Oral evidence: The role of Regional Schools Commissioners, HC 401Wednesday 21 October 2015
Oral evidence, 21 October 2015.
Witnesses
Jon Coles, Chief Executive, United Learning, Reverend Nigel Genders, Chief Education Officer, Church of England, Councillor Richard Watts, Vice-Chair, Local Government Association Children and Young People Board, and Debbie Barnes, Director, Children’s Services, Lincolnshire County Council, and Chair, Association of Directors of Children’s Services Educational Achievement Policy Committee, gave evidence.
Chair
Welcome to the second panel of today’s investigation into the Regional School Commissioners, their role, their capacity and basically their position within the education system. It is great to see you, Nigel, Jon, Richard and Debbie. Thank you very much for coming along. We are going to spend an hour effectively exploring this with you. We have some questions and my first one I am going to focus on Jon. As I understand it, you have a school in every single of the eight regions or near enough, so you will be an ideal person to ask the question effectively around what are the differences between the regions, and how the regional structure works from your perspective.
Jon Coles
Yes, thank you. Can I pick up one thing from the first session? Do you mind?
Chair
If it is quick, yes.
Jon Coles
It is very quick. I think it is a great idea to get all of the RSCs in and hold them to account. I think that is a fabulous idea and it absolutely fits with the role of the Committee. If you got all eight in once a term, four mornings, two hours, one hour for each, you would do a great job and that would be a fantastic service to the system.
Chair
We will take note of that suggestion; that is why I asked it. I am always keen to improve accountability systems. I am not sure my colleagues will agree with the idea we do it as regularly as you have just suggested.
Ian Mearns
I am getting the distinct feelings of guilt. I keep asking—
Jon Coles
Well, you used to ask me in all the time and ask me difficult questions. I thought that was absolutely fine.
Chair
Anyway, thank you, Jon, for that endorsement of that idea.
Jon Coles
So, they are quite different from one another. They are quite different people. I think we have to understand it is quite early and it is in a set-up phase in lots of ways. In the first year of anything you have a period of building relationships, getting structures up and running. I think it is unrealistic to think that all your decision-making criteria and approaches are completely consistent on day one. It was quite evident, almost from week one at the beginning of last year, that people were going to approach this in very different ways. Some of that just reflects the different backgrounds of the RSCs and the different ways they want to work. Some of them want to be personally out in schools all of the time. Others are using their teams a lot. The thresholds are different in different regions. We found in one region—I will not name names—an RSC wanting to visit a school that they were worried about but we were not. In another region we found RSCs not really interested in visiting a school that we were quite worried about. It was evident to us that the bar was being drawn at a different level in different regions reflecting the level of different challenge in the regions. There are differences. There are quite a lot of differences. For me, a big question that comes out of this is: then what is the role of the National School Commissioner? Because you are not going to get consistency and learning across regions simply by just relying on a network of ace individuals to compare practice. You have to have that properly organised. You have to have performance management. You have to have somebody saying, “This is the set of things that we want to see done in every region” and having at least a bit of 80:20; 80% consistency, 20% regional/local variation. I do not think we have got there yet and perhaps it is too early to think that we would have done, but I would quite like to see a bit more evidence of emerging consistency and shared practice and agreed approaches across the country.
Chair
The point that you have just made is central to the purpose of this inquiry in a sense because obviously, if we are defining the role of the Regional Schools Commissioner in more detail, we want to see that definition exercised across all of the regions. To make sure that happens is a question, to some extent, of performance review.
Jon Coles
Yes.
Chair
Going on from that, performance review involves measurement, so how would we measure the effectiveness of Regional School Commissioners?
Jon Coles
I thought Russell had it right that you have to do it by looking at the performance of the schools and, in a sense, if I cast my mind back to when I was setting up London Challenge, the beauty of running London Challenge was you have just compared yourself against national. All the arguments about do we agree with the standard of exams, do we agree with Ofsted are completely out the window. You are just benchmarking yourself against national performance and that is what you would naturally do as an RSC. I think that is the way to start. Two difficulties, obviously: one is it is a norm referencing system. They cannot all of them be above average, so you just need to be a bit careful that you are not going to generate unhealthy competition. Particularly, if you are thinking about sponsors working across multiple regions, you do not want the RSCs to be too much in competition with one another. You want them to display competitor/collaborator kind of behaviour. That is point 1. Point 2 is: do they have enough levers at the moment—which is one of the points we make in our evidence—to drive school improvement? If you think about what the drivers of school improvement are, the underpinning thing, number 1, is can you get enough good teachers? But they do not have much control over teacher supply in their regions or teacher professional development or leadership development in their regions, so there is a question: yes, you need to use that as your starting point, but do you then need to think about giving them more levers to affect the quality of schooling in their region?
Chair
I was going to ask you that same question because obviously the Church of England has pretty good coverage across England.
Reverend Genders
Absolutely, we have fantastic coverage all over the country, so we get to talk to dioceses that are working within each of the regions, but we also have dioceses that sit in two or three different regions themselves as well. They understand the complexity that comes with the kind of lack of consistency in the system. I echo what Jon was saying that, inevitably, some of that is about how it has evolved. We have started from a fairly blank piece of paper and everyone is trying to develop a system as we go along. It becomes a problem where dioceses are trying to put together a strategy for the 100 or so schools that they have in their diocese and a multi-academy trust system, where one region is taking a very different approach to another as to whether or not that should be one big multi-academy trust with hubs or whether it is a slightly different model. I understand that it needs to be an evolving system, but without those kinds of guidelines and criteria—as has been described in the previous panel—it is very difficult for dioceses to be able to play into that. That links into the performance criteria as well that you have just gone on to talk about. If the system seems to be evolving in a way that is about how many academies a particular region can develop and how many you can get in a particular trust, then that is always going to lead to particular outcomes and pressures to do things in a certain way. If it is about the performance of schools and the number of children and young people who are in schools that are good and outstanding, then that is an opportunity for the Regional Schools Commissioner, the diocese and the local authority to sit down together and say, “How are we going to improve the system on that basis?” rather than just play into particular models.
