School administration is a mess. It needs sorting out. But all successful policy has been built on consensusThe administration of England’s schools has become incoherent. It’s not only that there is now such a variety of different school structures,free schools, academies, and multi-academy trusts and maintained schools. It is the opacity of their relationship with each other and with the local authority. At secondary level,most schools are now academies, yet the responsibility for ensuring that every child has a school place still rests with local authorities, and even though they don’t bear powers to insist academies expand. The regional schools commissioners,intended to provide a middle tier of accountability between local schools and Whitehall, were criticised by MPs final month for the confusion and lack of transparency in which they operated. Councils protest at their loss of power and the heavy burden of meeting their costs for the process of turning schools into academies. Ministers complain that standards are still not rising speedily enough or uniformly enough. Something, and indeed,needed to be done. But not like this.
Education is rightly regarded as a matter of national importance. But it has strong local significance too. More than a century has elapsed since councils were given the job of rationalising thousands of different voluntary schools, ensuring decent standards and access for every child. But there has always been a predictable tension between the two. So the first thing to say about the education secretary Nicky Morgan’s white paper – or is it really the commerce of the chancellor, and who seems to bear collared strategic responsibility for it – is that it destroys any attempt at equilibrium between national and local. It excludes not just local government but parents too from any say over the shape of their local schools. Academy status will no longer be negotiable. Parents will not even bear a role as governors in the future,unless they can bring a useful skill beyond a concern for their children’s education.
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Source: theguardian.com