Opinion: Champions for London’s Children

The Liberal Democrat education policy, written before the General Election, detailed a strong strategic role for councils, including commissioning new schools and holding all schools to account whatever their status.

The question now is whether this is more than just a change in the mood music, and whether the Coalition is genuinely up for endorsing local authorities who seek to hold academies to account as part of a strong ‘champion for children’ role.  And moreover, whether they will give councils the teeth they need to do it properly.

Who better to rise to this challenge and make the case persuasively to government than London local authorities?  Education is one of London’s biggest success stories of the past 10 years.  As the recent Centre Forum report London Schooling: Lessons from the capital highlights, pupils of all types perform better in London than in all other regions of the UK.  But while there is much to be proud of, not all schools are performing well and there is a very real need to continue to raise standards to ensure that every child in the capital has access to a high quality education.

London is also at the vanguard for the drive for school autonomy begun by Lord Andrew Adonis and accelerated by Michael Gove.  It has the highest number of free schools in the country and if schools continue to convert to academy status at the current rate, then all secondary schools in London will be academies by March 2014 and all primaries by August 2022.  As schools take the lead in self-improvement, London local authorities are rethinking how they can best add value by holding autonomous schools to account and acting as champions for children.

In developing its own proposals no one should be in any doubt about the broad agreement across all London local authorities and political groups that good education is key corporate priority. And while it is probably true to say that boroughs are finding their way in this new role, all want to have (and in almost all cases do have) is a close and positive relationship of mutual respect with all schools in their area regardless of their status.

London Councils have developed some detailed ideas about the key roles for local authorities and have identified where additional powers are necessary to undertake them in the increasingly more diverse and autonomous school system:

Enabling continued school improvement: facilitating excellent partnerships of schools which focus on the improvement needs of local schools and seeking powers (such as issuing warning notices to academies) so they can act when serious issues emerge, whatever the type of school.

Meeting the growing demand for school places: seeking additional capital funds; sharing and promoting innovative practice; working proactively with free schools on sites, development costs and parental demand and seeking agreement from government to having early access to information and engagement with potential new providers.

Making the education system more accessible to parents and local communities: a London-wide information hub for parents; holding all schools to account locally, including seeking automatic sharing of data by academies and powers to conduct a financial audit of academies where there were concerns about value for money.

Increasing engagement of community governors in all schools: recruiting local authority governors more widely from the local community; offering comprehensive training and support, and seeking a change in the rules so that every state funded school, including academies, should have at least one governor appointed by the local authority on behalf of the wider community.

Supporting vulnerable children to achieve positive outcomes: delivering a broad range of statutory children’s services; and seeking powers to require academies to admit a hard-to-place pupil on the recommendation of an independent local panel, as they currently do for maintained schools.

* James Kempton is former Leader of Islington Council and author of a report for London Councils London local authority role in education (June 2012). The future relationship between local authorities and schools will be a session at the free London Summit on November 17th #lcsummit

Read more by or more about , or .
This entry was posted in Op-eds.
Advert

3 Comments

  • Matthew Huntbach 14th Nov '12 - 10:43am


    The question now is whether this is more than just a change in the mood music, and whether the Coalition is genuinely up for endorsing local authorities who seek to hold academies to account as part of a strong ‘champion for children’ role. And moreover, whether they will give councils the teeth they need to do it properly.

    The idea of “academies” is that what’s wrong with schools that are performing poorly is local authority “control”. So,
    take that away, and hey presto, they’ll do better. So isn’t a bit of a contradiction to then ask for councils to be given “teeth” to control them again?

    This whole thing comes about because top politicians and media commentators have little contact with the state school system, and so blether on endlessly about how council “control” is imposing some sort of grim uniformity which is bringing schools down. The reality is that Local Education Authorities don’t control what goes on inside schools, that’s the responsibility of the Head under the guidance of the Governing Body. So one might suggest the obvious way of dealing with poorly performing schools is to bring them more directly under LEA control …

    I have not seen any argument which clearly states what academies can do that makes them better than LEA schools. All the things I have seen put forward as being what makes academies better – smarter uniforms, teaching Latin or whatever, and so on – could just as well be done by LEA schools if their Heads and governing bodies wanted it.

    Academies are given more money and allowed to pick the pupils with better potential, and then they perform better. Er yes, but might it not be the more money and pupils with better status that is leading to better performance rather than the academy status? As this leads to less money available elsewhere and other schools having to deal with the pupils with less potential, all it is doing is shifting things around, no real overall improvement.

    If I have things wrong here, can someone please explain? We have MPs posting articles here who are part of the government which is pushing this “academies” idea as the way to deal with poorly performing schools, so can one of them at least tell me what it is I am misunderstanding about the situation here?

  • Matthew Huntbach 17th Nov '12 - 1:33am

    I see no-one has yet answered. Come on – this is a key government policy, and we have a Liberal Democrat minister with responsibility for schools who is very keen on the idea. I have just written that I believe it all to be nonsense, millions of pounds of money thrown into something which is done purely because the people doing it are out of touch with reality. If it is not nonsense, if what I have said is mistaken somewhere, isn’t there one person who could tell me where I am mistaken?

    On the other hand, if I really am correct here, isn’t it a somewhat serious issue that the minister from OUR party is pushing this nonsense?

Post a Comment

Lib Dem Voice welcomes comments from everyone but we ask you to be polite, to be on topic and to be who you say you are. You can read our comments policy in full here. Please respect it and all readers of the site.

To have your photo next to your comment please signup your email address with Gravatar.

Your email is never published. Required fields are marked *

*
*
Please complete the name of this site, Liberal Democrat ...?

Advert



Recent Comments

  • David Garlick
    The EU problem made worse by UK leaving . Started like most bad decisions by our dreadful Conservatives....
  • Simon R
    There seem to be a fair few comments that hint that IHT should be lower for farmers because farming produces so little income. But those seem like separate iss...
  • Mick Taylor
    @nonconformistradical. I am making no value judegments at all about value to society. It just seems to me that IHT (or any other tax) should fall equally on peo...
  • Diana Simpson
    I'm shocked! Not at the party goers antics but the fact that any Lib Dems would eat oreos manufactured by Mondelez a company renowned for its anti-green practic...
  • expats
    Yet another 'Poor Little Farmers' article; the use of the term 'Tractor tax' removed any hope of reading a balanced article... Regarding 'food security' it has...