Horace Camp: States must trust school leaders, not control them

When the States told us they were going to introduce local management of schools, I imagined something quite different from what we now see. In my mind I saw headteachers and parents sitting round a table, deciding how their schools would be run, managing budgets, hiring teachers and shaping priorities in a way that reflected the needs of their own community. Instead we are given something called a governance board. It is a strange name to choose. In most places they would simply be called boards of governors. Governance sounds like an exercise in oversight. It sounds like a layer of compliance. It sounds like a group appointed to look over the shoulders of others rather than to take decisions themselves. It does not sound like power being handed down to the schools and perhaps that is exactly the point.

True local management of schools would mean headteachers and governors holding the purse strings and being judged on the results they deliver. It would mean communities taking real ownership of their schools. That is not what the legislation gives us. The law says that the Committee for Education, Sport and Culture will appoint the chair of every governance board. Not the parents. Not the staff. The committee. Several of the other members are also appointed by the committee. A few parent and staff representatives are elected but they are in the minority. The balance of power remains with the centre. The director of education or someone they nominate is entitled to attend any meeting. Members of the committee must attend at least once a year. Officers can be in the room. This is not a group that runs its own affairs. It is a group being watched by the very officials and politicians it is supposed to challenge.

Even the powers these boards have are not really theirs. The committee may delegate things like financial management, human resources or procurement but it does not have to. These powers are not owned by the boards. They can be taken back whenever the committee chooses. This is not devolution. This is delegation. It is permission to act only so long as the centre allows it.

These boards are not entirely cost free. Each board will have a clerk, employed and paid by the Education Committee, whose salary is just over fifty thousand pounds a year pro rata for term time. Even allowing for that reduction it is still a remarkable sum for administrative support roles. The boards themselves are required to meet only once a term. Of course they may meet more often if they wish but the law does not require it. Are we really getting value for money from this arrangement and if we are can someone explain what that value is meant to be?

If these boards are taking on the work of oversight and planning one has to presume that those tasks are currently being done within the Education Office. If that is so then there must be a plan to reduce posts and free up the money to pay for these new boards. If not then we are simply adding another expensive layer to the system. That is not reform. That is duplication.

I have always been a supporter of local management of schools. Guernsey has schools that have run themselves for centuries. We already have a model of success. Elizabeth College is one of the oldest schools in the British Isles and it does not appear to need the guiding hand of the Education Office to tell it how to succeed. If that office was so vital to the success of schools, would the principal of Elizabeth College not be on her knees begging the director of education for support? I think we know the answer to that.

Why, then, the reluctance of the Education Committee to trust our States schools’ headteachers to manage their own schools in the same way? Why must we pay such a high price for boards that give them no more freedom than they have today?

What I cannot understand is why the present committee simply rubber-stamped the proposals of the last one which was openly against real local management of schools. Our new president stood up in the Assembly and gave an excellent update delivered with all the skill of an expert teacher but I could not help thinking that many of the words had been provided by officers. That thought grew stronger when he told us that La Mare was fully ready to receive sixth formers only for a brave student to reveal that it was not. To his credit, the president went to see for himself and found that the situation was not quite as described. If officers can be wrong about something as visible as whether a school site is ready why should we accept without question their solution for LMS?

This is a crucial moment for education policy. We have a chance to hand real power to schools. We have a chance to trust headteachers to run their schools as professionals. We have a chance to involve parents in a meaningful way. Instead we are creating boards that report back to the centre and whose authority depends entirely on the goodwill of the ‘centre’.

If we are going to spend this sort of money, let us spend it where it makes a difference. Let us put it into classrooms. Let us support special educational needs. Let us give teachers the help they need. Not another layer of meetings and minutes and reports that end up on someone’s desk at the Education Office.

What I am calling for is not chaos but trust. Trust the headteachers. Trust the parents. Trust the community to do what is right for their children. Give them real power and hold them accountable for the results. That is what LMS means. LMS does not mean waiting for the committee to lend a few powers and then taking them back when the political wind changes.

We need to get back to the vision that was promised when LMS was first discussed. We need boards of governors with real power. Budgets they control. Staff they appoint. Targets they set. That is how you improve standards. That is how you make schools belong to the people they serve.

If we are not prepared to do that then let us at least be honest. Let us admit that this is not local management but central control by another name. Let us stop spending tens of thousands of pounds on clerks for boards that have no power. Let us put that money to work where it will make a difference for the children in our care.

Local management of schools works. It works here in Guernsey. It will work for our States schools too if we are brave enough to let it.