Tories to abolish local accountability for all schools in England

[muriel_volestrangler]

Legislation to turn every school in England into an academy independent of local authority control will be unveiled in the budget on Wednesday.
...
The prime minister said his “vision for our schooling system” was to place education into the hands of headteachers and teachers rather than “bureaucrats”.
...
The plans are likely to be fiercely rejected by Labour, which argues that taking thousands of schools out of council control means that accountability and oversight falls on to Whitehall alone.

Lucy Powell, the shadow schools minister, said there was “no evidence to suggest that academisation in and of itself leads to school improvement”.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/15/every-english-school-to-become-an-academy-ministers-to-announce

So the only people who might be able to plan for school capacity for an area will be bureaucrats - not local ones, but ones in Whitehall.

[LeftishBrit]

1. Oh, just great..

The Tories like to talk 'decentralization' but are the biggest centralizers around, and have been since at least the days of Maggie.

[Bad Dog]

2. Exactly

And those who suffer will be the kids. How long before Creationism starts being taught in Science?

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. They move power to where they're most likely to hold it

For schools, they take it away from councils which are likely to be Labour (or other parties) in many areas, and centralise it. For the police, they reckoned they could make it a separate 'lawn-order' issue that people would mainly vote Tory (or small 'c' conservative), so they came up with the commissioners, again taking it out of council control.

Now they've suddenly come up with the idea of a body and mayor for 'the Solent' - Southampton, Portsmouth and the adjacent towns, plus the Isle of Wight (though it's quite different) and East Hampshire (I have no idea why they've included that - it's not on the Solent, mainly rural, and stretches half way to London).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-35811873
http://www.dailyecho.co.uk/news/district/eastleigh/14345016.Solent_to_get__Boris_style__mayor_next_year/?commentSort=score

It gets the local business rates, and seems to run transport, housing development and a few other things. I hadn't heard of any push for this locally until this came up this week (maybe Bad Dog had heard something?) It's possible they've just designed this to make it likely there will always be a Tory mayor (I can't see another reason for East Hampshire - it's reliably Tory, whereas Winchester, closer to most of the rest of 'the Solent' area, has a tendency to be No Overall Control).

[T_i_B]

4. Southern Powerhouse?

Last edited Sat Mar 19, 2016, 05:29 AM - Edit history (1)

Sounds very similar to the proposals for elected mayors up here, not just for the cities themselves but for "city regions", which means the surrounding boroughs as well.

I've brought this up on here a few times before as I don't think it will go down well with folk in my local area to have local services run from Sheffield rather than Derbyshire.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10889196

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. The phrase has been thrown around a little

http://www.democraticaudit.com/?p=20424
http://onthewight.com/2016/03/14/solent-devolution-movement-over-weekend-isle-of-wight-position-unclear/
http://www.hampshirechronicle.co.uk/news/14331276.Will_Solent_City_be_the_death_of_Hampshire_/

and it apparently started in August, but I missed that (maybe my unconscious blanked it out to spare me the pain): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-34052509

and it seems the Tory MP for Romsey (including a sliver of Southampton) didn't know about it till last week either: http://www.romseyadvertiser.co.uk/news/14319963.MP_hits_out_over_devolution_plan/

[T_i_B]

6. Some familiar themes popping up here already

Most notably the Tories tendency to impose schemes from the top down. A number of cities had referendums on elected mayors in 2012 and everywhere other than Bristol voted no to the idea. Now it's going to be imposed anyway, and include the surrounding areas to the cities as well.

[Bad Dog]

8. I think we're a bit more than a sliver.

Basset and Swaythling.

[Ken Burch]

7. And this is the sort of bureaucrat Cameron dreams of putting in control of England's schools: