…But is is the job of The Government to ensure that local councils and other responsible bodies are properly funded to carry out the necessary maintenance.
On that front, ministers haven’t just failed. Because failure implies making an effort to try and succeed in a task. And I’m not seeing nearly enough evidence of that.
Many of you will have seen the excruciating clip from ITV News
You can also watch the following from Parliament.TV
- The statement from the Education Secretary on RAAC / aerated concrete
- The response from the Shadow Education Secretary (Labour)
- Question from Layla Moran MP for the Liberal Democrats on what ‘reasonable costs’ means
There is a little more from BBC News here, but what this scandal exposes is an ideological divide between the Conservatives and other political parties over what the state – and central government should be responsible for.
Outsourcing functions all too often means outsourcing responsibility.
When Michael Gove announced the massive expansion of the academies programme in 2010, the principle being that academy chains were better at managing schools than local councils.
“Freedom is one thing but it needs to be accompanied by accountability. The main accountability mechanism for academies is meant to come in the form of competition. The idea is that schools that are failing don’t attract pupils, get less money from government as a result and then up their game or eventually close.”
Tom Gash, Institute for Government 04 March 2014
Above – Mr Gash summarising the ideology behind the academies programme.
Essentially this comes back to how local public services are organised, funded, and held accountable.
The present system means there is no real sense of democratic accountability for education spending because trying to hold distant ministers accountable for school-by-school performance is a massive diseconomy of scale.
There are nearly 25,000 schools in England (state and independent)
See the headline statistics here. Having a system of accountability where you have to go through your MP to the Ministers at the Department for Education is a nonsense. MPs lined up in the Commons today asking the Secretary of State about schools within their constituency – which is their right and duty in the current system. Who would be the civil servants having to research those 25,000 schools to find out which are the ones affected and what has been done to deal with the issues? Who would be the civil servants trying to come up with a funding system to cover the emergency repairs needed?
Schools haven’t always been so centralised
Here’s former Liberal MP for Brighton, Milicent Garratt Fawcett’s husband, Professor Henry.
“Government interference can only be tolerated if that which it seeks to do cannot be done without it; and facts prove beyond dispute that if we go on in the future as we have in the past, the education of the nation will never be secured.”
Prof Henry Fawcett, Fri 05 Jan 1870, The Guildhall, Cambridge
The provision of state education after the Education Act 1870 did not involve micromanagement from a central ministry, but rather via local councils. And even then, finding the funding from local government taxation was seldom straight forward – as the Cambridge Independent of 1893 tells us. It took 100 years after that 1870 Act for someone to ask the children what schools they’d like – a process repeated in 2001 with the study published in 2003.
- Above-left: The School that I’d Like by Blishen (1969-73)
- Above-right: The School I’d like, by Burke & Grovsenor (2003)
By the Millennium the system was well-and-truely centralised (hence The Observer re-running their study in 2001 above, and revamped in 2011), with a young up-and-coming Liberal Democrat MEP called Nick Clegg calling for the system to be funded by. alocal income tax.
“Liberal Democrat MEP Nick Clegg and the party’s director of policy, Richard Grayson, in the course of arguing for England to introduce a local income tax to pay for education, similar to that levied in some European countries, and thereby give schools more money.”
The Guardian 11 May 2002
You can read their 2002 paper from the Centre for European Reform here
“In Britain, successive governments have eroded English local authorities’ role in providing education. Policymakers have argued that local government tends to be inefficient. They have claimed that a highly centralised system of raising taxes, balanced with greater control of individual budgets by the schools themselves, has produced greater value for money.”
“Learning from Europen” by Clegg & Grayson (2002) CER, p8
Which comes back to the point I return to regularly: successive governments have put the overhaul of the governance of England in the ‘too difficult pile’, instead choosing to centralise services under ministerial oversight instead. As I frequently mention on Twitter, the Public Administration & Constitutional Affairs Committee has said that the Governance of England really needs to be dealt with.
Under the current system, it’s very difficult to see where day-to-day accountability resides, so quite understandably and quite rightly everyone has gone after the Education Secretary.
Who has been found wanting.
But then we’ve read about getting the wrong politicians.
- Above – left: Held in contempt by Hannah White
- Above – right: Why we get the wrong politicians, by Isabel Hardman
The impact? Victoria Derbyshire summarises:
The challenge for opposition parties – and Labour in particular following their reshuffle, is to change the system so that it can deal with future crises more locally, rather than having an understaffed civil service unit trying to sift through records of 25,000 schools.
Food for thought?
If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to:
- Follow me on Twitter
- Like my Facebook page
- Consider a small donation to help fund my continued research and reporting on local democracy in and around Cambridge.
The Cambridge Town Owl 