Like many other people of my generation, it was almost inevitable that any primary school fetes or fairs would be accompanied by music from Black Lace, including such classics as the hokey cokey. Never would I have imagined that four decades later, this timeless song would be stuck in my head as I digested the latest developments in our state school system.
During the interviews for my major research project on the school system earlier this year, the most consistent message I heard was not ‘put all schools back under local authority control’ or ‘put all schools in trusts’, but rather ‘can someone please just put a plan in place and get on with it?’.
When the previous Conservative government tried to put their 2022 Schools White Paper into action to push all schools into trusts, it encountered so many obstacles (some more avoidable than others) that it eventually fell apart. For the third time since 2010, we were yet again left without ‘a plan’.
The 2024 Labour party election manifesto was almost entirely silent on the question of how our school system should develop. Since the election, education secretary Bridget Phillipson has reiterated more than once that she is focused on “standards, not structures”.
There is nothing wrong with this positioning given the complexity of the issues at stake: admissions, funding, transparency, accountabilities, responsibilities and so on. I would not be keen on any new government charging into these issues unprepared.
That said, some sporadic announcements on this matter have started to emerge from the department for education (DfE).
A new government making announcements on schools is hardly surprising, but their proposals feel worryingly disconnected from any overall plan or strategy for where we might be headed.
We need a definitive answer on the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder
Start with the Phillipson’s recent comment that she is “open to considering” struggling academies returning to local authority (LA) oversight. Does this mean it is happening, or not happening, or does no one know if it is happening or not?
Then we learn that the DfE’s new Regional improvement for standards and excellence (RISE) teams will be commissioning support for weaker schools from trusts, LAs and federations.
But what will trigger this support? What if the LA cannot offer any support because their capacity and resources are fully exhausted after 14 years of financial strain? What if a trust says it has the internal expertise to improve a struggling school but the LA disagrees (a situation that could get more contentious if LAs were allowed to take on under-performing academies in future)?
Our state school system has been in desperate need of a clear direction of travel for too long. Moreover, without a plan for who is supposed to be responsible for each part of the system, any attempt by ministers to tackle other daunting challenges (such as improving specialist and alternative provision) will become that much harder.
From a policy perspective, the DfE’s recent announcements on LAs potentially taking on greater responsibility for school oversight and improvement without any additional funding to deliver these functions have regrettably pushed us even further away from a sensible, pragmatic route forward.
As a result, the hokey cokey is ringing loudly in my ears. In our future state school system, should we put the LAs in, or LAs out? In? Out? In? Out? Or are they just being messed about?
We need a definitive answer on the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder in the state school system, backed up with legislation, and we need it soon.
Regardless of exactly what school system we would each like to see, hopefully we can all agree that any uncertainty created by the DfE ‘shaking it all about’ without a plan is the worst of all worlds.
