Local authorities and the school system

Abstract

Coalition government policies have put into question the role of local authorities in a ‘self-improving school system’. In a number of local authorities new authority-wide partnership bodies are being set up involving all local schools, including academies, and controlled by headteachers. This article begins with an analysis of the new partnerships, differentiating their functions and the education policy leadership roles of headteacher-led and local authority-led partnerships. It then examines as a case study the evolution of a new partnership in Birmingham from the initial model proposed by the local authority through to the emergence of a headteacher-initiated model. The article proposes an analytical framework for the new partnerships, situating them in the wider theoretical context of network governance and the role of the state in local government theory and policy. It concludes with a discussion of the questions of educational principle about agency and purpose in local education policymaking which the new partnership developments raise.

Keywords

authority-led partnership governance local authorities school improvement

Introduction

The Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition government’s white paper The Importance of Teaching (DfE, 2010: paras 22, 7.4) envisages the future as a self-improving school system of locally autonomous schools, a perspective which has been developed by David Hargreaves in a number of publications by the National College of Teaching and Leadership (now an executive agency of the DfE) (Hargreaves, 2010, 2011, 2012; National College, 2012). In this context local authorities would have:

a strong strategic role as champions for parents, families and vulnerable pupils. They will promote educational excellence by ensuring a good supply of high quality places, coordinating admissions and developing their school improvement strategies to support local schools. (DfE, 2010: para. 16)

However, their ability to ensure school places is restricted by financial constraints and the lack of power to compel academies to expand, and coordinating admissions can mean little more than acting as an administrative clearing-house. The question this article addresses is how local authorities are addressing the task of developing school improvement strategies.

Government policy in the three years since the white paper has been directed at creating a self-improving school system and eroding the capacity of local authorities to implement school improvement strategies. Local authorities are held responsible by Ofsted for the performance of all schools in their area, but their capacity to support maintained schools has been drastically reduced as a result of the combination of the Coalition government’s unprecedented cuts in funding for local authorities, amounting to 33% by 2013/14 (LGA, 2013), leading to the decline and in many cases virtual disappearance of school support services, and the conversion of many local authority schools to academies, taking a disproportionately large share of local authority education support service budgets. Paradoxically, local authorities’ responsibility includes academies and free schools, but they have no powers to intervene in them to address under-performance.

The consequence of the decline of local authorities, in the context of compelling performance pressure on schools, has been the growth of various forms of partnerships among schools, partly spontaneous, partly engineered by government school improvement policies such as federations with executive heads, Teaching School Alliances and forced academization into sponsored chains. In contrast, three years after the white paper it is evident that government regards the role of local authorities in school improvement as in practice largely insignificant, as is demonstrated by the written evidence submitted by the DfE to the recent House of Commons Education Committee inquiry into School Partnerships and Cooperation (House of Commons Education Committee, 2013a). In its 36 paragraphs on school collaboration and support there is not a single mention of local authorities.

The Emergence of New Local Authority-wide Partnerships

In contrast, the summary of the House of Commons Education Committee report states that ‘Local authorities have a critical role to play in a school-led improvement system’ (3). Most local authorities have responded to the changing local school environment by continuing to support individual schools and clusters of schools in whatever ways their declining capacity permits. But in a number of areas new authority-wide partnership bodies have been established, initiated jointly by local authorities and headteachers or in some cases by heads themselves (ADCS, 2012; Parish et al., 2012; Aston et al., 2013; LGA and SOLACE, 2013). These new structured partnerships are innovatory in two respects: they are open to all the headteachers of state-funded schools in the local authority, including academies and free schools, and they are largely composed of and are controlled by the headteachers, though with the involvement of the local authority and in some cases other bodies such as further and higher education.

The principal purpose of the new partnerships is to promote and coordinate collaborative support among schools in order to raise standards, and in particular to ensure that schools satisfy government targets and Ofsted criteria and avoid forced academization. They also facilitate coordination of the school system with other local authority provision, especially children’s social services. For local authorities and for many headteachers they are more than narrowly instrumental: they embody a sense of the local school system as a coherent system, not a fragmented aggregation of schools subject to market forces, integral to a collective local civic identity.

Two Parameters of Partnerships

The new partnerships are shaped by two parameters: their function and their leadership. Their function can be mapped along a continuum from an enabling role to a strategic vision role. Similarly, the distribution of the leadership of the education policies of the new partnerships ranges along an axis from headteacher-led to local authority-led.

The concepts of ‘enabling’ and of ‘strategic vision’ lack precision in terms both of how partnership participants define them and of the limited empirical evidence, as yet, of what they mean in practice. The House of Commons Education Committee (2013a: 41) inquiry report speaks of local authorities still having a critical role, ‘in particular through creating an “enabling environment” within which collaboration can flourish’. Case studies of three new partnerships, in Brighton and Hove, Wigan and York, state that they are ‘school-led but involve the LA in an enabling role’ (Crossley-Holland, 2013a: 3). ‘Enabling’ here involves the monitoring of performance, the provision of data, both statistical and ‘soft intelligence’, and the brokerage of support.

