Duplicitous education white paper sets councils up to fail

The Department for Education’s white paper Educational Excellence Everywhere has faced considerable criticism. In particular, the proposal to require all schools to become academies by 2022 has fuelled the ire of Conservative county councils that think they have been doing a decent job of supporting their schools.

Last week, the DfE bowed to pressure, stating that blanket provision to convert all schools will not be brought forward in legislation, with “high-performing” maintained schools retaining choice of whether to convert. But there are more concerns about the plans. I want to focus on two themes – the duplicitous doublespeak running through the paper and the calculated attack on local authorities.

Doublespeak one: always beware of people relying on heady words like “excellence”. Governments of all colours have called on the “E” word to justify their ambitions. But rarely has it been done so brazenly. The white paper announces the creation of “achieving excellence areas”. In government doublespeak, though, this is an area that is truly doing badly. In particular, if you do not have many friendly big businesses who are keen to sponsor academies and assume control of your land and assets, you will be allocated to one of these areas, and the government will find companies to help you.

Doublespeak two: the involvement of parents in schools. The paper states that the government is “committed to ensuring that parents’ views are given due consideration by schools” and that “parents will always be encouraged to serve on governing boards”. What a shame the 128-page report did not have enough space to include one sentence about the real policy proposal in the pipeline – to remove the current requirement for governing bodies to actually have parents on the governing body. So the biggest move to disempower parents within our education system is cloaked in rhetoric of promoting parental influence.

Doublespeak three introduces the continued attempt to destroy any remaining power of local authorities. The paper claims that when councils no longer have a role in supporting schools, they will still have important functions to fulfil. It describes three roles – ensuring every child has a school place; that their needs are met; and championing parents and local community. The government must know that the actions they are pursuing make it almost impossible for local authorities to undertake those roles in the future.

How can they ensure “every child has a school place”? The government has removed the power of an authority to set up a school or to require an academy to expand. In future, councils will only be able to make representations to an unelected regional schools commissioner.

How can they ensure “the needs of all pupils are met”? They will retain responsibility to assess children with special educational needs and provide support, but they will no longer have access to academies to know how (or if) that support is being delivered. They will be expected to ensure places are available for those excluded from schools, but they will not have the power to set up that provision. If some academies are systematically suggesting to parents that “difficult children” be removed from registers and home-educated, the authority can do nothing.

How will they “champion parents”? They will have no powers, and no budget, to do that.

The cynic might conclude that government is setting up local authorities to fail in their future nominal education role, just as they are doing in the world of social care. It is not difficult. Set up an independent inspection regime, which places providers into one of four categories: outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate. Then ensure the criteria result in 80 per cent of authorities falling into the worst two categories. It is interesting to compare it with schools – independent agencies untainted by local authorities. For schools, 80 per cent are currently placed in the top two tiers – good or outstanding.

The categories are not objective judgments. While the inspection judgment of any one school or local authority usually reflects how good they are, the government indirectly determines roughly how many are placed in each category. This is what is called “norm referenced testing”. Inspections help to rank schools and local authorities against each other, while decisions about the four grades is a political decision.

Overall, most councils (who have faced budget cuts of 40 per cent amid increasing demand) have fared badly. Most schools (whose budgets have been protected) have fared well. We could come to a conclusion about the impact of cuts. Instead, the government suggests an alternative conclusion – that independently managed schools are largely good, while local authority services are largely bad. The so-called impartial judgments then become the justification for transferring social care roles into the private sector.

If the current government is still in power in 2022, I predict it will say that councils have proved themselves unable to carry out their functions relating to schools and social care effectively, and oh-so-reluctantly propose privatisation.

Sir Paul Ennals is chair of the local safeguarding children boards in Haringey and South Tyneside