How Labour flogged off Leeds education
Leeds Local Education Authority no longer exists. The education service in the city is run by Education Leeds, an unelected and only partially accountable "arms-length" company. Bob Wood explains how this came about.
In its drive to develop a free market in education, the new Labour government has selected Leeds, the second largest authority in the country, as a flagship for its policy. The intention is to end the direct provision of education by national or local government, and to develop both a national market in education and a thriving British education industry that can compete in world markets. The state will buy the education it requires on the market.
The Blair government has never explained or acknowledged its sudden conversion to privatisation since it took office. The current emphasis on the private sector, and the contribution that it can supposedly make in the public domain is starkly at odds with what Labour said in opposition to Thatcher and Major.
But this conversion is not irrational. Behind it lies the policies of the World Trade Organisation, and the 1994 General Agreement on Trade in Services.
Under the GATS agreement, countries are committed to the progressive liberalisation of trade in services. Perhaps the most obvious services are education, health and tourism, but since the agreement does not define services, the possibilities are almost endless.
Britain is already one of the largest exporters of education in the world, and British business stands to benefit enormously as the education market is gradually opened up under GATS.
First of all, though, a private British education industry must be built up which can take advantage of the new international market. And this is the purpose of the public-private initiatives that the government is now encouraging. What is happening now in Leeds is the model for the future of education, and other services as well.
In early February 2000, OFSTED published a highly critical and damaging report on the Local Education Authority of Leeds City Council.
Although the report acknowledged that Leeds had a higher proportion of successful primary schools than the national average, and that progress was being made under a new Director of Education, it concluded that ‘given the sheer volume, depth and range of the authority’s failings, this inspection has little confidence in the LEA’s capacity to respond fully to the government’s agenda within an acceptable timescale.’
The report also complained of a history of ‘political interference’ in the functioning of the LEA.
In fact, the performance of the LEA in Leeds has been better than many other authorities in several respects, as the report itself acknowledges. The score for A-Level results is above the national average and ‘has been rising for the last six years’. Test results at the ages of seven and fourteen are above average.
More is spent on education in total than central government requires: ‘The City Council’s expenditure on education has been consistently above its SSA’. 85.2% of the Local Schools Budget was delegated in 1999/2000, compared with the government target of 80% by 2000/2001, and ‘central administration costs are £44 per pupil, well within the Secretary of State’s target of £65’.
The report also notes that: ‘The LEA has been successful in recent years in reducing the rate of permanent exclusions and in 1998 it was broadly in line with the national average. There has been a further significant reduction in permanent exclusions since then’.
Moreover, Leeds is in the forefront when it comes to both early years provision and the integration of children with special needs into schools. On the provision for special education, the report recognised ‘the authority’s good intentions in recent years’ and that as a result ‘fewer pupils attend its special schools as a proportion of its school population than nationally’. The report also refers to strengths in IT, behaviour and numeracy.
Probably the most remarkable aspect of the report is the extent to which it acknowledges the recent improvements in the LEA, or rather its success in responding to the criteria laid down by central government.
As the report says: ‘The LEA has now had a new permanent Director for one year’ who ‘has laid out a clear vision for the future and has encouraged a fresh approach’ and has ‘reorganised the Education Department along very sensible lines.’ The Director has also ‘set out his priorities for the education service clearly and has won widespread support from schools for his new strategic approach’.
The report even states that: ‘Many of the weaknesses noted in this report have already been recognized by elected Members, senior and middle managers and developments are taking place.’ Given the report’s own evidence, it is difficult to see how the inspection team reached its conclusion that the LEA’s ‘weakness of provision extends almost consistently across all of its core responsibilities’.
Comparison with other local authorities is also revealing. In 1999, Leeds outperformed Islington, Sheffield, Hull, Liverpool and Hackney on several key indicators of student performance, including examination results.
Although the report claimed that schools in the city were highly critical of the services provided by the LEA, head teachers were actually disturbed by what they perceived as the one-sided nature of the report.
When Estelle Morris, the Schools Minister, spoke to primary and secondary heads in Leeds Civic Hall shortly after the report had been published, the chair of the Secondary Heads Association said: ‘It was clear that the majority of heads were in support of the local authority. There were criticisms in the report. But where there is praise it is faint and where there is criticism it is harsh to the degree that it gives an extreme view.’
The decline in the performance of Leeds LEA must have been extremely rapid. When Leeds were applying for Education Action Zone status in July 1998, David Blunkett said that ‘Leeds would be a very welcome bidder indeed’, and he praised the ‘excellent work’ done by Leeds schools and the education authority.
Following the OFSTED report, the DfEE and the Council, acting together, appointed the consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers to consider what should be done next. Their work is said to have cost Leeds in excess of £200,000. When the report appeared after a consultation period of four months, the conclusions reached by the consultants were little different from the original OFSTED assessment
‘Our review confirmed OFSTED’s criticism that fundamental weaknesses in the strategic management of the LEA exist’ the report said.