‘Strategic vision’ includes but goes beyond ‘enabling’. An NFER study says that ‘the key foci for the middle tier in enabling school-to-school support’ include ‘Develop a long-term vision and strategy for Teaching and Learning that moves beyond compliance’ (Aston et al., 2013: 7). A case in point is Liverpool’s Education Commission report, endorsed by the local authority and the headteacher-led Liverpool Learning Partnership, which states that ‘Education should be built on a strong strategic vision for young people and education in the city’ (Mayor of Liverpool’s Education Commission, 2013: 35).

Education Policy Leadership of the New Partnerships by Headteachers

The education policies of many of the new partnerships are determined by headteachers, and this is seen as their strength. According to Parish et al. (2012: 26) ‘some of the practical elements which appear to make these structures more likely to be effective…include: Strong ownership of the agenda by schools, including schools chairing the partnership or governing board, and having the majority voting position.‘ (I prefer the term ‘headteacher-led’. The partnerships are not ‘school-led’ because they involve neither teachers nor governors.) Parish et al. (2012: 27) cite the Middlesbrough Achievement Partnership: ‘The schools-led steering group will be responsible for agreeing identified priorities for the partnership on the basis of need’. In a study of Brighton and Hove, Hertfordshire, Wigan and York authorities ‘Case-study LAs were repositioning themselves to put schools in the lead, while securing delivery of their statutory duties through education partnerships’ (Aston et al., 2013: 2).

In some new headteacher-led partnerships the local authority has some share in the responsibility for vision and strategy. For example, the York Education Partnership is ‘a guardian of a wider educational vision and mission for York and its young people’ (Crossley, 2013a: 3). ‘It is headteachers that lead the partnership’, including to ‘develop the education strategy for the City’ (Aston et al., 2013: 4, 4), but school interviewees agreed that the local authority brought an ‘overall strategic view’ (Crossley, 2013a: 9).

However, in some cases the local authority has handed over all responsibility for the strategic vision and leadership of education to the collective body of headteachers. For example, the Liverpool Learning Partnership is a new partnership between all local schools and the local authority, set up and controlled by headteachers. In July 2013 From Better to Best, the report of Liverpool’s Education Commission, set up by the elected mayor and chaired by Estelle Morris, was published. The first recommendation of the report, which is endorsed by the city’s headteachers, is that the ‘Liverpool Learning Partnership should be acknowledged as the lead agency in the development of the strategic vision for education in the city’ (Mayor of Liverpool’s Education Commission, 2013: 51). Similarly, in Brighton and Hove ‘The City has set up a Learning Partnership to bring together school leaders. Chaired by the principal of the Sixth Form College, its remit is to: set the City’s education vision and strategy…’ (Aston et al., 2013: 5). In Hertfordshire there is a clear division of strategic and operational responsibilities: the headteacher-led Learning Trust sets the vision and strategy (Crossley-Holland, 2012: 25) while ‘Hertfordshire LA has focused its efforts on…Monitoring, Challenge, Support and Intervention’ (Crossley-Holland, 2013b: 2).

The abdication of responsibility for the strategic vision for education by local authorities in favour of a collective body of headteachers represents a historic turning point in the role of elected local government in education. It is codified in the policy discourse by the three roles for the local authority that Parish et al. (2012: 5) specify: ‘the local authority as a convenor of partnerships; the local authority as a maker and shaper of effective commissioning; and the local authority as a champion for children, parents and communities’.

Education Policy Leadership of the New Partnerships by Local Authorities

Parish et al.’s model omits the role of the local authority in developing and promoting a strategic vision for education, but the term ‘vision’ frequently occurs in the literature about the new role of local authorities, including in their own report for the Local Government Association (Parish et al., 2012: 22) which found that:

…all but one of the participating local authorities either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement ‘As an authority we have a clear and well defined vision of how we will support the quality of education for all pupils in our local area over the next two years.

The Association of Directors of Children’s Services (ADCS) report (Crossley-Holland, 2012: 14) recommends seven key features of the effective future local authority of which the first is ‘An inspiring and inspirational vision and values for the local authority area developed with schools…’. So for example Leicester local authority states that its role includes to ‘Articulate a vision for education in the city’ (LGA and SOLACE, 2013: 12).

In most cases local authorities, while asserting their strategic leadership role, share it with headteachers and perhaps other stakeholders in the new partnerships. For example the Cabinet member for children and young people in Bradford states that ‘The Council has accepted a central leading role, but this role needs to be exercised in partnership with a range of agencies…’ (House of Commons Education Committee, 2013b). Bradford is exceptional in having established a Strategic Board to direct the new partnership with equal membership by councillors and headteachers, along with other stakeholders.

