survival of the fittest?
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Survival of the Fittest?Heather Du Quesnay aa Executive Director of Education , London Borough ofLambethPublished online: 06 Jul 2006.
To cite this article: Heather Du Quesnay (1997) Survival of the Fittest?, Cambridge Journal ofEducation, 27:1, 35-46, DOI: 10.1080/0305764970270104
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Cambridge Journal of Education, Vol. 27, No. 1, 1997 35
Survival of the Fittest?HEATHER DU QUESNAYExecutive Director of Education, London Borough of Lambeth
Local Education Authorities (LEAs) have come through a difficult period overthe last eight years, since that treacherous rodent we fondly dubbed GERBILbecame law in 1988. Many of us have expended energy in elucidating, and lostsleep in worrying over, the implications of grant maintained status for the publiceducation service in our area, particularly where it has led to fragmentation,inequitable admissions arrangements and dissension amongst the schools. Wehave lost responsibility for further education and, in some cases, the ability toexert much influence over it and, for some of us, that means a loss of formalinvolvement in all 16-19 education. We have seen our ability to secure thequality and standards of education in our area reduced, not so much bystatute—for there is enough power still in the legislation to allow us to intervenewhere we deem it necessary—but as a result of the sucking of resources out ofthe local government sector to fund the new private inspection regime and as aresult of innuendo and sometimes straightforward sniping from national figuresdesigned to undermine the role of LEAs in the eyes of the public. The countiesare only just emerging from the bruising process of local government review andin most county areas the familiar struggle is being repeated of trying to maintainand develop services while creating new structures to meet the needs of newlyformed or truncated local authorities. There are times when it seems that weshould be proud to have survived at all.
But that would be an ignoble reaction. Local government education depart-ments and their staff have no more right to exist than any other public agencyor, indeed, private business unless they are doing a job that needs to be done,genuinely adding value to the educational institutions in their area and offeringreal service to the public. And I believe that we have come through the last 8years not just as survivors, but as a powerful force for improving education,because we have not only responded to the challenges laid before us but alsotaken real initiatives to remodel our services, to develop our managerial skillsand to rethink the culture of our relationships, both with the schools and withthose who use our services.
Local Management of Schools (LMS) has been a triumph for local govern-ment—and incidentally for central government, if only it realised it. It began inlocal authorities, in places such as Solihull and Cambridgeshire. You will forgivemy partiality if I dwell particularly on the Cambridgeshire experience, in which
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I played a small part. LMS was a concept with which Cambridgeshire wasexperimenting when I first became an education officer in 1983, years beforethe Education Reform Act. It is important to recognise that it grew out ofthe political values of elected members (initially under the Conservatives andthen in the hung council of 1985-1989), a mixture of Liberal Democratcommunity commitment and Conservative belief in managerial devolutionproved a powerful cocktail. The political aspirations of members were under-stood, interpreted and nurtured by an especially imaginative and free thinkingChief Education Officer (CEO), Geoffrey Morris, whose innovative influenceon our public education service seems hardly to have been recognised until youcount the number of current CEOs who have come from the Cambridgeshirestable.
LMS was born out of the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of localgovernment at both political and managerial level. It has resulted in one of thebiggest voluntary transfers of power from the political centre (locally) to thegrass roots that has taken place in recent years, without a lot of fuss andcommotion, without marches and protests, without children's education beingdamaged; in fact, very much the opposite. It worked because the ideas weredeveloped slowly through a quiet process of trial and sometimes error, in closecooperation with the practitioners, the heads and governors of the schools whohad to make it operate on the ground. Central government played an importantpart; they recognised the power of the ideas and they chose the moment tolegislate, turning what had been the brainchild of just a few local authorities intoa national norm. Without the legislation, some of us would not have moved sofar or so fast. Thus was a major public service transformed—without theballyhoo and the real public anxiety that have characterised the health servicereforms, for example. And in this experience we have an almost perfectillustration of the way central and local government can work in partnership ifthey have the will and the wit to do so.
