As today is April 1st, I thought about writing a post to celebrate All Fool’s Day. However, I didn’t have the heart to do so after reading Mark Pack’s brilliant parody of focus groups and political leaders. EXCLUSIVE: New focus group insights on political party leaders
My thought was to parody the mess the governance of schooling is in England at present by linking it to the opportunity offered by local government reorganisation. The post might have read something like this:
A leaked memo has suggested that the new councils created from local government reorganisation should have Education Committees. For those that are unaware of their history, such Committees existed for over a hundred years until Tony Blair imposed the cabinet style of government on local government, around the turn of the century, and abolished committees.
As a result, many decisions about education are currently taken by one person, the cabinet member, ratified, if necessary, by the cabinet, and then subject to scrutiny either before or after introduction. Although, as the civil service knows, cabinet government works well for the DfE, but it hasn’t always worked well at local levels, where coalition government is more commonplace. Local decisions about academies are often taken without any local scrutiny at all.
There is a pressing need to control the sprawling and out of control school scene, where two parallel school systems – academies and maintained schools – operate alongside each other with two sets of costs and a third diocesan system cuts across both. Education Committees could create single MAT for an area, including all schools, and make each school subject to democratically appointed governing bodies, voted in each year by the use of an app on mobile phones. Local employers would also have a vote, as would the Schools Council.
Schools forums would be abolished. Each Education Committee would establish a group of expert teachers to help schools and act as a buffer between schools and ofsted. In fact, ofsted would only visit schools either where Education Committees were concerned about the school or as part of a national sampling exercise liked to specific areas of national concern.
Education Committees would be part of a partnership of schooling that reflected a national service locally administered. Their understanding of place ….
At this point, the next page of the memo is lost. However, there is a note in the margin in scrawly handwriting that the current system is expensive and we should take a leaf out of the Department of Health’s recent mergers of ICBs to cut costs. We are worried that the growth of new upper tier authorities replacing the remaining ‘shire’ counties will increase costs with many new Directors each requiring need liaising from the department.
For those that don’t understand the heading, I suggest a visit to The Best April Fools’ Hoax Ever – GreekReporter.com Next year will be 70th anniversary of the programme’s first broadcast. What a different world we now inhabit.
John Howson 