The strategic direction of the Bradford partnership is the responsibility of an Education Improvement Strategic Board comprising representation of councillors, officers, headteachers and school governors and chaired by the Leader of the Council. (City of Bradford MDC, 2012: 4)

The board comprises five councillors, five officers, five headteachers, three governors and one representative each from further and higher education.

Since local authorities do not control the new partnerships they are dependent on the exercise of influence and persuasion to gain support for their strategic vision. The ADCS report urges local authorities, though they lack power, to ‘Maximize use of influence to shape the system’ (Crossley-Holland 2012: 15). The Director of Children’s Services in Wigan speaks of ‘a different sort of leadership style, relying less on concentrated executive power and more on influence, persuasion, relationships and shared objectives, while at the same time keeping in reserve judicious use of statutory and other powers where needed’ (Crossley, 2013b: 3).

Birmingham: a Case Study

This paper is based on a case study of one local authority: Birmingham, the largest local authority in England in terms of population, with some 400 state-funded schools in its area. Each local authority context is a unique combination of the national policy environment and specific local factors, of which the following are the most significant in Birmingham. In May 2012 a Labour council took office with a large majority, replacing a Conservative-led coalition with the Liberal Democrats, which had run the council since 2004. In 2009 and subsequently in 2010 and 2012 Ofsted judged that Birmingham council's child protection services were inadequate. Just over half of the 75 secondary schools in Birmingham are academies, almost all voluntary conversions. The spread of primary academies, approaching one in three, is more recent, many as a result of targeting by the DfE for forced conversion. Birmingham maintained school standards compare well on average with national figures and those of similar local authorities, but there are a significant number of lower-attaining schools (BCC, 2013a).

Finally, under the Coalition government the local authority’s budget has suffered a substantial reduction as a result both of direct government grant reductions and the loss of funding to academies. From 2011/12 to 2012/13 the city council made cuts in its overall spending of over £375 m, and it intends to reduce it by at least a further £450 m by 2017/18. Spending on education services in 2013/14 is around £150 m and the anticipated reduction in 2014/15 is £13.4 m and in 2015/16 £25.4 m (BCC, 2013b). The major impact of these cuts on the local authority’s capacity to support schools has been that its central school support team, comprising about a hundred advisory staff, was dismantled in 2011/12 and replaced by a much smaller Schools and Settings Improvement Team which currently comprises a head of service and eight advisors.

Methodology

The core questions that initially informed the research in Birmingham were the following: what role is the local authority attempting to construct for the new partnership and for itself, and what is the response of headteachers? The research took place over a period of some two years from September 2011. It was based on 27 in-depth face-to-face interviews with a purposive sample of 21 leading figures involved in the Birmingham school system: five elected members (including two each interviewed three times), one member of parliament, one senior officer (interviewed three times), 11 headteachers (five primary, six secondary, including three academy heads) and four other leading figures connected with the Birmingham school system. The interviews were complemented by non-participant observation at five internal Birmingham Labour Party education and education-related policy commission meetings in the seven months prior to their taking office. I analysed all relevant policy documents and minutes of BCC Education and Vulnerable Children Overview and Scrutiny Committee meetings after Labour took office and observed three meetings, as well as observing and making an invited contribution to the ‘Scrutiny Review into Strengthening the Birmingham Family of Schools – the role of the City Council’ (BCC, 2013c). An online questionnaire was sent in February 2013 to the headteachers of all 292 primary schools and 77 secondary schools, including academies. Respondents were not identifiable apart from three who volunteered to be interviewed. Forty responses were received, representing 10.84%, roughly equally proportionate from primary (30) and secondary (10). The heads’ interview and questionnaire responses represented a full range of viewpoints.

For comparative purposes three additional face-to-face interviews were carried out with leading members of the new partnerships in Bradford (the cabinet member for children and young people and a leading headteacher in the Bradford partnership) and Liverpool (one of the two headteacher leaders of the Liverpool Learning Partnership).

The Growth of Collaborative School Support

Schools in Birmingham have long been organized in permanent networks. Since the Coalition government took office in 2010 the combination of the decline of the support capacity of the local authority and the increased pressure on standards from government has led to a significant growth in school-to-school collaboration to support schools failing, or at risk of failing, to meet government targets.