What a pity then that the first half of the 1990s nearly saw the annihilationof that very central-local partnership which had characterised the developmentof the public education service for the previous half century. The flameflickered, very nearly failed, but was never entirely extinguished. And recently itseems to have been fanned back into life for two reasons.
First, the national agenda for education is becoming more sharply focussedand, while differences remain between the major political parties in terms ofpresentation and style, which of course have to be exaggerated for the purposesof the media, the underlying issues are the same right across the politicalspectrum: school effectiveness and standards of achievement; early years pro-vision; curriculum 14-19 and the qualifications framework; the professionaldevelopment and status of teachers; Special Educational Needs; the contribu-tion of the education service to securing a safe, prosperous and harmoniousBritain in the twenty first century. Secondly, LEAs have themselves done a gooddeal in recent years to put their house in order. Relationships with schools havenever been better. The very fact that schools have had the opportunity to choose
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whether to be part of an LEA or not has galvanised us. Virtually every LEA inthe country has developed an open and robust partnership with governors andheads. The quality of LEA services has been transformed, often by putting themon a trading basis. Cooperation with business, industry, the churches and thevoluntary sector has never been closer.
Meanwhile, we have recently seen the establishment of a new jointDepartment for Education and Employment (DfEE), something for whichmany of us have been arguing for years. The opportunity for a new central-local partnership in the governance of education opens before us and thefuture of our young people depends upon us seizing it with enthusiasm and asense of purpose.
It goes without saying, I hope, that any decent partnership depends uponeach of the two sides understanding the role and function of the other andrespecting the part that it has to play. Local government must accept the rightof central government and its officials to determine the framework of nationalpolicy, to monitor standards, to take steps to encourage innovation and bestpractice and, indeed, in doing all this, to reflect the values and concerns of thepolitical party in power. Likewise, it is to be hoped that central government andits officials would recognise that local government also works in a politicalcontext. Local government politicians are elected by their communities toensure that local services are delivered effectively and efficiently in accordancewith local needs and priorities. In setting about that task it is entirely appropriatethat they too should seek to reflect their political values in the decisions theymake and we, as their paid officials, must work within the policy that they setus. If that is understood, it need not be a problem. But if the old commonplacethat the British education service is a national system locally administered isinterpreted too rigidly, and if national government forms the view that localgovernment is simply there to act as its passive agents, we get into difficulty. Wehave experienced just such a difficulty in the past over government policy onopting out, which, in so far as it represented a denial of the role of localgovernment in education, could hardly have been expected to attract the mutecompliance of local authorities.
It would help if the concept of subsidiarity could be taken more seriouslyin central government's relationships with local government: after all, as a nationwe argue for it hard enough in our dealings with Europe. In his book The EmptyRaincoat Charles Handy (1994) reminds us that subsidiarity is different fromempowerment in that empowerment implies that somebody on high is givingaway power, while 'subsidiarity, on the other hand, implies that the powerproperly belongs, in the first place lower down or farther out'.
Local government officers are very clear that the relationship of the councilswhich employ us to central government is one of subsidiarity—we are notwaiting for the crumbs of power to be dropped from the table. What we needperhaps is a stronger sense of federalism which would admit both of a lead fromthe centre and of individual initiative and autonomy at local level. As Handyalso points out
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All federal organisations have written constitutions. It may be thatBritain's aversion to a written constitution has something to do withher intuitive distrust of federalism and its formality. (Handy, 1994,p. 116)
If that is so, it is an 'intuitive distrust' which will have to be rapidly overcomeif we are to make sense of the business of developing an education service fit forthe twenty first century. For I firmly believe that without an energetic contribu-tion from a strong and respected local government sector, the aspirations forrising educational standards and international competitiveness of any centralgovernment will be thwarted.
