Councils can offer safety net on school standards

Revised statutory guidance to local authorities on the roles of directors and lead members for children’s services makes clear that a single officer and a single elected member must be responsible for both education and children’s social care in their area and that they should each have an integrated children’s services brief.

The guidance – radically slimmed down, but this time not to the point of nothingness – affirms the concept of children’s services enshrined in the Children Act 2004.

But what is perhaps most striking about the guidance is its insistence that local authorities “should promote educational excellence for all children and young people and be ambitious in tackling underperformance” including the development of robust school improvement strategies. This assertion comes at a time when about 50 per cent of secondaries and four per cent of primaries are, or are in the process of becoming, academies – released from local authority control. It also comes as Ofsted chief inspector Michael Wilshaw intensifies the pressure on all schools to raise standards, scrapping the “satisfactory” grading and replacing it with the much more critical judgment of “requires improvement”.