Chair
Richard, you are from the LGA so your interest is partly, presumably, the role of the local authorities. Do you see the Regional Schools Commissioner as a competitive model to you or do you want to work with them and do you think that is happening?
Councillor Watts
They should not be a competitive model, but one of the challenges is it can sneak into that kind of relationship, and I will address that in a second if that is all right. Part of this does beg the question about: what do you have a middle tier in education for? I do not mean to open this up too much. I think the question of what are the powers to intervene is an important one, because that does then start to open up questions about what are the capacity and the scope of these people. Islington Council still employs nine or 10 staff to work with the 57 schools in our borough to drive school improvement. If you were to replicate that across the enormous geographies and thousands of schools in each of the regions for the Regional Schools Commissioners, you would have an incredibly big and unwieldy bureaucracy. I think a lot of the questions raised about early intervention and spotting problems before they develop in the last session are absolutely acute. We welcome the fact that there is a backstop for academies where standards are low. As a local authority we, and many other local authorities who are members of the LGA, have struggled to get responsiveness from the DfE when it was just the DfE managing this where academies were not of a level of performance that we were happy with. If there is something there, what we have found—and member authorities report this to us—is a very, very different, inconsistent level of engagement with local authorities across the piece. Some RSCs want to act as partners to local authorities, and we welcome that. Some see local authorities as competition, and that leads to quite a difficult set of relationships across localities and regions.
Chair
Okay, thank you. We will probe that point later; it was a very good one. Debbie, do you have any comments to make on this line of questioning we have just been pursuing?
Debbie Barnes
Thank you, a couple of comments from an Association of Directors of Children’s Services perspective. We would echo that we also see a level of inconsistency across the various different regions. Some regions are developing protocols with their Regional Schools Commissioners. We think that would be incredibly helpful and we would very much echo the suggestion of Jon of the 80:20 per cent rule, where there is 80% agreed rules of engagement and agreed standards about how we should respond so that there are clear parameters around working together, and then 20% to allow for local variation. In relation to the issues around performance, I would not want to replace one system necessarily with another simplistic system because measuring performance is incredibly complex. I would like a focus on performance measures in relation to a time when an academy takes on to then what the outcome is, in relation to progress that children have made as well as outcomes, because I think that they are both important. The other thing that I would say, which has only had minimal discussion so far, is that there is a lot of intelligence that local authorities have around our most vulnerable children: those children who are excluded, are looked-after children, children who are offending, and that information does not get on to the RSC’s radar. It is important that they know that about their academies and schools because they are the most vulnerable children that we have in society.
Chair
That strays into agency co-operation, doesn’t it?
Debbie Barnes
Completely.
Chair
And certainly gives a strong role to the RSC in that context?
Debbie Barnes
Absolutely, and the more that we can share data, work collectively to share data, and monitor and intervene the same things as a consistent data set across maintained schools and academies the better.
Chair
Thanks very much. Kate, you are going to be probing the issues of relationships with schools, parents and communities.
Kate Osamor
Hello, everybody. The Education and Adoption Bill removes a requirement for consultation on academy conversions when a school is subject to an academy order. Do you think this would entirely absolve RSCs from responsibility to engage with local communities or will this become even more important if the Bill becomes law? I will pass this to Richard as I know you are Leader of Islington.
Councillor Watts
Thank you. I think it is problematic. I agree with the speaker in the last evidence session who said that the process of conversion can often be the biggest delay in getting action in a failing school. The Government’s instinct, therefore, is to remove the delays in the process of conversion, but I think you will end up having a lot of local conflict where there is not a consensus that academy conversion is the right way forward. That is not going to be helpful to anyone, least of all the kids in that school who are the most important people in this. I think where there is partnership and where a consensus way forward can be established to improve a school that is by far the best way of doing it because it means you can get on more quickly.
Kate Osamor
Debbie, do you have anything to add to that?
Debbie Barnes
Yes. I think we have some good experiences where we have worked locally with the Regional Schools Commissioner, with the community, governing bodies, to broker the most appropriate sponsored solution for that school. Highly, highly successful, they have gone on to thrive. We have other examples, as well, where we have not had that level of co-operation and the schools have not always gone on to thrive as quickly as possible. To me, it is about relationships and joint working. What I would also say is: I don’t know whether this is a capacity issue but what we are finding in practice is that, where there is an effective relationship, high levels of trust and integrity between the Regional Schools Commissioner and the local authority, the Regional Schools Commissioners are then happy to almost do the introductions around sponsored academies and then let the local authorities work closely with the school and the governing bodies to deliver the implementation of the sponsored programme rather than it being led regionally. I think that co-operation is essential. All players have a role, but I think the role needs to be clearer defined.
Reverend Genders
To echo some of those points, we fully understand that the intention behind the Bill is to make the process quicker and faster and more agile. In that admirable zeal to get rid of bureaucracy sometimes things do get lost, and I think that that engagement with parents and with communities and with the wider school community is important. Not having the consultation about whether or not it should become an academy should not be an excuse for real engagement with parents. I think that in a maintained school and local authority maintained school, where the school has gone through difficult times, the local authority has to pitch up to full school meetings to explain what they have been doing and what they are proposing to do. There needs to be that kind of hands-on accountability between the Regional Schools Commissioners and their teams and the local schools community to explain the process that is involved, even if we are trying to find a quick way through.
Jon Coles
A couple of points very quickly. First, the fact that it is not a requirement in law does not mean it cannot happen.