It is worth considering some practical illustrations of the contribution whichlocal authorities can make, indeed must make, to the national agenda foreducation. Let us start with the pressing issue of school effectiveness andstudent achievement. We have already taken a step forward, by denning issuesof school effectiveness in terms of the standards achieved by pupils. For too longthe debate about good education has been unduly dominated by process issuesand insufficiently focussed on outcomes. Measuring success in education is, ofcourse, a complex matter and we must be wary of reducing our ambitions forthe learning of young people to that which can be measured easily. But there isno need for the debate to become polarised. Some of the knowledge, under-standing and skills which we want our young people to learn can be assessed,marked and reported in quantitative terms. Some cannot. The fact that we wantto preserve the development of personal values, empathy with others, imagin-ation and creativity, (which cannot easily be measured) within the curricularrequirements for every child, is not an excuse for refusing to measure that whichcan be measured, as a means of monitoring the effectiveness of both teachingand learning in our schools.
Local authorities throughout the UK are playing a significant part inpromoting this agenda. The National Targets for Education and Training offera splendid framework. But on their own they are meaningless at the local level.For example, the National Target is that by the year 2000, 85% of 19 year oldsshould have achieved 5 Grade Cs at GCSE or above (or its equivalent) and that60% of 21 year olds should achieve NVQ Level 3, Advanced GNVQ or 2 Alevels. The very formulation of the targets around the ages of 19 and 21, whenschools think in terms of their 16 + and 18 + cohorts, is opaque. Add to thatthe differences between local authority areas and between schools within a singleauthority and the relevance of national targets looks highly questionable. But theconcept of target setting is sound and if the national targets can be locallyinterpreted—by local education authority area, by type of school, by com-munity, by individual school—then you have something which governing bodiesand heads can use as a management tool, for bench-marking their performanceagainst other similar schools and for motivating and monitoring their pupils andstaff.
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Similarly in matters of general school performance, the OFSTED inspec-tion arrangements appear at times to be a somewhat crude and certainly aresource hungry instrument and I regret that a greater attempt was not made,when they were set up, formally to recognise the role of local authorities in thebusiness of assuring quality in schools. However, when one looks at what ishappening in practice, formal recognition seems almost irrelevant. OFSTED isvery substantially dependent upon local authorities for delivering its inspectionprogramme, particularly in the primary phase, and takes every opportunity toencourage CEOs to require their advisory and inspection staff to do more.However, as long as the competitive contractual regime persists, OFSTED willhave to do more in order to encourage local authorities to increase theirinspection commitments: it is ironic that OFSTED appears to believe that LEAshave a duty to help them to deliver primary inspection, where tenderers are inshort supply, while they readily accept tenders for secondary schools at priceswhich LEAs could not hope to match. In the real commercial world, I suspectthat entrepreneurial clients would be finding some means of achieving atrade-off between the two.
But leaving this issue aside, LEAs are in fact key players in the inspectionbusiness and the skills, knowledge and understanding of their inspection andadvisory staff in the observation and evaluation of educational quality andperformance have been enhanced as a result. And that is a second key issue,because LEA staff form a substantial network for the transmission to teachers ofan understanding of what constitutes an appropriate level of achievement forchildren of differing levels of ability and differing social contexts. If we are reallyto drive up teachers' expectations of what their pupils can achieve, nothing ismore important than to help teachers challenge themselves to demand more.LEA advisory staff, informed by their OFSTED experience, are doing that daily,through training courses, through one-to-one observation and feedback onlessons, through offering consultancy to heads. It saddens me that this workseems so often to be undervalued. The act of inspection is both threatening andsterile if it does not feed strategies for improvement.