It continued: ‘Collectively the agenda for change is a formidable one, which we believe requires a whole service response that will only be achieved with sustained and dynamic leadership. We conclude that the scale and scope of the agenda for change is such that we do not believe the current LEA in-house service delivery mechanism has the capacity to bring about the fundamental and rapid change required in a time-frame which is acceptable’.
Like OFSTED, Pricewaterhouse-Coopers had chosen to ignore the evidence about the overall performance of Leeds in comparison with other LEAs, and the strides that had been made since the appointment of a new Director. With this mindset, it is difficult to see how any LEA in the country could have come through unscathed.
The report ranked various options in a highly subjective procedure. Total outsourcing of the services provided by the LEA – effectively the complete privatisation of the authority – scored the highest number of points. A public-private partnership (a joint venture company) scored almost as highly. The status quo was on this occasion at least considered as an option, but appeared well down the list.
PricewaterhouseCooper recommended the setting up of a Joint Venture Company (JVC), jointly controlled in a 50-50 partnership by Leeds City Council and a private sector partner. Unsurprisingly Estelle Morris endorsed this choice in June. The chair of the new company was named in October as Peter Ridsdale, until then known only as the chairman of Leeds Sporting plc, the owners of Leeds United.
Fittingly, Estelle Morris met the heads of Leeds schools in the conference centre at the Leeds United ground at Elland Road, and announced her decision, repeating the now familiar mantra that no change was not an option.
The response was less than enthusiastic. The chair of Leeds Primary Heads Association said: ‘This isn’t what the primary heads asked for. We asked for continuity and stability. At the end of the day we are part of an experiment…’
The secretary of the PHA was even more outspoken: ‘Similar experiments in London have already received bad coverage. We are very concerned about what is going to happen in the interim. There could be a lack of direction, confusion and inconsistency.’ He added: ‘Councillors are accountable through the ballot box. The Joint Venture Company needs to be just as accountable.’
A shortlist of potential private sector partners was announced last November: Capita (who have been far from successful in running housing benefit in Lambeth, with over 500 complaints to the ombudsman in a single year), W S Atkins (best known as an engineering consultancy), and Serco (who include in their diverse interests holding the contract for Doncaster Prison).
The choice of partner had been due at the end of January 2001 but was delayed, amid reports that councillors, heads, governors and trade union representatives had all been far less than impressed by the presentations made by all three of the prospective candidates.
In the interim, the Leader of the Council and all the Leeds MPs (all Labour) were said to be discreetly lobbying the DfEE for a more acceptable partnership with another local authority, perhaps Birmingham or Lancashire.
After a year of uncertainty, and on the precise anniversary of the original OFSTED report, the government finally ditched the Joint Venture Company in favour of an ‘Arms Length’ Company to be known as Education Leeds.
The new company is fully owned by the City Council, but still with Peter Ridsdale of Leeds United in charge, and still employing Capita as consultants. The change altered the form but not the substance of the arrangement.
Capita were the successful bidders – they already have extensive interests in schools computer information management systems. Capita appointed two members to the board of Education Leeds, both until now senior officers at Newham Council in London, the Director and Deputy Director respectively.
Serco’s unsuccessful bid was led by Bedfordshire County Council’s Director of Education. It is clear that the private sector obtains its educational expertise largely by poaching from the public sector.
In early March, the Chief Executive of Education Leeds was named as Chris Edwards, acting Director of Education in York. The new company started work in April this year, when staff formerly employed by the LEA were transferred.
The campaign to prevent any loss of democracy or accountability in the education service, whether it involved an element of privatisation or not, has been led throughout by the Leeds Campaign for the Advancement of State Education (CASE). The Yorkshire Evening Post also provided very strong support for the campaign, giving extensive coverage to the issues and arguments over the proposals.
The Labour Party in the city holds more than three-quarters of the seats on the City Council and has generally been hostile to the removal of the education service from direct control by the council. But this opposition has often been tempered to an extent by feelings of loyalty to Westminster. Clear divisions have emerged between the Party at large in the city and the Labour Group on the Council.
Leeds CASE was launched in June 2000 and public sector trade unions whose members are affected by the proposals have provided the backbone of the campaign. Led by UNISON, the campaign has also had a significant input from both the main teaching unions, the NUT and the NASUWT.
Governors, parents and others have also played a role. The campaign has been determined, sustained and persistent over a period of many months, with public meetings, lobbies, demonstrations, street stalls, leafleting and many other activities.