Kate Osamor
Well, no, but unfortunately—
Jon Coles
Overwhelmingly, most academy sponsors would say, “We want to consult the community. We want to talk to the community before taking on a school”. That would certainly be our view. The reason for the Bill—I am not sure how clearly this has been articulated by Government—is that Government have been trying to use a piece of legislation that was designed for one purpose for a completely different purpose. The Academies Act immediately following the last election set up a converter process for academies, which was designed—I know for sure—to deal with the process of outstanding schools wishing to convert. Government have subsequently been trying to use that for cases of forced conversion in which the Government are simply saying, “The standards in this school are not high enough and we need to require there to be change”. I think the Government are fundamentally trying to fix the problem with this piece of legislation—which is absolutely fine 99% of the time. On issues of forced conversion, when there is a serious local dispute, that does not work very well. You might say this is a small proportion of schools and a small proportion of conversions, but they take up a disproportionate amount of Government time in thinking about them. I think that is really what the Government are trying to fix with this. It would be highly regrettable if that led to a lack of consultation in the overwhelming majority of cases where that is not the situation, it is not that there is a big local dispute. There is a serious question to solve in policy terms about: if Government and others think this school is not performing but there is not a consensus about what should happen, how do we now proceed? If it is not this solution there needs to be a solution to that.
Kate Osamor
Yes, there needs to be a solution, but I think what I need to say at this point is that on the ground most communities feel that they have not been consulted. If it is not law for them to be consulted, unfortunately they will not feel included. A lot of the hostility around the way that a school has to improve, especially if it has to turn into an academy, is because the parents on the ground feel that they have not been consulted, even though we are all together when we say we want the school to do better. Nobody says that they do not want that but they just want to be part of that change.
Debbie Barnes
Can I introduce a slightly different dimension, which I am not sure we have experienced in big measures but I think there is a potential with the issue around the coasting schools needing to become academies potentially? We have two minor examples at the moment with really small schools that are not performing, a requirement for them to become a sponsored academy, but the Regional Schools Commissioner and their Headteacher Board are saying they are not viable; therefore, looking at closure. Again community engagement with that I think is absolutely essential, and that is going to need some teasing out as we go through the process.
Councillor Watts
The Local Government Association’s view is that academisation should not be the kind of “one club golfer” act to improve schools, and I think there is lots of evidence of where you can improve schools dramatically and quickly not pursuing that route. However, there are then a lot of issues. This is where the geography of the Regional Schools Commissioners goes from being a bureaucratic problem to a real problem, where then there are not the networks in place in order to have the relationship that lends itself to going well on the ground because Regional Schools Commissioners do not fit any other bit of government in the shape in which they operate.
Chair
Thanks very much, Kate. Now, Ian, you are going to talk about local authorities and you do so from the vantage point of your experience in Gateshead.
Ian Mearns
Indeed, as well as declaring a non-financial interest as the Vice-President of the LGA.
Chair
That is a good warning as well.
Councillor Watts
I think they throw some particularly tough questions at us.
Chair
So behave yourself.
Councillor Watts
I am under scrutiny.
Ian Mearns
A couple of weeks ago we had the Chief Inspector sitting just about where you are, Richard, and in answer to a question from me he said, “With increasing academisation and increasing autonomy for schools, local authorities have less responsibility than ever” for schools and education. I am adding in “schools and education” but that is what he was talking about, “Their main focus of attention should be on the quality of provisioning in Children’s Services”. Do you agree with that perspective that has been put out by the Chief Inspector?
Councillor Watts
In a word, no. I think we have a moral responsibility for the quality of education in our areas. There are still lots of areas—including my own—where the overwhelming majority of schools are still maintained by the local authority. As local authorities, I think that we have clear responsibilities that tie into a whole range of our statutory duties to ensure that the quality of education in the area is good. The phrase that drives me most potty in this whole debate is, “Council-run school”. There is no such thing as a council-run school. Councils run no schools at all. What we do have, though, is a supervisory responsibility for ensuring the quality of education across our patch as well as things, like, ensuring the quality of the admission system is working effectively, that there are no holes through which vulnerable children slip through the system, that place planning is done effectively. You cannot do those statutory responsibilities in local authorities unless you have some kind of stake in the broader education system.
Debbie Barnes
Can I come in on that? The law has not changed in regard to our legal duties, in terms of a supply of good education or places, and neither has the legislation changed in relation to the wealth of other statutory education-related responsibilities that we have. We have a legal responsibility, we have a moral responsibility, we have a democratic responsibility, and we are also inspected on how we fulfil those responsibilities through Ofsted. I am not sure we have the funding but we certainly do have moral, legal and an inspection requirement where we are called to account.
Ian Mearns
You are quite right, Debbie, that those responsibilities have not changed, but the landscape has changed because we have the DfE with its significant change of policy over the last five or six years. You have Ofsted. You have Regional Schools Commissioners. You have the Education Funding Agency. The landscape is quite different from what it was five or 10 years ago. The problem then is how do local authorities in that new landscape exercise their responsibilities?
Debbie Barnes
I can give you some experience. I think one of the most significant frustrations is the lack of clarity but, notwithstanding that, local authorities have been working with the other stakeholders to look at how we can bring all that together so we can have a single, coherent discussion around education. For example, in Lincolnshire we have established an education board. We have headteachers elected by their colleagues on to that board. We have diocesan representation. We have regional schools representation. We want to bring that mechanism together so that we can have one single conversation about education, driving education improvement as well as addressing schools causing concern, as well as trying to increase the capacity of sponsored academy education leaders, maintain schools that are good or outstanding that may want to federate and merge with other schools, and it will be that vehicle that will drive that improvement forward. Local authorities have a raft of those examples and the Lincolnshire example is just one of them.
Ian Mearns
I must admit I do to a certain extent share Richard’s frustration because it seems to me that successively legislation, particularly in relation to local authorities, has been put there to deal with the bad ones but has affected every local authority under the great big umbrella. Now, many of your written submissions to the Committee called for a formal working protocol to be established to manage the relationships between Regional Schools Commissioners and local authorities. How has United Learning succeeded in developing a protocol where some local authorities have not?