LEAs are also, of course, playing a crucial role at individual school level,both in helping schools to prepare for inspection—an enormously valuablelearning experience for a school if it is done well—and in follow-up work. Thelegislation, as it is framed, makes some extraordinary assumptions about thecapacity of Governing Bodies to act alone following an inspection. Clearly, if theschool is doing well, the head is effective and relationships are good, there is noproblem. But in many cases, some action is needed over poor performance in aparticular subject area, over weak teaching, over ineffective management. Is itreally to be expected that a Governing Body can make the necessary professionaljudgements and deploy the appropriate personnel procedures acting alone?Governors are, after all, volunteers, fitting in an increasingly time consumingand sometimes stressful piece of voluntary service to the community alongsideall the other demands on their lives. They need professional advice and support,just as the board of any company might after a management review. Frequently
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they can be expected to pay for the support they need, but the systematic raisingof standards of teaching and learning across an area depends upon a continuityof judgement and oversight which only the LEA can give.
This is so for all schools, but particularly in the case of schools displayingserious weaknesses. The report of the DfEE and OFSTED to an OECDseminar held in the autumn of 1995 on 'The improvement of failing schools'comments favourably on the part played by LEAs and their inspection andadvisory services in supporting schools requiring special measures:
The policy has enabled LEAs to take troublesome schools by the scruffof the neck and shake them into improvement: in some cases, wheremediocre schools refused to heed the warnings of the authority, thepolicy has given the authority the lever it needs to engineer improve-ment.
The Secretary of State and her ministers, in the discussions they havechaired about school improvement, have readily acknowledged the key rolewhich LEAs play when schools get into difficulties. And the lack of a body toplay a similar part with respect to grant maintained schools requiring specialmeasures is a glaring omission from the arrangements that the government hasestablished. Although the OECD report acknowledges that the percentage offailing schools in the grant maintained sector is the same as in the LEAmaintained sector, there is scant comment about the sources of external helpavailable to them, namely 'The Funding Agency for Schools will provide helpfor schools in this position, while not encroaching on their autonomy'.
Yet Professor Michael Barber is quoted earlier in the document on theimportance of failing schools both receiving support and being put underpressure if they are to be pulled round. And that has to be a continuous process;the inspection alone is not enough.
But I dwell too long on the LEA's role in respect of schools with difficulties.I repudiate vehemently the suggestion that this is the major task for LEAs inmatters of quality. A rigorous quality assurance framework depends upon LEAsnot only as a rescue and retrieval service for schools in difficulty, but as thevehicle for interpreting national standards and policy, for providing relevantlocal bench-marks and for monitoring school performance between inspections.And is it unduly self-indulgent to suggest that the seriousness with whichEducation Committees and senior LEA officers debate and review issues ofschool performance in the public arena has played a significant part in develop-ing the climate of opinion among heads and governors as well as in creating alocal agenda for driving up standards? None of this, I should hasten to add,involves the culture of dependency which Her Majesty's Chief Inspector con-demns. The work would, however, be much enhanced by the encouragement ofa spirit of partnership and mutual respect between OFSTED and LEAs. Muchwill be gained as the OFSTED database is opened up to local scrutiny.
Let me move on now to the professional development and support of theteaching profession and others who work in schools. We have been slow to
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recognise the high levels of skill required of both our teachers and the leaders ofour schools. Too little has been done in the past to ensure rigour and relevancein teacher development and training. The energy which the Teacher TrainingAgency is bringing to the task is to be welcomed.
The view is at last gaining ground that we ought to be making far more useof the educational research of British and foreign higher education institutionsin the classroom. Our weakness as a nation in the application and implemen-tation of frontline research is as much of a problem in education as it is inscience and technology. It is also of the first importance that the nationalagencies, such as OFSTED, the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority,the Teacher Training Agency (TTA) and the Basic Skills Agency, whoseterritorial preoccupations tend to keep them apart, should be encouraged topool their knowledge and expertise. What a golden opportunity for the LEA tostand at the centre of such a partnership and to give teachers access to highquality training which draws on such a deep reservoir of support!
