Whip cracked above heads of local authority leaders

Education Minister Leighton Andrews laid down the gauntlet to Welsh local authorities last night, demanding that they collaborate in delivering education improvements by September 2012 or face “radical restructuring on a regional basis.”

In a wide-ranging speech to an IWA audience of more than 300 at Cardiff University (available here), Andrews said that the Welsh Inspectorate Estyn was in the process of evaluating all local authorities on their education performance. So far six of the 22 local authorities had been inspected with four reports published:

“Neath Port Talbot was judged to be good across the board. Cardiff  was adequate. Or, to put it another way, barely good enough. There  is a similar story with Wrexham and Powys – the judgement is good  in terms of outcomes but otherwise judged to be adequate in terms  of provision, leadership and management, current performance and  prospects for improvement. It tells the same story – a fair system aiming to become good.”

He said that in March this year he was given assurances by all 22 local authority leaders that a radical overhaul was needed to address the systemic failure in education. The answer was they should collaborate together across four regional partnerships:

“…the political commitment given by all 22 local authorities is that school  improvement regional partnerships will be in place by September 2012.”

Between now and September 2012 he expected to see:

• Strong leadership.
• Upfront investment to deliver the agenda.
• Strong governance.
• Creation of shadow provision and the appointment of key personnel.
• Targeting of resources to those schools in most need.
• Recruitment and deployment of system leaders against national  criteria.
• Best practice being applied across consortia.

If these were not forthcoming  he made it clear he was prepared to insist on a root and branch shake-up of the local authority role in education. As he put it:

“I am on record as saying that I would not have invented 22 local education authorities. I believe that the fragmentation of education  authorities in the mid-1990s was one of the contributing factors for the downturn in educational performance a decade later, as effective challenge and support was lost in many parts of the  system and time, energy and resource was dissipated.”

The criteria against which he would measure local authority improvement would be

• Have education standards gone up?
• Are education services coherent with other services?
• Are local authorities cost effective? Have they delegated 85 per cent of funding to schools?
• Is change irreversible? Have milestones been met? Sufficient progress made?

And he added:

“The answers to these questions must be yes. If not, given my responsibility for learners, given my responsibility to parents, given the challenges identified to us by PISA and other evidence, I would not hesitate to follow a different route if the consortia do not deliver.”

The background to this loud sound of a whip cracking above the heads of Welsh local authority leaders was the continuing under performance of Welsh schools which were not improving fast enough. The Education Minister reported that under a new, tougher inspection framework, Estyn was progressively visiting all Welsh schools. So far it had inspected 197 primary schools and 31 secondary schools and the results were extremely disappointing:

“Estyn has found that 97 schools require some sort of follow up, a staggering 42 per cent, about the same for primary and secondary.”

There were common deficiencies across the board:

• Literacy and numeracy standards and practice.
• Lack of depth in planning to improve skills.
• Inconsistency or inadequate assessment.
• Insufficient challenge from governors.
• Self-evaluation and improvement planning is often weak.

The Minister reported that a new School Standards Unit within his department had begun work last month to help drive improvement:

“Working with Consortia and local authorities, it will understand  exactly what high performing schools and local authorities are  doing well. It is already starting to underpin our understanding of  how current policy and any changes will impact on performance.  The Unit will carry out priority policy reviews to ensure that policy  is well implemented and having the intended impact, use data to inform discussion on performance and progress and work with  consortia and local authorities to assess capacity and priorities for  improvement.”