The central CASE argument was that education should continue to be controlled, however imperfectly, by the people of Leeds through the mechanism of the ballot box. Any attempt to reduce the accountability of elected representatives for the education service should be resisted. Any suggestion that the private sector is somehow by definition more efficient has been relatively easy to rebut, given the state of the railways.
CASE has also questioned the cost of the exercise. In addition to the costs involved in setting up the new arrangement, the council will have to maintain a parallel structure to monitor the performance of the new company.
Fees or profits earned by the private sector partners will clearly not be available to be spent on education. The likely cost overall has been estimated at in the region of £750,000. In addition, given the involvement of local authority trade unions, CASE has also been concerned with the impact on the pay and conditions of a group of workers.
Understandably perhaps, the campaign has been less successful in setting what is happening in Leeds in the wider context of a potential global market in education, and the government’s well-hidden determination to ensure that UK business is strongly placed to benefit from this market. It could also be argued that CASE would have benefited from linking up to a greater extent with the opposition inside the Labour Party.
In July, shortly after Estelle Morris had opted for a Joint Venture Company, the Leeds District Labour Party, after a heated debate, resolved to call for the retention of the management of education by the City Council, support for the CASE campaign and a city-wide referendum on the issue. It also called for the Labour Group on the council to publicly oppose the government’s proposals. Although this had little apparent effect, it did indicate the strength of opinion within the party.
When an adjournment debate on the issue took place in the House of Commons in July 2000, all the Leeds MPs expressed doubts about the way in which the DfEE was dealing with Leeds LEA, albeit with varying degrees of fervour.
Leading off in the debate, George Mudie (Leeds East) asked rhetorically why OFSTED and the DfEE had singled out Leeds:
‘It is one of the biggest Labour authorities, and there is a feeling that everyone would take notice if Leeds were made an example of. It is that type of syndrome. If the Minister reads the press, she will discover that the mood in Leeds has become worse as the saga has developed. The authority may not be perfect, but the grotesque picture painted by OFSTED does no service to anyone, unless the political agenda is to destroy local education authorities.’
He asked the Minister whether she thought ‘that Leeds children….should be experimented with by handing over their education to an untried body?’
Another local MP took up the issue of democracy. Harold Best (Leeds North-West) said that ‘the people of Leeds want their children’s education back in the control of their elected representatives. The suggestion that it would take five to seven years for the required management skills to be instituted, and therefore before the return of control and management of the educational system to the city’s elected representatives’ was not acceptable.
Estelle Morris’ rather unhelpful and unilluminating reply was worthy of George W Bush. She referred to George Mudie’s contribution and said that he had ‘talked about Leeds … in an interesting way, and he meant some praise by saying that its schools were average. That is not good enough for Leeds. It is capable of better than average.’
She added: ‘The argument in Leeds is not about the public versus the private sector, but about forging a new relationship between the best of Leeds LEA with something new that it currently lacks.’
Following the marginal concession that the JVC would be replaced by an arms length company, George Mudie, who is a former leader of the council, complained that a council which had seen off Margaret Thatcher should have no difficulty with Estelle Morris.
The Council’s preference for a partnership with another local authority was roundly ignored, but their opposition and the opposition within the party have never been translated into votes in the council chamber.
In a last ditch attempt to head off the arms-length company and retain education services in-house, the Lord Mayor, Bernard Atha, offered to lead a delegation to Blunkett ‘if the people of Leeds want me to’. A barrage of letters in the local evening press urged him to do so, and so did the District Labour Party.
The board of Education Leeds met for the first time at the beginning of April behind closed doors. Afterwards, with unintentional irony, chairman of the board Peter Ridsdale promised a new culture of openness and transparency.
In its report in February 2000, OFSTED wrote of the ‘government’s agenda’ and the need for the LEA to respond to it. Unfortunately, the government’s agenda appears to have more to do with the needs of British business rather than public education and the defence of the comprehensive ideal.
As Minister for Trade and Industry in 1998, Peter Mandelson issued a consultation paper to industry, whose purpose was to ‘encourage views on the important negotiations on international trade in services … Within the European Community we will be drawing up request lists country-by-country and sector-by-sector. These negotiating priorities must reflect UK business priorities.’
Why has Leeds been chosen for this experiment? Part of the answer may be that it is the second largest LEA. Secondly, although its performance is better than Sheffield or Hull, it does not have a cabinet minister to embarrass.
The last word should perhaps go to an editorial in the Yorkshire Evening Post: ‘This snub to Leeds is nothing less than an outrageous affront to democracy which divorces us all from the right to take a part in our children’s education. And if this untested experiment fails they will be the ones to pay the price.’
The above is an amended and updated version of an article due to appear in the journal Education and Social Justice. An annual subscription for personal subscribers costs £25, and can be obtained from Barbara Wiggins, Trentham Books Ltd, Westview House, 734 London Rd, Oakhill, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 5NP.