A hole in the budget for potato prints
Town & Country Planning, December 2005
It’s amazing, when you think about it, how something as apparently irrelevant to planning as psephology or education actually has on the shape of the places we live in.
Since south west London swung to the Liberal Democrats – starting with the London borough of Richmond in 1980 and followed by Kingston and Sutton – there has been an emphasis placed on education in that corner of the capital.
Resources were shifted into schools over a decade or more. The result: the house prices shot up, as parents hustled to be near the right places of education, and now people like me can’t afford to live there.
I have never seen this connection properly evaluated – and I am mildly biased in favour of things Liberal Democrat – so you have to take this all with a pinch of salt. I rehearse it here to demonstrate two things.
One is the power of the law of unintended consequences. The other is that, despite what government rhetoric implies, local education authorities can make a difference, and that difference has knock-on economic effects.
All of which provides an angle for viewing the government’s plans for education, if they survive until this issue actually emerges in print.
Because, as a localist, I find myself thoroughly in favour of the importance of parent power as a means of driving up educational standards. And broadening them as well: most parents I know, unlike government ministers, can tell the difference between good SATS results and a genuine education of the soul.
I am particularly excited by the idea that a group of parents can get together and, after reasonable safeguards, draw down government funds to open their own school. I like the way this looks set to provide better access to smaller schools and more humane systems of education, like the Steiner schools.
These things prey on my mind at the moment, as the father of a toddler who does not deserve to be exposed to the mind-numbingly utilitarian style of schooling-by-numbers that seems to reassure ministers.
But I am staggered that the government’s communicators have managed to make any kind of case that this is a ‘localist’ measure, or that their ‘setting schools free’ rhetoric has survived any scrutiny at all.
Making schools directly responsible to the Department for Education and Skills will not, in fact, hand power to parents, but will – if not now, then later – hand the whole caboodle over to Whitehall micro-managers.
Any parent who is naïve enough to think that this will give them any measure of control should have a look at the fate of the poor Primary Care Trusts in the NHS, the advent of which was billed not very many years ago as a localist measure. These are now in chaos as they are amalgamated back into much less local bodies in order to meet Treasury pledges in the general election manifesto.
“Central government only considers the money,” a leading county councillor said to me yesterday, and it’s true.
Somebody should consider the money, of course, but Whitehall departments – like the brontosaurus – can only think of one thing at a time. In those circumstances, it is best not to have them as your direct parents.
Or worse, have the government’s regional offices, hideous caricatures of the Gradgrind school of administration. Think of having to phone them up every time the headteacher finds a small hole in the budget for potato prints.
But it is fascinating how these debates, which all have localism at their heart, are springing up. What role should local education authorities have if they don’t have ‘authority’?
Without anything to read on the train recently, I found myself perusing a report by NERA Economic Consulting with the zappy title Commissioning in the NHS, which asks very similar questions in health and comes to very similar conclusions.
If you want smaller GP practices to survive at all, there needs to be a local ‘strategic commissioning’ body they can rely on if they are not going to be ‘over-burdened’ – that’s Whitehall-speak for ‘drowned’ – in bureaucracy.
That’s what the consultants found and it is exactly the same for schools. If we want to guarantee our children’s right not to be educated in mega-schools, with batteries of administrators and accountants – where they can share some resources with other federated schools, rather than having to provide them all themselves – they will need a strategic commissioning body too.
The truth is that taking direct control of schools is a deeply centralising, and therefore deeply inefficient, measure. Don’t be deceived that it comes knocking in the door dressed in a localist suit that doesn’t really fit.