I think certainly since I’ve been a head there’s a shift in mentality from battening down the hatches and just sticking to your own school and don't really care what goes on elsewhere more to opening up and saying actually I can learn from other schools and they can learn from me. (Leading headteacher, Primary School Improvement Group)

In April 2011 the local authority, recognizing that the resources to provide support lay very largely with the schools not the local authority, took the initiative to set up primary and secondary school improvement support groups of headteachers of high-performing schools – national leaders in education (NLE) and local leaders in education (LLE) – linked to the Teaching School alliances. The effectiveness of the Primary School Improvement Group (PSIG) has been positively evaluated (Abbott et al., 2012: 4). The Secondary School to School Partnership Board never achieved a comparable level of functioning and in autumn 2012 it dissolved on the grounds that results had improved sufficiently, and that the secondary NLEs preferred to rely on direct relations between heads without any involvement by the local authority. The local authority works with schools through its Schools and Settings Improvement Team of eight advisory staff (reduced from over a hundred three years previously). It has a key role in two respects. First, it holds vital statistical data and soft intelligence about the schools, enabling it to identify actual or potential weaknesses that need to be addressed. Second, it instigates and coordinates the commissioning of support from NLEs, LLEs and the Teaching Schools.

However, the current level of school to school support is not meeting the need. ‘At the moment we are kind of holding our head up just above water with it’ (chair, PSIG). In response to the research questionnaire only a small minority of heads (12.8%) felt that the current level of collaboration was very largely meeting the need for support in the city, with twice as many (25.6%) stating that it was hardly meeting the need at all. The ‘moral purpose’ of improvement through school-to-school support – the proclaimed policy of government – is undermined by the countervailing pressures of government policies on potentially supportive schools to devote their resources to maintaining and improving their own performance and to competing against other schools (Glatter, 2012; Robinson, 2012; House of Commons Education Committee, 2013: 12).

You can't always guarantee that there will be that moral purpose among headteachers because there is a dilemma between how much you can do in your own school, how much you can do out of your own school, how much you can afford to do out of your own school for one reason or another, and from the governors of each individual school whether they want you to go and what's in it for them and their children, which is understandable. (Leading headteacher, PSIG)

The gap between the support being offered and the number of schools in need is likely to be exacerbated both by the addition of the pupil premium to the Ofsted agenda and by the change in the Ofsted category of ‘satisfactory’ to ‘requires improvement’, which puts a large new tranche of Birmingham schools at risk and potentially needing support.

My impression is that it’s getting harder to find support for newly identified schools, so if we have got a school that goes unexpectedly into category that becomes problematic and that’s why I am worried about the ‘requires improvement’ schools because that is a bit of a piece of string, the boundary is not totally predictable yet. (Senior local authority officer)

The Local Authority’s Proposal for a New Partnership with Birmingham Schools

On 11 July 2012, shortly after the new Labour council took office, the cabinet member for education sent a letter to all Birmingham headteachers announcing the intention ‘to form an overarching cooperative trust to which all schools can choose to belong’ (BCC, 2012a). It would be a new ‘Cooperative Partnership’ structure for the Birmingham school system, including academies, in which the schools would be the principal partners, with the purpose of ‘sourcing and orchestrating a pool of capacity and support to aid school improvement…’ (BCC, 2012b).

During the summer and autumn of 2012 a number of consultation meetings took place, involving mainly headteachers, but by January 2013 no decision had been taken and little progress made. According to the questionnaire I administered in February 2013 over two-thirds of heads were supportive of the idea of the Cooperative Partnership, but three-quarters were still unclear about what it would mean in practice. Half did not think it would actually come into being. If it did, just over half thought it would be effective.

I explored in interviews the reasons for the lack of progress. ‘I think that heads would say there was a lack of leadership by the local authority and the local authority would say heads were sitting on the fence and not buying in’ (secondary head). The absence of a more detailed proposal was a deliberate decision by the local authority.

We are saying to them ‘We are not clarifying it because we are not imposing it on you, you can choose and we are not telling you what it will look like because you need to be part of it’. They are saying ‘But we want to know what it looks like because it is yours really’. (Senior local authority officer)

However, headteachers wanted a sufficiently specific proposal for them to come to a decision about.

I think they need to sit down and have a framework and not go with a half-baked idea…and say ‘We would like to do this, you get together and draw it up’. I think there needs to be a framework based on work that is proven.…What is the management structure going to look like? Who is going to lead and co-ordinate? Who is going to commission work, how is it going to be done? (Head, secondary academy)

Underlying the headteachers’ scepticism was a lack of confidence in the local authority. The combination of the decline in the role and capacity of the local authority and its perceived focus on children’s social services at the expense of education, as a result of a series of highly critical Ofsted inspections, had accustomed many schools to only a tenuous relationship with it, while they developed their own networks. Many schools had chosen to leave the local authority to become academies. The principal responsibility for gaining support for the proposal lay with a director of children’s services and a cabinet member for education who were both relatively inexperienced in education. The authority employed David Hargreaves to lead consultation conferences for heads, but in keeping with his view, expressed in one meeting, that ‘The notion of a middle tier is dead’ (BCC, 2012c) he dealt only with partnership working among small groups of schools, not with the proposed authority-wide partnership and the role of the local authority. And there was suspicion of the new local authority attempting to impose policies which infringed schools’ autonomy, and in particular of two policies which the new Labour council was promoting as its distinctive agenda for education. One was the initial proposal to constitute the Cooperative Partnership as a Cooperative Schools Society Trust (BCC, 2012d). The idea was abandoned when it was recognized that many schools would not countenance committing themselves to the requirements of the Cooperative Society model. The other was the priority given to education for employability, signalled in the section on education in the council leader’s policy statement on 12 June 2012 proposing a ‘Birmingham Baccalaureate’, a qualification designed to align schools more closely with the needs of employers by ‘putting learning and employability skills at the centre of the curriculum’ (BCC, 2012e: 6). As one secondary head said:

Some of the hints and suggestions that were coming from the centre weren't the most fruitful and helpful. When someone stands up and says we need a Birmingham Education Cooperative and you want to have better links with the Chamber of Commerce and we think you should look at a Birmingham Baccalaureate, those are two fairly non-energizing unhelpful places to start. (Tim Boyes, interview, named with permission)

By the end of 2012 the view of many heads in Birmingham was that the proposed new partnership would never get off the ground. But then a new train of development emerged. According to a primary head, Sarah Smith, at a meeting in January the then director of Children’s Services said ‘well it's up to you isn't it? If you want it to happen you need to make it happen’ (interview, named with permission). She continued:

I chair Primary Forum so I thought well I suppose if I don't make it happen in that role of chair then who is going to take it forward? And by this time we were heading towards February so I sort of said to Primary Forum heads, let's get something going.

Over the following few months a number of meetings of a group of primary heads took place. As Sarah Smith said, ‘I am really concerned that the city is fragmenting, it has fragmented, and I think this is the last stop attempt to try and hold us together and I think there is mileage in being together.’ She made contact with a secondary head, Tim Boyes, who expressed the same concern: ‘The challenge for schools and local authorities is to reinvent or redefine what a coordinated citywide joint endeavour is around leading education and supporting schools’. Tim Boyes took the initiative of organizing discussions (in which Sarah Smith was also involved) on the need for a city-wide coordination of school support at the Birmingham secondary heads conference on 27–28 June 2013. The outcome was agreement to set up a Birmingham Education Partnership led and controlled by headteachers and funded by subscription. Sarah Smith secured the involvement of primary heads, a working group was set up to develop the proposal, and a launch conference with 265 headteachers present took place on 6 November 2013.

The Role of the New Birmingham Education Partnership

The role of the new Birmingham Education Partnership (BEP) is spelled out in the brochure published for the BEP on 6 November 2013. It begins with a statement by Tim Boyes, elected chair of the Partnership at the conference: ‘This is a unique chance to effect a step change in Birmingham with headteachers taking on the effective leadership of the educational agenda in our city’ (Birmingham Education Partnership, 2013: n.p.). The aim is restated on the following page: ‘The vision for the Birmingham Education Partnership (BEP) is that headteachers, from all types of schools, take on collective leadership of education in our city’ (1).

The BEP is to be run by a board of headteachers, one primary and one secondary, elected by headteachers in each of the ten constituencies of the city, together with two representatives of special schools and an elected representative from each of nurseries, Teaching School alliances and the King Edward VI Foundation (which runs five grammar schools and a sponsored academy in the city), and the elected chair and vice-chair (Sarah Smith).

The attitude of the local authority to the BEP is welcoming and supportive.

I think they're appreciative of the fact that it was beginning to die a death and Tim and I have managed to pull it together for them and try and make something happen, and they’re really helpful. (Sarah Smith)

The local authority is represented on the Board by a place allocated for the Cabinet member responsible for education.

The focus of the partnership is school improvement. This could mean that the BEP has just a preventative and remedial role, but what has been agreed is more ambitious: it will not be ‘simply a mapping, checking body so that schools that are most in need are helped to be put into the spheres of powerful networks or effective teaching school alliances or helpful partnerships with a school that has capacity of an appropriate sort down the road’ (interview with Tim Boyes). The BEP’s role will extend beyond supporting vulnerable schools to having a developmental role for all schools:

Genuinely I think there is a high level of buy in to wanting to pool strengths so that Birmingham is collectively strong and schools don't get left behind. If we got clarity and agreement on that score, to then start saying what about good schools learning from other good schools, what about being a little pre-emptive and generating such a sense of resource and development and positive sharing around ways of improving teaching and learning in schools that are currently good and outstanding that can all risk getting a requires improvement at a future Ofsted. (Tim Boyes)

Sarah Smith explained that the potential for a developmental role was the principal attraction of the BEP for primary heads:

The primary, if you like, hook was much more to do with a sort of task and finish around at the time we were looking at safeguarding.…let's commission someone to do a piece of work on this, hand it on to the local safeguarding board and get it out there…I personally think that the partnership if it evolved could do a whole series of things like that, do some research into boys’ writing in year eight and commission someone to do some research on that, produce some stuff as a result of that that has some impact on teaching and learning, and actually there could be a whole series of little projects, task and finish type projects that the partnership could enable us to do, which obviously then fit into school improvement.