Jon Coles
In relation to the first part of what you said, I think we are reaching a point where we need a new settlement. We have not had a settlement that has been national, clear and comprehensive since the 1944 Act. Since that started breaking down in the late 1970s I think there has been a progressive erosion of some people’s roles, development of new roles, changes to the key functions of key actors in the system, and it may be that what the Prime Minister is talking about, in terms of all schools becoming academies, creates the framework in which a new settlement becomes possible. I do think we have reached the point where local authorities have the same duties as they used to have but, exactly as you say, the landscape has changed hugely. Therefore, local authorities’ ability to carry out some of their duties is significantly reduced and I think we just need to have a fresh look at some of those and, as I say, a new settlement. In answer to your narrow question, we have one because I thought we should have one and I went and argued with people until we got one. It became clear in the first month of operation that, in an entirely admirable burst of opening enthusiasm, lots of the RSCs wanted to be out and about in schools as quickly as possible. They were picking up the phone and ringing heads and saying, “I want to come and visit and I would like to come on this day and can you sort it out, please?” We have not had a negative experience at all coming out of that. All of the visits they have had are very positive. However, it means that particularly for the schools that we have recently taken over, which were in difficulty, they do risk having what Michael Fullan calls, “The helping hand strikes again” as we and Ofsted and the RSCs and sometimes—and we welcome this as well—local authorities are coming and having a look at what is happening and whether it is working properly. We have just said there are some simple things that we can do. One is: let us have a data sharing agreement. You as the RSCs collectively come to us as the sponsor and ask us for our data. We give it to you once. You disseminate it to all the RSCs. You can have as much data as you want. We will share very openly. But don’t ask the schools for it, ask us for it. Let’s agree a format. If you want to visit a school that is absolutely fine, but instead of coming as a discrete one-off visit and getting the royal visit treatment, here is our schedule of monitoring visits that we will be doing. Tell us which schools you would like to visit this term. Tell us which monitoring visit you would like to join and we will arrange for you to come with us. For us, that has benefit as in they join our team to some degree and they are giving us extra capacity. They are seeing things that we might not see. They are looking afresh. They will also give us feedback on our monitoring processes and tell us if there are things that they have seen elsewhere that we could usefully learn from. Hopefully, they will pick up things from us but also they will get access to all the information that we would gather anyway through our monitoring visits. Therefore, everybody benefits from this arrangement. It was not too hard to agree and we are happy to share the agreement we have with anybody who wants it. It works quite well. It does not mean that you never get an issue, but it does mean that you have something to go back to and say, “Hang on a minute; we are supposed to be working this way”.
Councillor Watts
I think it speaks volumes about the rapidly changing nature of the Regional Schools Commissioners only a year into their operation that, until very recently, local authorities would not have needed that kind of sharing agreement because RSCs only dealt with academies. Now there are these enormously increased responsibilities around so-called coasting schools and that kind of stuff, and I think local authorities will rapidly start needing agreements like that. I think there are also questions about the capacity of schools commissioners. On average, each Regional Schools Commissioner is dealing with 100 failing or requiring improvement academies in each of their patches across thousands of schools in their patch with staffs of, what, a handful? There are enormous capacity issues that they have already without then this enormous expansion of their role within their first year of operation. I think we are going to need those memoranda and that is where it starts then, as I say, becoming a real problem that the geographies of Regional Schools Commissioners do not fit the geography of any other bit of government. As the Chancellor pursues his cities agenda and counties agenda, and as we still have areas like London, pretty functional regional government, the fact that Islington and Hackney as next door boroughs sit in different regions makes life a lot more complicated for us.
Reverend Genders
Certainly, within the Church of England we have had a working agreement in terms of how both the department and Regional Schools Commissioners engage with schools and how they keep the diocese involved in that process. One of the difficulties is, again, with the zeal for speed and for trying to make quick decisions and trying to get things moving quickly, it is easy for some of those things to get forgotten. We end up with schools who are getting—as Jon says—a visit from a Regional Schools Commissioner one day, a broker another and Ofsted another and they all say slightly different things. That just adds too much burden to the system when schools should be spending time getting on with delivering outcomes for children. I think that greater clarity about those kinds of working agreements is important. Since 1944, most of our dioceses deal with many more than half a dozen local authorities all at the same time and they are used to operating different agreements and different working relationships with people. The advantage in that system is that most of that is structured around statutory guidance and statutes and, because we are entering into a system where there is not so much statute but there is much more contract; it is quite hard to manage all of that. Clear protocols and guidance about how these different organisations engage, and I think particularly the difference between the RSCs and the brokers and how they engage with schools, is something that is really needed.
Ian Mearns
Am I getting across the board a general perception that the lack of clarity about roles and responsibilities in the new landscape is less than helpful at the moment?
Jon Coles
I don’t know. I think in some ways there is less to this than meets the eye. The role is fairly clear. I think what is happening is that it is having to be operationalised. There is a problem with changing structures and, although, as we say in our evidence, the regional structure is pretty idiosyncratic, to be honest, I would leave it as it is. In my experience, in the first 12 months of any new structure that Government has ever set up there is a whole lot of relationship building that needs to go on, there is a whole lot of, “What are our operational ways of working that need to be established?” There is a great deal of what we are talking about today, working through that has to be done, and it does take a bit of time.
Ian Mearns
The problem is, Jon, that we are in a period of transition and I think there are an awful lot of people out there who don’t know what we are in transition towards.
Jon Coles
No, and that is my point about a new settlement, in a way, and also about wanting in time to push the RSC role wider, give it a greater responsibility. I would just say I think that the role, as it is, is clear enough; it is defined. It is the operation that is—
Reverend Genders
I want to agree with Jon, but I think the problem is that because the role is changing through this current Education and Adoption Bill and expanding so vastly in terms of the responsibilities that the RSC will have, I am not sure we do have the luxury of having, “Just leave it as it is and let it bed in”. We have already moved the goalposts after a year. I would absolutely agree with what Jon is saying if it was not for that fact, but because of the fact that the whole area of responsibility for the RSCs—particularly around coasting schools and the engagement with all of that—is changing so dramatically under this Bill, there do need to be some changes to adjust to that.
