledge of what is needed and where in local communities, not the secretary of state.
LGUI chief executive Jonathan Carr-West added that local authorities have a duty to ensure that there are sufficient and sufficiently diverse school places available to meet the needs of their communities.
He said: ‘Too few places and the community is ill served, too many and public resource is wasted. Failures in school place planning have many and complex causes, but research for this report suggests a correlation with the number of academies: schools in which the local authority has no direct power to increase or decrease the number of places available.’
‘Local authorities rightly see themselves as the champions of all children and parents in their localities irrespective of which schools they attend. This political advocacy role is vital and exists entirely independently of their formal powers to direct schools. In a fast changing context, however, we must ensure that we support this role rather than undermine it.’
At a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrat conference in Glasgow where the report was discussed, schools minister David Laws said the government was considering making long-term capital allocations to councils to provide new school places.