Moreover, there is more that could be done to turn inspection into alearning experience for teachers. Management models of quality assuranceemphasise the critical need to ensure a continuous loop of feedback from reviewand evaluation or, in this case, inspection to development planning and theimplementation of staff training strategies. The OECD research reported in theTimes Educational Supplement in September 1995 compares the British system,where 'the focus is on accountability in terms of publishing information', withthe approach in other European countries, particularly Spain, where inspectionteams include a local inspector who can help the school capitalise on the insightsprovided by the inspection. Such an approach both ensures the greatest possiblebenefits from the inspection and reduces the sense of external threat. The LEAcould easily secure that feedback loop, if it were given the opportunity to do so.It seems to have much in common with the FEFC's approach to the inspectionof colleges.
Disseminating information about good practice has always been a key taskfor LEA advisers. No amount of glossy brochures published by OFSTED andthe DfEE can substitute for the insights of an experienced adviser, shared in thecontext of a real classroom situation. Yet the OECD report author, CarolineSt-John Brookes, points to the gaps in UK local authorities' advisory work. Andrecent research by the Royal Society, the Association of Education CommitteesTrust and the NFER has indicated a worrying decline in the number of LEAadvisory posts, with a fall of 25% in the number of advisory and inspection postsand 33% in advisory teacher posts between 1992/3 and 1994/5. At a time ofsharpened national concern about science and mathematics achievement, it wasnotable that the survey found 8% of LEAs without a science adviser and 14%without a mathematics specialist.
The work of a number of the national agencies, particularly the TTA,SCAA and the National Council for Educational Technology, depends uponthis kind of local dissemination and support. It is absurd to think that a singlenational body can develop and maintain effective channels of communication
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with 25,000 schools, 400,000 teachers and as many more governors. Thecontribution of LEA advisers is a critical but unacknowledged element in thesystem.
While professional development is on the agenda, we should also be lookingmuch more energetically at the people too often referred to dismissively as thenon-teaching staff of the school. Every school in the country is dependent upona range of support staff from the overpressed part-time secretary in the villageprimary school to teams of technicians and classroom support assistants in thebig secondary schools. Yet training and development for these staff is spasmodicat best and entirely dependent upon individual school and LEA initiatives. Theinterest taken by a number of schools in Investors in People, something which Ivery much welcome, has encouraged some useful local developments. But muchmore needs to be done. The DfEE is spendidly placed to promote an NVQframework for education support staff, so that we can all stop having to borrowNVQs from other occupational areas. With the rapid advance of new learningtechnologies, and changing patterns of working life, the school of the twenty firstcentury is going to be peopled with a vast array of adults: learning supporttechnologists; classroom assistants; bursars and administrators; engineers andmanagers on secondment from industry; artists and writers in residence; parentsand young retired volunteers, some of them learning alongside the young peopleas well as helping the teachers. We need a better framework than we have fortraining and developing such people and providing them with a decent careerstructure; this is another area which would lend itself to cooperation betweencentral and local government.
Every theme in education seems to lead on to another and the topic of staffdevelopment inevitably takes me to the changing nature of the curriculum. SirRon Dealing was absolutely right, in his review of the National Curriculum, toinsist that there should be a moratorium on further change for 5 years.Teachers' sanity could have borne no less. But in practice I hope that we allbelieve that what will happen next will be a gradual, evolutionary process ofdevelopment, as teachers rediscover their professional confidence and begin toexploit the admittedly limited additional freedoms that the Dealing review gavethem. In 14-19 education, however, the pace will be, and needs to be, muchhotter.
Sir Ron's 16-19 Review has set out a framework of three pathways for16-19 education, not as radical a solution as some would have wished, but asignificant step forward, nonetheless, in the coherence and flexibility' of ourqualifications system. Here is another area where the national agencies need thehelp of LEAs. It is not only a matter of developing the teaching skills necessaryto support the very different kind of learning programmes and assessmentinherent in the GNVQ, but also a question of facilitating local partnerships, inorder to give students and teachers access to the necessary range of learningexperiences. LEAs stand at the centre of a web of local contacts: Training andEnterprise Councils, Business-Education Partnerships, Compacts, further edu-cation (FE) colleges, business and industry can all be readily accessed through
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the LEA's network, saving time and energy for teachers and school admini-strative staff and for business people. As time becomes more and morepressured, even large secondary schools increasingly value the LEA's role asfacilitator and enabler, because it helps them to avoid continually reinventingthe wheel.
