England’s biggest local authority has admitted it cannot afford to provide school improvement support, just days after ministers confirmed they want councils to help drive their new standards agenda.
Kent County Council – which has a £200 million SEND budget deficit – said its “current financial position” meant it could no longer pay for support for schools.
Schools must now pay themselves for help – with specific support for struggling schools pulled altogether.
Other authorities have also opted to buy in the support for their schools, scrapping in-house teams as funding is cut and budgets are squeezed by academy conversions.
Multi-academy trusts were the go-to school improvement solution under the Conservative government.
But Labour last week revealed details of new regional improvement for standards and excellence (RISE) teams that will commission support to improve struggling schools, including from councils, from January.
‘Bulk’ of support will come from elsewhere
However, Loic Menzies, a policy expert, said there were doubts that many councils would have the resource and expertise to get involved.
“Whilst RISE teams’ role as brokers has the potential to help schools navigate a fragmented landscape, the continued withering away of local authority capacity makes it clear that the bulk of support schools access is likely to come from [elsewhere].
“In the long run, most schools will probably be best off in a strong family of schools.”
Last year, the government scrapped a £50 million grant for local authority school improvement activities.
In an update posted online last week, Christine McInnes, Kent’s education director, said the council had “continued investing in school improvement services”, through its company The Education People (TEP).
But the authority’s current financial position meant this was “no longer possible”. Instead, schools would have to use their own money if they wanted to access support.
Under the plans, additional cash for “specific interventions” or brokered support would also no longer be available, with schools having to fund this themselves.
In-house teams ‘reduced or cut’
Lucia Glynn, an academy consultant, said many council in-house school improvement teams had been “reduced, or cut completely, with external consultancy [companies] taking their place”.
In Haringey, north London, headteachers banded together six years ago to launch their own schools-run improvement company. The authority expected to pay up to £275,000 on redundancies as it “would no longer require employees to carry out these functions”.
Haringey said it used to get £1.4 million as part of the education services grant, scrapped as the government aimed to “reduce the role of local authorities in school improvement”, council documents said.
Staffordshire used previous improvement cash “to commission quality assurance visits based on our analysis of schools”.
But after the grant was pulled, its schools forum – which votes on local funding matters – decided leaders should instead be responsible for taking on the work.
Hull City Council said it no longer ran a school improvement team “as it operates in a near fully-academised education system”. Ninety-four of its 98 schools are in a trust.
“As such, the LA can no longer access central funding to directly deliver school improvement services. This is the case nationally for academised education systems,” a spokesman said.
“It is important to recognise that due to increasing financial burdens, the LA has been forced to focus on the delivery of statutory duties.”
Many councils have majority of academies
Schools Week analysis suggests that at least half of primaries and secondaries in six of England’s 10 largest local authorities are academies. In all, 45 per cent of councils had a majority of academies.
Thurrock in Essex no longer has any maintained schools. As such, it “does not have a duty to provide school improvement support”.
Academies in the area “have access to the well-established local teaching school hub”, though, the authority added.
North Somerset continues to provide in-house improvement support for its last six maintained schools.
But the scope of the support “has changed over the years, due to increased academisation, changing responsibilities” and funding cuts.
Hampshire still runs more than 85 per cent of schools. The council stressed its improvement work “has not been scaled back and indeed continues to expand”.
Glynn said RISE “will work best” in areas such as Hampshire, where authorities “have retained and invested in their school improvement teams”.
But she called on the DfE “to review the dedicated schools grant and ensure that it is sufficient to recruit and retain high-calibre school improvement leaders in-house”.