Debbie Barnes
I think there does need to be greater clarity about roles and responsibilities. It links to the previous discussion around a need for greater transparency and accountability as well. Within that, there are quite a lot of players in the middle tier. There is an importance for the Regional Schools Commissioners, local authorities, Ofsted and EFA to have protocols that dovetail each other and I think, because of the speed of putting some of those systems in place, they don’t always dovetail currently. There is a clear example about safeguarding children. So, because of the importance of some of those issues, I think it is essential that we look at roles and responsibilities.
Councillor Watts
Jon is right. If we are heading towards a new settlement in education at some point, and, if I may say so, while I think this Committee’s inquiry is timely, we need to ask ourselves: are the structures we are putting in place fit for purpose in that new settlement? If Regional Schools Commissioners are to play a role then I think we have to ask the question, and the Committee is right to do so: do the structures put in place to deal with a problem as identified a year ago, which is the lack of a middle tier between the Department and struggling academies, essentially become the middle tier across the entirety of 23,000 schools in this country? The Committee will take a view but that is the key question.
Chair
That is the key question. Of course, as more schools become academies then the role of the Regional Schools Commissioners is going to expand still further, in terms of the responsibility of schools, and I am sure it must be a driver as we go along in the next year or so. Would you agree?
Jon Coles
This is quite an unusual frame of reference, but I think of it from my experience in London Challenge. We didn’t say, “We are going to become the new middle tier”. We didn’t want a huge team; we didn’t become a huge team. We didn’t think we could do everything ourselves; we set out to work through lots of other people. We built good quality relationships with all the local authorities across London. In some respects we worked through them; in some respects we set up additional things that we could see were missing; in some respects we drove a bit of collaboration that did not previously exist between authorities. We created networks across the whole region, and it is sometimes much easier for an extremely good school to work with a school not too far away, but not an immediate neighbour, than it is to work with an immediate neighbour. For all of these reasons, I like the regional structure; I think there is a lot to it. Giving it a wider set of responsibilities and accountabilities is a good thing, but I think working mostly through influence and working through other people, rather than accreting all of the powers and all the operational functions, is the way to go. So I would give them more responsibilities, widening their sphere of influence, not giving them all the staff and all the people, and expecting them to build good quality relationships with people.
Chair
So a leadership role as opposed to an administrative one?
Jon Coles
Exactly. I do not think it should become a hugely heavy duty operational role, because that misses the point. I absolutely agree with a number of points to my left. It relies on there being some clarity that this is how we are going to work with local authorities. This is the sort of relationship we have. We are not, at the regional level, going to do places planning. You can get people to collaborate on places planning, but you can only do it if you know ward-by-ward information about live births, you know which roads can be crossed in a particular area, and so on. The people who know that stuff are local authorities and the people who own the land that you might build schools on tend to be local authorities as well. Let’s just be a bit realistic about it.
Councillor Watts
I completely agree. One of the reasons why London Challenge was such a success—and it was an enormous success—was it did not seek to replicate a lot of what happened in successful local authorities. It built on that and added value to that. If we are saying that Regional Schools Commissioners essentially will now replace local authorities as the middle tier, then who is it who knows there are no crossings on City Road in Islington, which means children cannot cross that street? Are they going to be sat, as they currently are, in a regional office somewhere in Hertfordshire? You are doing that across an area of about 6 million people, and I have no idea where in Edmonton you cannot cross roads, let alone in the far end of Hertfordshire. If you are going to say what we are doing is transferring the core middle tier responsibilities to these groups of people, they become a very big quango.
Lucy Frazer
Is there currently a conflict between the Regional Schools Commissioners and the local authorities?
Councillor Watts
There can be where there is no consensus about right ways forward. Sorry, let me rephrase that. There is not at the moment because their role of driving standards in academies that are not up to snuff is fine and welcome, and it is good that there is someone there to do that to act as a backstop. Where there can be is where Regional Schools Commissioners are now being given responsibilities to intervene in local authority-maintained schools, where there could well be a difference of opinion about what the scale of the problems are. Also, it is where local authorities with expert knowledge about the local area will be saying, “Hold on, we think there is a problem there. We think it will take two years to be reflected in school results because school results are a lagging indicator of where there are problems in a school. But where we, on the basis of local knowledge, think there is a problem we may want to intervene in this school”. The Regional Schools Commissioner is saying, “Hold on, the GCSE results haven’t dropped yet and, therefore, they are not on our list”.
Debbie Barnes
I think the other area of challenge is where local authorities do not feel that Regional Schools Commissioners are acting promptly enough. If a school goes into special measures, drift and delay in identifying a new sponsor, Ofsted come back in and monitor. Therefore, it is a reflection of the local authority’s inaction, if the school has not progressed far enough, but it is because of drift and delay around getting a sponsored academy.
Chair
Thank you very much for those answers. We are now going to discuss what we think a region actually is. Marion.
Marion Fellows
Well, I know something it definitely isn’t, if you will excuse my voice.
Chair
Marion comes from the vantage point of not being in any region because she is in Scotland.
Marion Fellows
Yes, an issue in itself. If you will excuse my voice, it has just gone. I think it is lack of action for a wee while, not a common occurrence in my life, it has to be said. You will excuse my pronunciation as well. Dioceses, parishes we think of them as, and academy chains sometimes find themselves working with several different RSCs. This has already been touched on here. What do you think is the most effective way of managing this?
Reverend Genders
Certainly one of the comments that we have already made, that some guidelines and protocols are a really good way. I warm to Jon’s 80:20 rule, because I think that we need to leave some scope for local difference and for nuance locally. If there is clarity about the big picture and the overall vision, then people can work within that very straightforwardly. That is emerging and we are getting there, but writing some of that stuff down would be very helpful for the system and then understanding how these quite huge regions, at the moment, can relate to the nuance of the different areas within their region is really important as well. On Jon’s point about London Challenge, London feels like that is quite a manageable size, although obviously the population is vast, but when you are covering everywhere from east Kent through to the Isle of Wight and expecting to understand the nuance of all of that, that is quite a challenge.