Local government was almost unanimous in its outrage when proposals fornursery vouchers were first announced and reports of the experience of the pilotauthorities continue to give rise to some concern. For local authorities, it is nota matter of seeking to be monopolistic providers for the area. In many author-ities, councillors of all political groups are developing a policy which encouragescooperation with the private and voluntary sectors. They want to secure moreplaces, they want to look at private finance, they want parents to have a choiceof provision, they want to ensure cooperation across agency and geographicalboundaries, but they also want to ensure that the best use is made of publicresources and that provision is spread as equitably as possible across the area asa whole. While they have total confidence in the quality of the LEA's currentprovision, they are nervous of finding themselves with a nursery class or schoolwhose viability is undermined by the loss of perhaps just a handful of voucher-bearing pupils and they are finding it difficult to predict the impact on primaryschool reception classes of the inclusion of rising 5s in the voucher scheme.They are also concerned that parents who are disorganised, illiterate or disad-vantaged may never get to grips with their vouchers at all. What an opportunityappears to have been missed to develop early years services in an organic,evolutionary way, building on the expertise, the networks and the goodwill oflocal authorities. And yet, vouchers will only work if local authorities pitch inand facilitate local partnerships of public, private and voluntary sector providers,in order to get the best out of existing provision and bring new resources intothe system. And now that the legislation is in place, many local authorities aredoing this very energetically—just as we have managed the amputation from thelocal government sector of the FE colleges, just as we have helped to makeOFSTED work, just as we have advised on the development of the CommonFunding Formula and cooperated with the FAS on planning school provision—not because we are oblivious to the slights of central government nor because weare their lackeys, but because we are committed to promoting the good of thecommunities we serve and because parents' and children's needs will always beparamount.
In my survey of the role of local government in responding to recentreforms, I cannot pass over Special Educational Needs: a vastly important rangeof services in which nobody as yet has suggested there can be any substitute forlocal government involvement. Important work is going on up and down theland on the back of the Code of Practice, as LEAs seek to make their servicesmore responsive to children's needs and more amenable to parental influence.This is, in fact, one area where I would argue for more central governmentinvolvement rather than less. Since the Education Act of 1981, we haveexperienced central government driving up parents' hopes and expectations
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through legislation which requires children's needs to be met without everoffering recognition (in the form of additional resources) of the pressures uponlocal authorities. In the 1993 Act we saw the establishment of tribunals to hearparents' appeals against LEAs' statements of special needs provision. Tribunalswhich can overrule LEAs' judgement and commit their resources withoutany financial accountability of their own. Simultaneously, documents like theParent's Charter encourage parents to press for their child's needs to be met inthe way they think fit.
It is difficult to avoid the perception that there is some buck passinghere. The issues around providing for children with special educational needs:how much can the country afford?, what should be the relative importanceof the needs of the individual and the needs of the majority? how far canmainstream schools provide for children with SEN if their resources are notenhanced? what part should special schools play in the system? how do weenhance their development and make the jobs of their staff more professionallysatisfying, particularly those for children displaying emotional and behaviouraldifficulties, which many of us perceive to be on a knife edge?, and finally, howdo you control the spending on SEN when budgets are cash-limited and thelegislation is not? All these are national issues, requiring a new national policythrust.
The last of my issues for the twenty first century is the contribution whichthe public education service can make to the creation of a safe, prosperous andharmonious Britain. It is perhaps the most important of all. At the North ofEngland Conference in January 1996, Sir Geoffrey Holland reminded us of thechallenge which the UK faces to remain competitive with its European and FarEastern neighbours. But we have a challenge just as great at home, and that ishow to hold together a nation where there is every possibility of the gap betweenrich and poor gaping ever wider, where, in the knowledge economy of thetwenty first century some people may find it difficult ever to find work, manymay have nothing but part time work and even the highly skilled and highlyeducated are likely to find their working lives compressed into perhaps 20 or 25years. Leisure and unemployment are but different sides of the same coin andthey are both likely to be significant features of the adult lives of many of theyoung people in our schools today.
