Training | 2009.06.26
Labour to junk Blair's flagship school reform
Headteachers to get more powers as era of centralised control ends
The government is to abandon the most significant education reform of the New Labour era in order to end the centralised control of schools and grant headteachers more powers, the Guardian has learned.
In a totemic break from the Blair years, next week\'s education white paper will signal the end of Labour\'s national strategies for schools, which includes oversight of the literacy and numeracy hours in primaries. The changes will strip away centralised prescription of teaching methods and dramatically cut the use of private consultants currently employed to improve schools.
They will give schools more freedom and establish new networks of school-to-school support to help drive up standards in what will be described as a "new era of localism".
Ed Balls, the schools secretary, has masterminded the plan, which could save the government up to £100m a year on its contract with the private company Capita, which delivers the national strategies. It forms part of an efficiency drive to slim down government bureaucracy.
Instead, money will be redirected to schools to spend on forging networks with neighbouring schools and buying in their own advisers to help them drive up teaching standards and exam results. Good schools will be expected to federate with lower-performing schools to help them improve. Schools will still be able to teach the literacy and numeracy hours, but there will be no central bureaucracy to support it.
The changes will be part of a wide-ranging white paper, expected to be published on Tuesday, which will also overhaul school league tables by introducing New York-style report cards that will give schools a grade ranging from A to F. The annual report cards will include information on truancy levels, pupil behaviour, sporting achievements and how good schools are at teaching children from disadvantaged backgrounds, as well as raw exam results. The white paper will include a prospectus for a version for all state schools in England.
The national strategies were introduced in 1998, beginning with a daily literacy and numeracy hour in primary schools. Capita provides teaching materials and staff training to standardise and improve teaching across schools. The strategies have since expanded to take in secondary school improvement and consultancy services to local authorities to help them manage schools.
Three separate sources close to the white paper told the Guardian that the national strategies would be wound down and replaced with more local support for schools. It is understood that the contract with Capita will not be renewed after 2011. The Conservatives backed the plans last night.
The changes are designed to end duplication in support for schools, which currently have an array of consultants from the local authority and the national strategies to help them improve. Instead, schools will be able to employ consultants directly to advise them, and increasingly the consultants will be other practising headteachers.
The national strategies are credited with a substantial improvement in school test results in the period after they were introduced, but that success has stalled. They were heavily criticised by the Commons education select committee, which concluded that what and how schools can teach under the programmes is too heavily prescribed. It said: "At times schooling has appeared more of a franchise operation, dependent on a recipe handed down by government rather than the exercise of professional expertise by teachers."
The literacy and numeracy hours are non-statutory, and schools do not have to follow the plans. However, headteachers complain that they are in effect required to because they are judged on their implementation by Ofsted.
Earlier this month, Balls told a conference of headteachers: "I think the right thing for us to do now is to move away from what has historically been a rather central view of school improvement through national strategies, to something which is essentially being commissioned not from the centre, but by schools themselves."
A statement on the Department for Children, Schools and Families website in April announced that Capita\'s contract had been extended by a year, the shortest contract to date. It said the services were being revised as part of the white paper to work towards the government\'s "new vision" for school improvement.
John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: "It is now clear that the way to improve schools in difficulty is to organise support from other, more successful schools. I hope the white paper will create a more coherent system of school support based on this principle."
Michael Gove, the shadow education secretary, said: "If Ed Balls is going to scrap the national strategies in their current form, we will support him. They cost a fortune and do not drive up standards. We want to give teachers more responsibility."
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/[...]ucation-reform-labour-ed-balls