However, the immediate issue facing the BEP is the relatively low performance of some schools in many of the wards which underlie the positive average performance statistics. These schools are at risk of being failed by Ofsted, but all schools are conscious of the consequences of a dip in performance, which is a powerful disincentive to devoting resources to support other schools. In itself constructing a new partnership does not necessarily produce additional resources to overcome the patchiness of current support; it depends on whether it can, through the commitment it generates and the quality of its network relationships, make more effective collective use of existing expertise within the schools (including not relying exclusively on NLEs and LLEs) and generate new productive knowledge-based practice through cross-school collaboration. As Tim Boyes said, ‘it depends on ‘people's engagement and commitment…and that would be where my concern would be’.

Why did the headteachers agree to the Education Partnership but not to the local authority’s partnership proposal? Primarily because it originated from headteachers themselves.

We really thought actually we’re not going to be dictated to…This needs to come from heads and be for heads rather than somebody else's vision which we haven't really been part of trying to develop or grow, not that the visions are not the same, I think they probably are the same, it felt a little bit it had come round the wrong way. (Sarah Smith)

The BEP proposal assuaged heads’ fears that they didn’t control the agenda.

My concern…was not to worry people or scare people off with a sense of a Trojan horse and lots of agendas being smuggled in…there was I think a high level of agreement about the need for a transparent, dare I say democratic, constitution, a sense of openness about who is being empowered and what is being built and what is being presumed before the building happens. (Tim Boyes)

A contributory factor was a warning at the secondary heads conference in June 2013 from a senior Her Majesty’s Inspector who has a responsibility for Birmingham that the authority is under pressure because there are primary and secondary schools in wards of the city which are either satisfactory or requiring improvement or are in a special measures category. As Tim Boyes said, ‘I think that that external voice underpinning the moral purpose with a bit of realism about politics and pressure on the city added some weight to the conversations’.

The New Authority-wide Partnerships: a Framework for Analysis

The evolution of the Birmingham partnership model from its origins in the Labour local authority to its appropriation and reshaping by headteachers is revealing of the relationship between the overlapping but partly contradictory agendas of the local authority and headteachers, and in particular the determination of heads to assert their autonomy and dominant position in the local education system at a collective authority-wide level as well as individual school level in order to decide and have leadership of the strategic vision and agenda.

I have said that the term ‘strategic vision’ is lacking in precision. Vision and strategies for what? Drawing on the evidence from Birmingham and other local authorities it is possible to construct an initial model based on three categories of ‘strategic vision’: preventative and remedial; developmental (incorporating preventative and remedial); and critical (incorporating preventative, remedial and developmental).

The local authority-wide partnerships about which most information is available could be provisionally grouped as follows, though bearing in mind that although ‘headteacher-led’ and ‘local authority-led’ have been represented here as discrete categories for analytical purposes, they should be understood as constituting a continuum. It should also be borne in mind that the evidence on which the categorization is based consists very largely of self-reporting by partnership members. There are as yet no empirical research studies available of the actual relative strategic influence of the various partners as exercised in practice, which future research could illuminate.

Table 1.

A model of local authority-wide partnerships.

	Headteacher-led	Local authority-led
Preventative/Remedial	Hertfordshire	Wigan
Preventative/Remedial + Developmental	Birmingham Brighton and Hove Liverpool York	Bradford Leicester
Preventative/Remedial + Developmental + Critical

Preventative and remedial strategic visions typify partnerships which restrict themselves to being local relays of the government’s performance agenda. The ADCS’s report (Crossley-Holland, 2012) identifies seven features of effective local authorities, which essentially accept, and are limited to, ‘official’ school improvement and this is typical of its case study local authorities. Crossley-Holland (2013b: 7) comments that:

Hertfordshire’s current vision and strategy for teaching and learning, in common with many LAs, contains objectives focused on improving key stage results, narrowing the gap and tackling poor performance. It could also be seen, in common with the vision and strategy of most LAs, as being largely a reaction to government priorities.