It is important, then, that we should offer them a range of experiencesbeyond the traditional classroom learning that dominates the educational debateat present. Our schools do it through a range of extracurricular activities andthrough personal and social education programmes, which should be morehighly valued. Despite some of the recent headlines suggesting the opposite,schools do teach children the difference between right and wrong and do it verywell, day in and day out. The problem is when the morality of the schoolcommunity clashes with that of the world outside, as the tragic death of aLondon headteacher illustrated. LEAs through their Youth and CommunityServices and through a wide range of local partnerships with voluntary organisa-tions, TECs, business and industry, make possible a multiplicity of personal and
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social learning opportunities—from sport and outdoor pursuits to dance, theatreand music, from community service to the development of new hobbies andskills. LEA Youth and Community Services play a vital part in communityregeneration initiatives and have enjoyed significant success in winning fundingfrom Europe, from other agencies like the Police and from the Single Regener-ation Budget, because of the value of their contribution.
A recent paper published by the Society of Local Authority Chief Execu-tives argues that for the second half of the 1990s a new public policy modelis needed. The authors take the lighthouse, as opposed to the spotlight, asthe metaphor for this model. They suggest that over the last decade there hasbeen a predilection for single issue agencies and while the narrow beam ofthe spotlight from such bodies has had its value in focussing energy andperformance, we need now to move into a different phase. Now, within thebroad beam of the lighthouse, policy will be built up from the needs ofcommunities, rather than down from on high; local agencies will come togetherin a genuine partnership to meet local needs. Local councils, unlike nationalquangos, are lighthouse organisations. They and their officers have a keyrole to play in helping such partnerships get off the ground, above all ineducation.
Local government currently runs the risk of being disempowered by theschizophrenia inherent in national government policy. On the one hand we havethe philosophy of rampant consumerism; education is a commodity whosequality is most likely to be improved by exposing it to the market place; parents'entitlement to choose is best expressed in the form of a voucher and theaggregate effect of their individual choices will force decent schools to get betterand poor schools to close. Simultaneously, we have the Gillian Shephard andDavid Blunkett common sense style of government. Both of them know thepublic education service, understand where the traditional levers of power lieand, while they will continue to encourage parents to use their influence, theysee a need for a degree of external intervention, particularly in matters of schoolimprovement and, in Blunkett's case, in planning and admissions too. Thependulum is undoubtedly swinging back in favour of an active local governmentrole in education. But the repositioning of the LEA has to be handled with somecare. In my early years as a CEO talk was all of delegation, school autonomy,putting schools in the driving seat. More recently it has been much more aboutaccountability, challenging poor practice, publishing information about per-formance. LEAs up and down the land, to varying degrees, are right in themiddle of managing the cultural changes that movement between those polari-ties implies. If we get it wrong, we shall lose credibility with those parts ofcentral government which still see value in us, we shall lose the opportunity toregain the confidence of the public and we shall lose the trust of the schools. Ifwe can get it right, we shall play a significant part in reinventing the publiceducation service in Britain. The stakes are high, but well worth the effort, andthere are many in local government, both elected members and officers, whowill rise to that challenge.
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46 H. Du Quesnay
Correspondence: Heather Du Quesnay, London Borough of Lambeth EducationDepartment, 234-244 Stockwell Road, London SW9 9SP, UK.
NOTE
[1] This article was commissioned after a lecture given at the University of Cambridge Instituteof Education in February 1996 based on Heather Du Quesnay's unpublished presidentialaddress to the Society of Education Officers, January 1996.
REFERENCES
HANDY, C. (1994) The Empty Raincoat (London, Hutchinson).
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