Jon Coles
My hunch is, though, that regions are about the right size. I don’t know whether they are the right shape. I do not know what evidence you have drawn here, but I suppose my nearest analogy would be if you look at the highest performing jurisdictions in the world, they tend to be 8 million to 10 million people. You see in many of the highest performing areas of the world that this is roughly the sort of size. Why would that be? Well, I don’t know. It could just be coincidence, of course, but I think it is a size that combines a good level of responsiveness to the local and an ability to make strategic decisions that fit the variety of circumstances in those localities but it is big enough to allow the right sort of sharing of practice, collaboration. There is enough resource and talent in an area of that size that you can grow the top as well as intervening at the bottom end. I am not sure that I would change the size of regions. Whether the shape makes any sense is a different question. I think in the end, wherever you have regions, you are going to have boundaries. Show me a design of regions without any borders to it. Given that, it then comes back to protocols, processes, procedures, but also relationships.
Councillor Watts
I think form should follow function. If we are talking about RSCs taking on a whole lot more middle tier functions they will have to be a whole lot smaller. If you are doing a lot of that place planning and stuff like that, as Jon said the level of knowledge you need about a particular area and birth rates and so on, it is going to be a lot smaller than 8 million to 10 million people. If you were doing that brokerage role, London Challenge worked because it was at scale, but I think it also worked because London is a pretty cohesive place with a single identity in a way that I suspect, if you were looking at the notion of Scotland, you would look at doing it on a kind of greater Glasgow or Strathclyde basis rather than a whole of Scotland basis. I suspect the challenges in Kelvinside are very different from the challenges in Aberdeen. You have to figure out what these things are trying to do and then figure out the geography that works. My strong argument, though, is to disagree with Jon when he says, “Leave it fixed”. If the stress of government policy in England is to move towards sub-regional identities for cities, so Greater Manchester being the thing, I think this has to fit in with that. There are all sorts of networks already established on the ground and having geographies for Regional Schools Commissioners that do not fit any other bit of geography within government makes it unhelpful. So, whether it is coalitions of local authorities, coalitions of directors of Children’s Services, a network like London councils or East Midlands councils, or whatever it is that still exist on the ground already, and if we are going to have that kind of knowledge and intelligence sharing it would be far more effective for Regional Schools Commissioners to fit in to those existing networks than the person who looks after South London and most of the south coast will have to fit in with three or four different geographies, stretching from Lambeth to Brighton and everything in between.
Ian Mearns
The domain for the Regional Schools Commissioners, for what is euphemistically called the north of England, goes from south of York to the Scottish border to Carlisle and Barrow-in-Furness. It is a hell of an area to cover and there is probably more sheep than people in most of it. That is a bit prohibitive in terms of coherent working.
Jon Coles
I guess so. My challenge to that is: what are we doing for the children in those places? I get totally the kind of coherence and the kind of administrative sense of saying Greater Manchester is a region and we set a Greater Manchester challenge on the same basis and that sense of identity is there. But what happens if you do live in Accrington, are you denied access to the wealth and resources and cultural strength of a city like Manchester just because you happen to live in Accrington? Well, I would say not, and what happens if you are in East Kent? If you are in East Kent should you not have some access to all that makes London great and vibrant and some of the kind of educational and knowledge capital of that city?
Ian Mearns
They should not be kept apart but in practice in many respects, of course, many parts of the different way in which we run things people are actually excluded because of that geography.
Jon Coles
Absolutely. I am not overlooking geography as a really important question, it is a really important question but, if we organise around the city regions, there are a lot of people who do not live in the city regions. You have to think, “Is it right then that we organise our schooling for people who don’t live in cities in a way which denies them access to what makes our cities great?” and I think that is problematic.
Debbie Barnes
Again, echoing what has been said in terms of form follows function, and again we have the whole devolution issue of what that means for regions and working together. Whatever geographical boundaries we have, one of the benefits, certainly that we felt from the alternative regions through the Regional Schools Commissioner is the sharing of best practice, the introduction of other sponsors into the county. Whatever regional structure we have, which must follow whichever functions they are going to be responsible for, there needs to be a way of ensuring that we harness that working across the country in a much more cohesive way somehow.
Marion Fellows
On that question of regions, are there any clear advantages to the RSC regions not aligning with Ofsted regions as happens just now? Who wants to go for that?
Jon Coles
It is a struggle to identify them, really.
Marion Fellows
Okay. Let’s move on to Headteacher Boards then. Are the major academy chains and dioceses well represented on Headteacher Boards, would better representation be a good or a bad thing?
Reverend Genders
Picking up from the first panel this morning, I understand the desire and the need for these boards to feel like school-led systems with headteachers primarily being the driving force because support has been offered through them, but I think that there is a danger that even the very best heads tend to think about their locality more than the bigger, broader picture. One of the things that dioceses have been doing, ever since they have been involved in education, is taking responsibility for a whole range of schools. Your typical Church of England diocese will have 120 schools that it is seeing the responsibility for. Having that kind of strategic oversight, as part of the Headteacher Board and the RSC development, I think is really helpful. There is a case in one of the RSCs where they have co-opted a Director of Education to be on the board. I think that is a positive move because it brings a slightly different dimension, a more strategic overview dimension, and I think you can expand that to other areas as well without losing the kind of practitioner active current headteacher ability as well. So I think you do need a mixed economy, but we will get a more strategic system if we can bring people into play that have an interest over a much broader number of schools.
