Michael Gove to appoint new regulators to oversee free schools and academies

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/20/michael-gove-regulators-free-schools

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A new cadre of powerful school regulators called chancellors are to be appointed by Michael Gove in an attempt to oversee the burgeoning number of free schools and academies, with the power to seize control of failing schools.

According to internal Department for Education (DfE) documents seen by the Guardian, the plan will see England split into eight geographical regions separate from local councils, with the free schools and academies in each region supervised by a new body to known as a Headteacher Board (HTB) and headed by a chancellor.

The new system echoes the model used for schools governance in the US, although the appointments are made locally. New York City has a schools chancellor, appointed by the mayor, who is head of the city's education department, while Washington DC has a public schools chancellor who oversees the district's state schools.

The plan to create a middle tier between individual schools and the DfE in Whitehall comes after months of wrangling as the DfE has struggled to oversee the rising number of academies and free schools.

Setbacks to the free schools programme have included the Discovery primary in school in Crawley, West Sussex, which was criticised in a damning report by Ofsted into its school leadership, and the Al-Madinah free school in Derby, which is being threatened with closure after being accused of financial mismanagement and inadequate teaching.

In recent months as many as a third of the DfE's civil servants have been engaged in working on aspects of the free schools and academy programme introduced by the coalition government since 2010, with staff complaining about the growing drain on resources.

Since 2010 more than 3,444 schools – including more than half of secondary schools – have taken on academy or free school, status, which allows them to operate largely outside of the supervision of local education authorities as well as granting extra freedoms over the curriculum and teachers' pay and conditions.

The new school boards would be made up of a chancellor appointed by the DfE and six members, who would be the headteachers of successful local academies and free schools, elected by the heads of all the schools in the region. The chancellors and boards would be granted powers delegated by the secretary of state, allowing them to investigate and change the sponsors and management of failing academies or free schools.

A Whitehall source said: "We are building a long-term architecture for a new system: a limited focus on failing academies, minimal bureaucracy, no local politics, and led by great heads who know their local area. We've been working on this for about a year, it will be embedded before the next election and, hopefully, it will be supported by all three parties."

According to the documents, the DfE officials are also considered giving the boards a role in brokering the takeover of failing local authority schools and their conversion to academies. It is not known whether Gove will go ahead with this, but in any event other local authority schools will remain outside the new system.

Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, said the new tier of bureaucracy marked an admission by Gove that his schools policy was failing, and that the new structure would not have stopped mismanagement at the likes of Al-Madinah.

"The government's aggressive free-market education strategy has not delivered the improvements we need. Michael Gove is at last starting to consider following the Labour party's lead – we have been clear that the secretary of state cannot run thousands of schools from Whitehall," Hunt said.

"But these plans will fall far short of what is needed. For high standards in all schools we need real local accountability and oversight."

The scheme is to be launched next month, with the DfE publicly advertising for applicants for the positions of chancellor at salaries to be determined. Officials hope to have the system fully up and running by the time of the 2015 election.

According to the memos, as many as 200 jobs may need to be cut within the DfE to fund the spending on the new regional posts, with the cost likely to rise because of Gove's insistence that the new boards be accommodated within a school in each region, rather than in cheaper, existing government offices.

Civil servants write in one of the documents that Gove "gave a steer that he wanted HTBs to be located in schools and absolutely not in other government buildings." But they note that Gove's demand cuts directly across the government-wide policy and would cost more, needing cabinet office approval. "Should we now be pushing back on this steer?" one civil servant asks.

Russell Hobby, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, gave the move a cautious welcome.

"Opinion is pretty united on the fact that there ought to be something between schools and the secretary of state. The idea that we should have some organisation with local knowledge and insight operating between the two is right, but we need to know the detail," said Hobby.

"In particular, we need more information on how local authorities would fit into this new structure, since we would want to avoid duplication and 90 per cent of primary schools still look to their local authority for local oversight."

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