Schools White Paper promises councils strategic role as parent champions

Local authorities will have a strong strategic role “as champions for parents, families and vulnerable pupils”, the government has claimed in its Schools White Paper, The Importance of Teaching.

Councils will also promote educational excellence “by ensuring a good supply of high quality school places, co-ordinating fair admissions and developing their own school improvement strategies to support local schools”.

The government said its package of reforms would see heads and teachers driving school improvement.

Key elements of the White Paper are as follows:

Teaching and leadership

• Raising the quality of new entrants to the teaching profession
• Reforming initial teacher training to increase the proportion of time trainees spend in the classroom
• Developing a national network of Teaching Schools on the model of teaching hospitals, and increasing the number of National and Local Leaders of Education
• “Sharply” reducing the bureaucratic burden on schools, “cutting away unnecessary duties, processes, guidance and requirements so that schools are free to focus on doing what is right for the children and young people in their care”

Behaviour

• Increasing the authority of teachers to discipline pupils “by strengthening their powers to search pupils, issue same day detentions and use reasonable force where necessary”
• Strengthening head teachers’ authority to maintain discipline beyond the school gates, improving exclusion processes and empowering head teachers to take a strong stand against bullying
• Changing the system of independent appeal panels for exclusions “so that they take less time and head teachers no longer have to worry that a pupil will be reinstated when the young person concerned has committed a serious offence”
• Trialling a new approach to exclusions “where schools have new responsibilities for the ongoing education and care of excluded children”
• Improving the quality of alternative provision, and encouraging new providers to set up free schools
• Protecting teachers from malicious allegations – “speeding up investigations and legislating to grant teachers anonymity when accused by pupils”
• Focusing Ofsted inspection more strongly on behaviour and safety, including bullying, as one of four key areas of inspection

Curriculum, assessment and qualifications

• Reviewing the National Curriculum, “with the aim of reducing prescription and allowing schools to decide how to teach, while refocusing on the core subject knowledge that every child and young person should gain at each stage of their education”
• Ensuring there is proper assessment of pupils at each vital transitional stage of their education
• Introducing an English Baccalaureate
• Holding an independent review of key stage two testing
• Reforming vocational education
• Raising to 17 by 2013 and 18 by 2015 the age to which all young people will be expected to participate in education or training

The new school system

• Increasing freedom and autonomy for all schools, “removing unnecessary duties and burdens, and allowing all schools to choose for themselves how best to develop”
• Restoring for all academies “the freedoms they originally had” while continuing to ensure a level playing field on admissions particularly in relation to children with special educational needs
• Ensuring that the lowest performing schools are considered for conversion to academies
• “Dramatically” extending the academies programme
• Giving local authorities “a strong strategic role as champions for parents, families and vulnerable pupils”

Accountability

• Putting more information on schools’ performance into the public domain
• Placing information on expenditure online
• Reforming performance tables “so that they set out our high expectations”
• Instituting a new measure of how well deprived pupils do
• Reforming Ofsted inspection, “so that inspectors spend more time in the classroom and focus on key issues of educational effectiveness, rather than the long list of issues they are currently required to consider”
• Establishing a new “floor standard” for primary and secondary schools
• Making it easier for schools to adopt models of governance which work for them

School improvement

• Making clear that schools – “governors, head teachers and teachers” – have responsibility for improvement. The requirement for every school to have a local authority school improvement partner will be ended
• Freeing local authorities to provide “whatever forms of improvement support they choose”
• Ensuring that those schools that are seriously failing, or are unable to improve their results, are “transformed” through conversion to academy status
• Encouraging local authorities and schools to bring forward applications to the new Education Endowment Fund

School funding

• Targeting more resources on the most deprived pupils over the next four years through the new Pupil Premium
• Consulting on developing and introducing a “clear, transparent and fairer national funding formula based on the needs of pupils”
• “In the meantime”, increasing the transparency of the current funding system by showing how much money schools receive and what they spend their funds on
• Taking forward the conclusions of the review of capital spending, “cutting bureaucracy from the process of allocating capital funding and securing significantly better value for money”.

Education Secretary Michael Gove said: “The best education systems draw their teachers from among the top graduates and train them rigorously, focusing on classroom practice. They recognise that it is teachers’ knowledge, intellectual depth and love of their subject which stimulates the imagination of children and allows them to flourish and succeed."

Gove suggested that teachers and heads have been hamstrung by bureaucracy and left without real support. He said it was “a scandal” that only 40 of the 80,000 children in England eligible for free school meals secured places at Oxford or Cambridge.

“That’s why the coalition government plans to recruit more great people into teaching, train our existing teachers better and free them from bureaucracy and Whitehall control,” the minister said. “We are putting teachers in the driving seat of school improvement and we are setting out changes that will make schools more accountable to their communities and their parents.”

Responding to the White Paper, Baroness Shireen Ritchie, chairman of the Local Government Association’s children and young people board, said it was encouraging that ministers had listened to local government and that councils would continue to have a strong role in education.

She added: “We’re pleased that the vast majority of funding for schools will continue to be allocated through councils working in close partnership with local schools and we will work with the government on the new funding formula for local authorities. The simplification of the bureaucracy governing schools, including the abolition of the Young People’s Learning Agency, is a welcome move.”

However, she warned that it was important that the transition to the new funding arrangements was carefully managed and that no area was left facing a rapid increase or reduction in their levels of funding.

Baroness Ritchie added: “Giving parents more choice over the kind of school their children go to is something that councils support and they have long been working to give families more say over how and where their children are educated. However, it’s vital that under any new system local choice and diversity of provision is maintained and the views of the local community are taken into account.”

She insisted that councils’ main priority was to make sure that all children had access to good quality education, whether in an academy school or in a traditionally funded community school.

“The government must make sure that money is fairly distributed and the same opportunities are available to all,” Baroness Ritchie said. “Reassuring parents that their children are being treated fairly depends on having a system where all schools are on a level playing field. Councils are best placed to oversee schools in their local area, and make sure the principle of fairness is embedded from the start.”