Jon Coles
The one area where I did not agree with the direction of conversation in the first part of this session was about Headteacher Boards. People started talking about Headteacher Boards as having accountabilities. I think, in practice and in theory, Headteacher Boards are advisory. If they were called, “The Heads Advisory Group to the RSC” I think most of your questions this morning and most of your worries about transparency and the accountability of the Headteacher Boards would go away, but in practice I think that is what they are. In fact I think they are effectively a non-executive advisory board. These are all people who have day jobs and that is what they spend 95% of their time thinking about, and they come together occasionally to provide advice, challenge and support to the RSC and that seems fine to me. I think that is good. I think that is a useful function but I do not think they need to become quite strategists, to be honest. I think it is great to have dioceses involved but—
Chair
On that point, Jon, you are effectively going back to the issue I raised—and you agreed with—about: what is the accountability mechanism of a Regional Schools Commissioner? If you are going to rename those boards, as you have suggested, and instead go down that kind of performance review route, and perhaps even ask the National Schools Commissioner to take a leading role and get this Committee to test everybody—as you think it should, I believe—then you are essentially acknowledging that the Regional Schools Commissioner is, therefore, the key person to be held to account.
Jon Coles
Yes I think so. I mean I think that is what follows from this system. The Regional Schools Commissioner is a civil servant like any other civil servant and, therefore, accountable to the Government of the day. That is understood by the Civil Service to mean reporting to their Secretary of State, and that is the doctrine of political neutrality as it has survived since the Northcote-Trevelyan Report to the Civil Service. That is the way it works. That just is how it is. In setting up somebody as a civil servant but with a semi-public role, you are making that person the key person to be accountable and to be accountable for the powers vested in them through delegation from the Secretary of State.
Councillor Watts
I was quite surprised to hear these kind of advisory boards described as some kind of democratic accountability mechanism for Regional Schools Commissioners. I was under the impression they were civil servants and therefore accountable to Parliament through Ministers, like every other civil servant was as well. If you are going to have a democratic accountability mechanism through these people directly, well, the question is: are they elected? Who elects them? Should that in fact then be parents not teachers, if that is the ultimate set of accountabilities to parents who are the key stakeholders here? So I suspect the system would be a lot simpler if we just accept that they are civil servants accountable to Parliament in the normal way.
Chair
Through this Committee?
Councillor Watts
Yes.
Reverend Genders
Can I pick up on that strategy point again? I absolutely agree if you see them as advisory boards that is really helpful, but to be helpful advisory boards they need to have a larger, broader perspective. Most Directors of Education in dioceses I could go to could tell you down to who the caretaker is in each of their schools, because they understand what the system is. They know their schools intimately. I think having that kind of input in to the kind of advisory work that goes on at those boards is really helpful. I agree that it needs to be seen as an advisory board, I just think you need to broaden the pool of who is offering that advice.
Chair
Thank you. Marion, do you have any more questions?
Debbie Barnes
Sorry, quickly, is that okay? If you don’t use this opportunity to bring skills, businesses, apprenticeships, work-based training opportunities for young people together with the education system, I think it could potentially be a missed opportunity. Adding in to that layer the role of Children’s Services around, looked-after children, vulnerable children, the local authority has a lot to add. So I would like to see a wider membership, but I did see them as advisory and headteachers that I have spoken to see themselves as part of an advisory board.
Chair
One quick question, Marion.
Marion Fellows
One quick one. What do you think the role should be of the School Commissioner in co-ordinating across the regions?
Jon Coles
I refer you to the written submission that we have made on that very subject. We have set out a number of things that I think the Schools Commissioner could usefully be doing. Some of what I have said earlier about trying to ensure some consistency across the regions, performance managing the RSCs and making sure relationships with national organisations work effectively. These seem like key things for a National Schools Commissioner to be doing and I would like to see that brought to the fore a little more.
Chair
Well, come and watch us as the National Schools Commissioner in two weeks’ time.
Ian Mearns
Mr Chairman, on the last question, no members of the panel would want to say anything detrimental towards the interests of the National Schools Commissioner.
Chair
Right. We are going to move on to the very important issue of safeguarding, because Debbie has some interesting things to say and Suella is going to be leading the line of questioning.
Suella Fernandes
You have mentioned safeguarding quite a lot and I want to explore it a bit more. It seems that there is no explicit responsibility attributed to the RSCs for safeguarding, whether that is monitoring, investigation or reporting. What is the panel’s view of this?
Debbie Barnes
I am delighted that this question has been raised because it is an issue that is concerning the Director of Children’s Services. Where there is an allegation about an individual who works with children, where the allegation questions their suitability to work with children, there is a clear policy and procedure, local authority designated officer; that is well known, well understood and well embedded. Where there is a child protection referral, there is a referral to local authority Children’s Services who have the powers, with the police if relevant, to undertake a section 47 investigation. It is crystal clear. It is well embedded, well understood. Where there are complaints of a safeguarding in its widest nature, so health and safety of children, perhaps no incident has happened but concerns about robustness of risk assessments, that wider safeguarding—not child protection—then it is in that space that I think there is a lack of clarity. The complaints protocol, through the EFA, around complaints about academies clearly state that they will not investigate safeguarding in academy concerns; that that should be referred to the Local Safeguarding Children Board. But the Local Safeguarding Children Board does not have investigative powers to actually go in to an academy and undertake any form of safeguarding investigation. So I think that this is an area of lack of clarity.
Suella Fernandes
So there is a real gap there, in those instances where there is no mechanism for reporting or investigating those cases?
Debbie Barnes
For maintained schools, clearly, local authorities have their own processes and systems, which normally end up in a strategy discussion with the chair of governors and the relevant key professionals. Currently, local authorities are writing to the Regional Schools Commissioner, sending him whistle blowing letters, whatever, to the Regional Schools Commissioners. If it is in the space of an allegation, it is clear. If it is in the space of child protection, it is clear. It is if it is in that wider safeguarding there is an ad hoc individual agreement about individual issues, perhaps a joint meeting with the Regional Schools Commissioner and the local authority, for example. But we are finding a way through that rather there being any clear, crisp national guidance, and I think there does need to be clear, crisp national guidance in relation to safeguarding.
Suella Fernandes
When you say there is wider concern over safeguarding can you tell us a bit more about that, what kind of things?
