Councils redefine their role with schools

Since the government set out its education reforms, councils have been trying to clarify their role in a more autonomous schools system.

Education Secretary Michael Gove has said councils should be “champions” for all local children, but what this means in practice is just starting to emerge. As rising numbers of academies and changes to the way improvement support is delivered come into force, councils are coming up with fresh ways of tackling problems.

A study on the council role in education, on behalf of the Local Government Association and the Department for Education, attempts to answer a number of the questions that remain.

Here, we examine the key issues raised in the research.

How do you make sure that schools support each other?
The government wants schools to support each other to improve. But local authorities continue to be accountable for ?securing good outcomes for all children and young people in their area. Therefore, councils must make sure that school-to-school support is comprehensive.

“If there isn’t a well-developed market in school improvement apart from the local authority, the council could encourage a new provider to come into the area,” says Ian Keating, senior policy consultant at the Local Government Association. “They could also have a role around quality assuring school support.”

In Kingston, the council has created EducationKingston, a partnership tasked with supporting school improvement. The partnership provides member schools with support and challenges, brokers school-to-school support and can commission external support on behalf of schools. So far, 96 per cent of Kingston schools have signed up to the project.

How do you manage the supply of places?
Increasing numbers of academies mean that local authorities are facing challenges in planning the supply of school places.

Decisions to expand or contract have knock-on implications for neighbouring schools, and the situation is complicated by the fact that in five years’ time, the current surge in primary school numbers will feed through to secondary schools.

Justin Donovan, director of education and early intervention at Hertfordshire County Council, says strong relationships with schools are essential.

“Rather than talk to individual schools, we sit down with secondary schools across an area, share the data with them, provide an analysis of which sites are suitable for expansion and have a grown-up conversation,” he says.

“Reason, shared data and strong relationships are the levers of power now. Authorities that have been doing things to schools rather than working with them are going to struggle.”

How do you deal with school closures?
When a successful school expands, or a new school opens, other local schools can be forced to close as a result of ?falling rolls.

“In the new system, a lot of local authority responsibilities around closing schools and reorganising have gone,” says Stephen Castle, lead member for education at Essex County Council. “My view is that the local authority should be a commissioner of education settings on behalf of the community and the taxpayer.”

Evidence of this “commissioning approach” can be found in Wandsworth, where the local authority has set up an Academies and Free School Commission, as a point of contact for potential academy sponsors and free school ?applications. Its establishment means the authority is better informed about potential bids, and increases the chance that applications fit the needs of local children and young people.

How do you monitor underperformance?
Another issue for local authorities is how to keep tabs on how schools are performing. “Authorities ought to have the ability to challenge the delivery of public sector services such as schools in their area,” Essex’s Stephen Castle says.

“We should be able to hold schools to account on outcomes. We need transparency in terms of the hard measures such as exam results, and soft measures, such as concerns of parents.”

East Sussex has developed a system to make up for the fact that it no longer receives regular information from school improvement partners about school performance. Rather than relying on outcomes data and Ofsted inspections, the authority is holding bi-monthly meetings with service managers whose agencies interact regularly with schools. Managers are asked to identify any concerns or relevant intelligence about schools. Logs of questions, complaints and concerns raised by parents are also discussed.

How can councils support the most vulnerable children?
Since the inception of academies, fears have been raised that increasing autonomy could lead to individual schools ?deciding to “opt out” of taking their fair share of students of children with special educational needs or those from ?disadvantaged backgrounds.

Cuts to council funding for services such as education welfare and behaviour support, in light of increasing academy numbers, also mean that local authority services to support the most vulnerable children are being cut back.

The LGA’s Ian Keating says success in this area will require local authorities to support and persuade schools to take ?decisions that are for the collective good.

“There is a worry about the ability of schools to provide or source provision themselves,” he adds. “Authorities need to help those smaller schools and stand-alone academies to make sufficient provision.”

How can local authorities tackle failings?
Local authority school improvement teams have been stripped back. As a result, the ability of local authorities to ?effectively support maintained schools has been reduced in many areas.

Academies, meanwhile, are responsible for their own improvement. Although the government is advocating school-to-school support, Hertfordshire’s Justin Donovan says there is still a vital role for local authorities in helping to address ?underperformance.

“You can’t ask a school to step in and make a difficult decision on behalf of another school,” he says. “In the past, the local authority has supported head teachers in finding other careers, but it is unreasonable for one head to take another for a ‘walk-around-the-garden’ conversation. It won’t be a problem for four or five years because schools that have converted are all outstanding, but it will be an issue when head teachers and governors change.”