Education: Local control is best

A READER wrote recently enclosing a cutting from The Independent for 6 October, 1988. The piece, by Peter Wilby, one of my predecessors and now the editor of the New Statesman, made a prediction: "Local education authorities will be extinct by 1998."

Wilby, of course, was wrong. Today, the north of England education conference begins in Sunderland, where representatives of the nation's local education authorities are assembling for their annual jamboree. David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education, will be there, proof enough that this is no marginal gathering of educational dinosaurs.

Local councillors were hated by the last government. This one is more ambivalent but the Prime Minister's advisers believe that real schools reform is impossible until they disappear. So how have authorities managed to fend off their enemies? One of their strongest cards is their opponents' difficulty in finding a replacement. If they didn't exist, should we need to reinvent them?

Kenneth Clarke, the former Conservative secretary of state for education, who tried harder than most to find a way of cutting local authorities out of the educational action, wanted to do just that. He considered regional bodies that would have no elected members and would be firmly under Whitehall's control. The solution was rejected as "too socialist", an objection which the present Government would presumably share.

Today, the opposition to local education authorities from people such as Chris Woodhead, the Chief Inspector of Schools, is based on the idea that schools would run their own affairs, buying in services they needed from commercial agencies. Mr Woodhead has suggested that local councils may create "a dependency culture" among schools.

But authorities' first line of defence is that they are not what they were. During the last decade, they have undergone a transformation. The Conservatives' decision to allow schools to opt out of local authority control has acted as a spur. Many councils have stepped back from their nannying role and now talk about "partnership" with heads and governors.

As Mr Blunkett will point out tomorrow, there are exceptions. A report last year on Calderdale education authority painted a picture of councillors who immersed themselves in the trivia of schools' daily life while failing to notice the Ridings school's descent into chaos. Also castigated was the London borough of Hackney, where councillors squabbled so much that they neglected local children's interests.

The answer, however, is not to abolish local education authorities. Even the Conservatives,who considered freeing all schools from local authority control, had civil servants working on (unpublished) plans for how to prop up small primaries: in short, they acknowledged that some schools would need the support of something very like a local authority.

This Government has sensibly accepted that local councils should have a role in planning school places and working out a fair admissions system. The alternative is a parental free-for-all in which the weak go to the wall.

A central source of advice and information - available if it is wanted - also makes sense at least for some schools.

Peter Wilby admitted in his 1988 piece that prediction-making was dangerous, but added: "Nobody reads old newspaper cuttings." He was wrong about that, too. But I remain undeterred. I predict that in 2009 local education authorities will still be alive and well. If they are not, Mr Hyman of Bushey Heath will no doubt let us know.