Debbie Barnes
The supervision of children, perhaps a complaint—it is difficult to give an example—about a school trip where parents did not consider that the risk assessment was robust enough. Nothing happened but the parent was concerned that something could have happened. So it is that wider welfare safeguarding issue. Perhaps a parent feels that a teacher is picking on and bullying a child but not a child protection concern.
Suella Fernandes
I think there are lots of examples and I invite the views from the other members of the panel. I mean in terms of vulnerable groups, SEN children, looked-after children, children with free school meals, English as an additional language, children with social, emotional mental health concerns, that whole group of children. What is the role of the Regional Commissioners in relation to those?
Councillor Watts
One example, which I think is germane because there are lots of them in the country, the question is: who is responsible for looking for academies if there are allegations or rumours that they are off-rolling kids, dumping difficult kids before they get to exam time, which you hear rumours about across all sorts of schools relatively regularly? At the moment local authorities have no power to know who is on the school roll of an academy. We cannot then discharge what we have a legal duty to do, which is to make sure all kids have an adequate education, have an adequate place at school. There are all sorts of questions like that. That is a broader safeguarding issue, where we have a duty to make sure that people are at school but we don’t have the power to know the schools where people are at where this can become an issue. I think there is a wider problem in all of this, which is: things like bad management of school trips rarely happen in isolation. They tend to be examples of wider bad management at the school. So, if you are going to start looking for the canaries in the mine about where results may start to drop down the line then, actually, local intel about bad management of school trips is a pretty good sign that things may not be right more widely and you may need to start looking at what is happening in that institution. It is better to start intervening at that stage rather than three years later when two years of kids have really bad exam results as a result.
Suella Fernandes
Do you think it is realistic for the RSCs, which are already stretched, to include that within its remit?
Reverend Genders
Personally I don’t think it is. I think it goes back to the earlier conversation that, if you are going to make that the RSCs role, then you need many more of them with the huge proxy that Jon was talking about. I don’t think that is the game we are in. Therefore, we have to work much harder at bringing the clarity and the processes that are there, which show whose responsibility it is, and make sure that local authorities are given the tools and resources that they need to have that kind of clarity and impact in academies as well as in maintained schools.
Jon Coles
I must say I think it would be a huge mistake to give the RSCs a remit for this. I am grateful to Debbie for explaining the concern because I think we as a Trust would always work with the local authority on these less serious issues, in the same way that we would on the more serious issues. In other words, if a safeguarding issue of any description is raised, in relation to any of our academies, we would take that with the utmost seriousness. The answer to who is accountable for making it right in our schools is: I am. Our trustees ultimately are and we would always work with the local authority on those issues.
Suella Fernandes
It is not expressly stated in your terms of reference, is it?
Jon Coles
It is interesting that Debbie says that there is an area of lack of clarity there because I did not think that there was. I would always work with the local authority on those issues. If there was any serious safeguarding concern in relation to a school we believe that we have a duty to work with the local authority on those.
Suella Fernandes
It is your belief but it is not stated.
Jon Coles
If that is not the case, it is not the case but I think that, whenever there is a child protection concern, the referral arrangements that Debbie has described apply. That is how we would handle it, whether it is a theoretical or an actual incident. My understanding of the law was that was how it worked, but I could be wrong.
Ian Mearns
I think that is entirely right, Jon, and I am sure that you and your academy chain, under your guidance, would notice or do something and refer it correctly. But when it comes to safeguarding and schools, where is it that the vast majority of children turn up every day, 38 or more weeks per year? It is in schools. Where are the vast majority of differences in children noticed, which gives rise to a question about safeguarding and about making sure of the welfare of an individual, it is usually through schools. Therefore, there does need to be—no matter what the nature or the state of the school or the category of the school—that close tie up with the local authority where safeguarding of children is concerned.
Jon Coles
Yes. I think we are agreed that, in relation to the bigger incidents and bigger issues of the sort we have just been discussing, that is clear. I think there is no doubt about it.
Councillor Watts
I am sure in Jon’s Trust there are good functional working relationships. My issue is where there aren’t good functional working relationships, when push comes to shove what then happens?
Chair
That has as much to do with the DCSs, hasn’t it? Would you agree with that?
Debbie Barnes
Yes but there are two comments. One, it works because Jon and other academy sponsors work really well with the local authority. Question: with the next Government settlement, are local authorities going to continue to have capacity to intervene and support schools on non-child protection issues? That is a big anxiety in terms of being able to have the capacity and the resources at local authority level to be able to respond to that. I have 350 schools. That is not a lot of capacity but it is capacity that is needed. The second issue is we have no right of access. So the vast majority of academies and pre-schools we have a superb relationship. Where we don’t—and I am talking on safeguarding—I think it needs to be in statute.
Chair
The question, though, is this: if we see an emerging role for the Regional Schools Commissioners, which is more comprehensive, what kind of relationship should there be between the RSCs and your DCs?
Debbie Barnes
The relationship that we are building—and it does depend at different local levels—is positive. We work well. Because of capacity issues pretty much the local authority deliver a lot of the brokered sponsored solutions, a lot of intelligence gathering for Regional Schools Commissioners. Maybe there is an opportunity to have some discussions of where they are effective working relationships and they are effective local authorities, that local authorities could be commissioned to deliver some of those functions.
Chair
What about where there are not effective working relationships?
Debbie Barnes
Then I think that middle tier has a whole raft of other people who could undertake that function. Teach in schools, for example, multi academy trusts. I think we are moving to a much more of a mixed market of individuals undertaking that and I think it should be right for the individual community.
Chair
That is going to be difficult for parents and carers and children to actually navigate, isn’t it?
Debbie Barnes
Parents and carers already come to the local authority and ask for guidance on the navigation around the system, because they already find it confused.
Chair
I want to thank you all very much. We have had a good discussion there. We have certainly probed the issue of accountability and tested out what we think accountability really means in Regional Schools Commissioners. I like the way in which we have set the agenda for this whole discussion, so it has gone well. Thank you very much indeed. Oral evidence: The role of Regional Schools Commissioners, HC 401 21