Sir Philip Green right to propose centralised approach
John Freeman
Monday, October 25, 2010
Sir Philip Green has spotted that the government is inefficient. It buys laptops and paper for wildly different and inflated prices, and manages its property portfolio appallingly. He proposes centralisation, and who could argue against that? A central agency could distribute supplies much more cheaply than every business unit buying their own.
Of course, this is back to the future. My late father worked in the private sector, and one of his jobs was to negotiate contracts for millions of exercise books to local education authorities up and down the country. Because the orders were being placed on a huge scale, and in a very competitive environment, councils could, and did, demand very tight pricing. And when I worked in the Inner London Education Authority in the early 1980s, the cost of computer disks and other supplies was held right down by the Greater London Council's supplies department.
The benefits of local educational management of schools are beyond doubt. But if a school is responsible for its own land and buildings, its own staffing, and its own purchasing, it will often be less efficient. There is, in my view, a minimum size for organisations to operate truly independently, while securing reasonable efficiency. A further education college with a £20m turnover is probably big enough. But most academies, secondary schools, free schools, and primary schools are simply not able to secure economies of scale. That's one reason why the first swathe of academies operate in chains, and why local education authorities were thought of in the first place.
Of course, this goes diametrically against Education Secretary Michael Gove's view that the more autonomy a school has, the better it will be. While I am a strong proponent of educational autonomy, I am, like Philip Green, convinced that complete management autonomy builds in diseconomies of scale that we can ill afford in these austere times.
John Freeman is a former director of children's services and now a freelance consultant