Labour proposes handing education oversight to city regions

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/22/labour-education-oversight-city-regions

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Labour will try to wrest back the city devolution agenda grasped by George Osborne by proposing that city regions be handed responsibility for overseeing local education standards.

Osborne is planning to devolve powers to city regions, or combined local authorities, but is refusing to include education in the mix of mainly economic, skills and transport powers.

But Tristam Hunt, the shadow education secretary, will say on Monday that the Osborne settlement leaves education under a form of Soviet command and control in which most key decisions are increasingly taken by the education secretary in Whitehall.

Hunt will argue that the statutory powers to intervene in schools that are found by consecutive Ofsted inspections to require improvement, or rated inadequate following one inspection, should be devolved from ministers to the level of combined authorities. The relevant budgets and human resources would also be decentralised from the Department for Education to the combined authority.

It is likely that the combined authority will become the dominant form of local government in metropolitan areas over the next five years.

Hunt is one of many shadow cabinet members aghast that Ed Miliband allowed the city devolution agenda to be snatched from Labour by Osborne, notably in Greater Manchester, before the election. Lord O’Neill, once seen as an ally of Labour on this issue, is now working as a Tory minister as he became disillusioned by Labour’s inability to run with the devolution agenda.

Hunt will argue during the second reading of the education bill that the Conservative party has failed to understand the components that underpinned the success of the Labour sponsor academy programme, under which the management of bad schools was transferred from negligent local authority education departments to high-quality academy sponsors or trusts.

Ofsted has singled out Labour’s sponsor academy programme for delivering faster progress in those academies relative to all other schools.

Hunt argues that the failure of the Conservative party to retain quality assurance in selecting new sponsors, combined with the rapid acceleration of the number of schools becoming academies, has led to schools being passed from one poor provider to another. Handing responsibility for raising standards to a combined authority would fill the gap between Ofsted inspection and Whitehall oversight, Hunt believes.

He said: “It is beyond the capacity of ministers to provide operational oversight for so many schools – and only an unprecedented devolution of power, capital and resource will create the conditions for a transformation in school improvement across all parts of the English education system.”

Hunt points out that Conservative ministers have already faced criticism from the head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, who has concluded that for academy schools in underperforming chains, “the neglect you suffer at the hands of your local authority is indistinguishable from the neglect you endure from your new trust”.