Developmental strategic visions address the performance agenda but have additional aims which extend beyond but are compatible with it, often comprising curriculum enhancement and ‘employability’. So for example the Liverpool report speaks of an ‘Enhanced Curriculum’ supported by ‘a Pupil Promise which sets out the learning experiences and opportunities the city’s schools will offer its pupils’ and which ‘should go beyond the national curriculum entitlement…’ (Mayor of Liverpool’s Education Commission, 2013: 46). It also states that the curriculum should link to the economic regeneration of the city’ (Mayor of Liverpool’s Education Commission, 2013: 35). (See also Crossley on Wigan: 2013b: 11.) The Brighton and Hove Partnership:

…sets the vision and strategy for education and training in the city. It has developed a vision which aims to provide a ‘coherent and inclusive experience that makes learning personalized, irresistible, engaging and enjoyable’, building on ‘motivating and exciting experiences that draw upon the uniqueness of our vibrant city by the sea’. (LGA and SOLACE, 2013: 29).

Crossley-Holland (2013b: 11) recommends that the Hertfordshire Learning Trust should develop a developmental role and:

move beyond a narrow, compliance-driven focus on key stage results – important though that is. This could involve partners signing up to a long-term strategy to adopt what are now broadly accepted as the characteristics of outstanding learning in the 21st century, the kind of teaching necessary to deliver that learning, and the school conditions needed to achieve it.

Critical strategic visions would typify partnerships which are preventative, remedial and developmental and which also put into question neo-liberal education policy. For example, in the curriculum they might entail what Fielding and Moss (2011: 151) advocate as ‘radical approaches to practice that…call into question the moral and existential basis of acquisitive consumerism and economism…’. As a case in point, education for employability would include fostering a critical understanding of the world of work rather than be, in McCafferty’s words (2010: 541), ‘the increasingly pervasive embedding of rhetoric and practices of “enterprising education”’ as ‘an aspect of a “neoliberal pedagogy”’. But I can find no examples of local partnerships with strategic visions with what I would describe as a critical dimension.

The New Partnerships, Network Governance and the State

These new local authority-wide education partnerships can best be understood as specific instances of wider developments and debates in the field of local government theory and policy.

From the 1990s a new paradigm, displacing the traditional bureaucratic-professional model of public administration, came to the fore in the public sector, centred on the notion of a shift from government to governance. ‘Governance theory starts from the proposition that we are witnessing a shift from government (through direct control) to governance (through steering, influencing, and collaborating with multiple actors in a dispersed system)’ (Newman, 2004: 71). The defining institutional form of governance, existing alongside or displacing markets and hierarchy as modes of social coordination, is the network. According to Rhodes, networks ‘are the analytic heart of the notion of governance in the study of public administration’ (Rhodes, 2000: 60, quoted in Davies, 2011: 11).

Network governance can serve differing political interests. It has the potential to be participative and democratic (Geddes, 2009). But the research evidence has demonstrated that the typical pattern is of network governance in the public sector being subordinated to hierarchical control by the state, whether acting within the network or regulating it externally (Barnes et al., 2007; Davies, 2011: 59–60). Jonathan Davies argues from a classical marxist perspective based on Gramsci’s concept of the ‘integral state’ that:

…consent in the integral state is partly ‘constituted by a silent, absent force’, the threat of violence, without which ‘the system of cultural control would be instantly fragile, since the limits of possible actions against it would disappear’ (Anderson, 1976: p. 43, original emphasis). Hegemony or consent in civil society is always mediated by coercion or tacit threat – the ‘shadow of hierarchy’. (Davies, 2011: 106)

In this context Davies (2011: 5) argues that network governance is ‘a form of neoliberal ideology, defined…as an active project for economic and political modernization inspired by informational capitalism, the heart of the “connectionist” objective of fostering an entrepreneurial, reflexive and communicative sociability’. In this perspective ‘Trust therefore displaces command as the primary organizing mechanism’ (14).

The new education partnerships are instances of governance networks. The network of headteachers is bound together by ‘trust and reciprocity’ (Hargreaves, 2012: 13) based on ‘collective moral purpose’, which is the educational version of Davies’ connectionist ideology. The new partnership governance networks may be regarded by local authorities and by headteachers as embodying a countervailing principle to market fragmentation and the dominance of competition, perhaps even an assertion of traditional social-democratic educational values of solidarity. Certainly they have the potential to be effective vehicles for ‘school improvement’, development and radical innovation. But for government school improvement partnership networks are a hegemonic mechanism for implementing its neo-liberal performance agenda. ‘Moral purpose’ becomes circumscribed and instrumentalized. Control over the schools in the new partnerships is exercised externally by government through the coercive power of the performativity regime, policed by the regulative powers of Ofsted and the DfE and the threat of forced takeover by academy sponsors. Control over the role of local authorities in relation to the new partnerships is maintained by holding local authorities responsible for school improvement in all the schools in their area and subject to inspection by Ofsted. Together these powers ensure that the new education partnership networks are predominantly if not exclusively an instrument and relay of the government’s performance agenda through a process of what Jessop calls ‘regulated self-regulation’ (Jessop, 2002: 199), backed by coercion.

