It is in the interests of local authorities to make sure no school becomes outstanding

23 January 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

Why are local authorities so bad at PR? Don’t they realise they are engaged in a political fight for their lives? The nub of the Tories’ education policy — though they don’t express it like this — is to wrest control of state education away from local authorities. Given that educational provision is the chief responsibility of local authorities, they are in danger of losing their raison d’être.

The main criticism of local education authorities is that they haven’t done enough to raise standards. As David Cameron pointed out earlier this week, the number of boys at Eton who received three As at A-level last year is greater than the total number of boys eligible for free school meals who received comparable results. That is a scandalous statistic and a reflection of the fact that access to high-performing schools is largely restricted to the rich. The main exceptions are faith schools and the remaining grammar schools — and the reason they’re so successful is that they have a variety of mechanisms in place to protect them from local authority interference. When it comes to running schools, most local authorities are not fit for purpose.

Contrary to popular prejudice, this is not because the personnel involved are useless. I’m currently leading the efforts of a group of parents and teachers in Acton to set up a state secondary school and the local education officers I’ve come across have all been pretty impressive. The problem is a structural one. Because local authorities are responsible for the majority of state schools on their patch, they have a built-in incentive to ensure that no one school becomes outstanding. If it does, the neighbouring schools will begin to look bad in comparison and the authorities will end up antagonising more people than they please. If they single out one school for improvement — or try to start a high-performing school from scratch — the majority of their ‘stakeholders’ will complain. In short, local authorities are under an obligation to preserve mediocrity. In some cases, this isn’t simply a political obligation — it’s also a financial one. Suppose a local authority has refurbished one of its existing schools with a variety of Private Finance Initiatives. Provided that school is fully subscribed, a local authority has no problem meeting its obligations to the companies who’ve invested in that school, but the moment the rolls begin to fall it starts to incur penalties. Consequently, a local authority has a financial incentive to ensure that its PFI-funded school has no serious competition. If the PFI-school happens to be bog standard, that means the authority has a responsibility to ensure that every other school on its patch is also bog standard.

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