Why are local authorities so bad at PR? Don’t they realise they are engaged in a political fight for their lives? The nub of the Tories’ education policy — though they don’t express it like this — is to wrest control of state education away from local authorities. Given that educational provision is the chief responsibility of local authorities, they are in danger of losing their raison d’être.
The main criticism of local education authorities is that they haven’t done enough to raise standards. As David Cameron pointed out earlier this week, the number of boys at Eton who received three As at A-level last year is greater than the total number of boys eligible for free school meals who received comparable results. That is a scandalous statistic and a reflection of the fact that access to high-performing schools is largely restricted to the rich. The main exceptions are faith schools and the remaining grammar schools — and the reason they’re so successful is that they have a variety of mechanisms in place to protect them from local authority interference. When it comes to running schools, most local authorities are not fit for purpose.
Contrary to popular prejudice, this is not because the personnel involved are useless. I’m currently leading the efforts of a group of parents and teachers in Acton to set up a state secondary school and the local education officers I’ve come across have all been pretty impressive. The problem is a structural one. Because local authorities are responsible for the majority of state schools on their patch, they have a built-in incentive to ensure that no one school becomes outstanding. If it does, the neighbouring schools will begin to look bad in comparison and the authorities will end up antagonising more people than they please. If they single out one school for improvement — or try to start a high-performing school from scratch — the majority of their ‘stakeholders’ will complain. In short, local authorities are under an obligation to preserve mediocrity. In some cases, this isn’t simply a political obligation — it’s also a financial one. Suppose a local authority has refurbished one of its existing schools with a variety of Private Finance Initiatives. Provided that school is fully subscribed, a local authority has no problem meeting its obligations to the companies who’ve invested in that school, but the moment the rolls begin to fall it starts to incur penalties. Consequently, a local authority has a financial incentive to ensure that its PFI-funded school has no serious competition. If the PFI-school happens to be bog standard, that means the authority has a responsibility to ensure that every other school on its patch is also bog standard.
Even where education officers aren’t hampered by PFIs, there are still plenty of barriers to raising standards. In those boroughs where one comprehensive is conspicuously better than all the rest, the good comp will end up massively oversubscribed. It follows that a majority of the parents who’ve applied will not end up getting into their first choice of school — and a fair percentage of them will be so cheesed off about this that they will not vote for whichever party is running the local authority at the next council election. It follows that if local education officers succeed in creating a high-performing state school they will not please their political masters. On the contrary, their efforts are more likely to be met with redundancy.
Alan Milburn, the government’s ‘mobility tsar’, is aware of this design flaw in the provision of state education and he came up with a solution. Why not give the poorest children a voucher worth 150 per cent of the amount the state typically spends on educating them? If their parents are unhappy with the existing provision, they can simply switch to a better performing state school, thereby giving local authorities a financial incentive to drive up standards. Unfortunately, of the 88 recommendations Milburn made on improving social mobility, the government has only adopted 83 — and this wasn’t one of them.
The only way to improve standards in state schools is to create genuine competition and that will never happen under the present system. The problem with the Tories’ policy is that they’re not proposing to set schools free, merely to transfer state control from the local to the national level. In the long run, the best solution is to hand control over to parents and teachers.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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