In effect the new partnerships are quasi-state or parastatal apparatuses, and this accounts for their exclusionary membership. One of their most striking features is the exclusion of representatives of parents, teachers and local communities, even school governors, from representation on the partnership boards. They are closed managerialist networks. The stakeholder model of governance at school level is not replicated at authority-wide partnership level. The dominant discourse of ‘moral purpose’, social capital and trust does not extend to permitting popular participation by parents, governors and communities, or indeed professional participation by teachers. Parish et al. (2012: 24), for example, pose the ‘process for defining the local vision’ entirely as the responsibility of the local authority and the schools. Again in this respect developments in education mirror those in the wider field of local government, where research evidence testifies to network closure by powerful groups in order to exclude dissenting voices (Newman, 2001: 138–139; Barnes, 2009; Davies, 2011: 61–62). Wider participation risks the new education partnership becoming a contested space in which managerial and state interests are challenged, threatening the partnership project of managing ‘school improvement’ in conformity with government agendas.

The Depoliticization of Local Education and the Question of Democracy

The consequence of the combination of the subordination of the new partnerships to the government’s agenda, the exclusion from them of other popular and professional participants, and in some cases the marginalization of the local authority, is the depoliticization of education at the local level. Strategic vision in education at the authority-wide level should not be just a matter for headteachers because it is not at root a matter of technical expertise but of one of political aims and values, and the depoliticization of local education is itself political. For Ranson neo-liberalism’s restructuring of governance is eroding:

…any conception of the public good as collective good determined through democratic participation, contestation, and judgement in the public sphere. It seeks to replace politics (substantive rationality) with contract (technically rational solutions). (Ranson, 2003: 470, quoted in Fielding and Moss, 2011: 21)

Fielding and Moss argue that:

…the public discourse of education rarely gives voice to such critical questions: What is education for, what is its purpose…? What should be its fundamental values and ethics? What do we mean by knowledge and learning? What is our concept of education? What is our image of the child, the teacher, the school? (Fielding and Moss, 2011: 18)

These are the educational-political questions which should underlie and inform what I have called a critical strategic vision for a local education partnership. Fielding and Moss (2011: 125) advocate the role of the local authority ‘as a leader and facilitator of the development of a local educational project, a shared and democratic exploration of the meaning and practice of education and the potential of the school’, but the growth of network governance has been accompanied by the decline of the governing role of local government:

Encouraging public service provision through complex networks has enabled central government to corrode the governing capacity of local government to such an extent that we are left wondering: do we still need elected local government? (Copus et al., 2013: 393)

The role assigned to local government in education in this respect in the official discourse is that of ‘champion’. The 2010 white paper states that ‘local authorities have an indispensable role to play as champions of children and parents’ (DfE, 2010: 34). It is also promoted in local authority discourse (Parish et al., 2012; BCC, 2013c). It is another imprecise term. It implies a conception of the interests and aspirations of parents and children and therefore of the education policies to realize them. But how does a local authority know what those interests and aspirations might be? The ADCS report recommends local authorities ‘exploiting democratic legitimacy’ to maximize influence (Crossley-Holland, 2012: 14), but the democratic legitimacy of a local authority’s influence on education partnership policy depends on it representing the expressed concerns of those it is elected to represent. The structures and processes of local government are largely immune to public participation and voice (Hatcher, 2012). Nor are parents and other stakeholders apart from headteachers allowed to participate in the new partnership bodies and express their views there. Without that opportunity the term ’champion’ in this official discourse signifies that the role of the local authority is to speak and act on behalf of children, parents – and communities – but not to enable them to speak and participate in decision-making for themselves.

The exclusionary managerial composition of the new partnerships raises a fundamental issue of principle concerning education policy at the local level: what should be the legitimate roles in policy decision making in the local school system of elected local government and of parents and other stakeholders, including teachers and communities? Underpinning it is the nature of and relationship between representative democracy and participatory democracy, revolving around the politics of voice and the politics of knowledge: whose voices, whose knowledge and what kinds of knowledge count in educational governance (Wainwright, 2003; Barnes et al., 2008). At present local authorities are relatively powerless and the pressure on them to conform to government agendas is intense. The only way they could potentially play a counter-hegemonic governing role in education is if they mobilize popular and professional support for progressive public concerns and policies, including by opening up the potential of the new partnerships to become the vehicle of a public–professional alliance for a more democratic, egalitarian and emancipatory vision for the local school system (Hatcher, 2013). The collusion of local authorities in exclusionary partnerships denies them that possibility.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to all the participants in this research for their cooperation. I would like to thank the editors of this issue of the journal and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments. I would also like to thank the British Educational Leadership Management and Administration Society for part-funding this research under the BELMAS Structural Reform Research Programme.

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