Something had to happen
in Waltham Forest. The LEA was a mess. But is privatisation really
the best solution, asks Francis Beckett
Francis Beckett
Tuesday June 26, 2001
The Guardian
Something had to be done about the education authority in the
north London borough of Waltham Forest. Everyone agrees about
that, from the education consultants scrabbling for the borough's
business, to the trade union shop stewards who may lead their
members out on strike against privatisation. Leaving things as
they were was never an option after an Ofsted report in May last
year exposed the authority's weaknesses.
To Estelle Morris, who was schools minister when she was first
consulted and is now education secretary, the answer is the same
as it was for Islington and Hackney, for Leeds, Bradford and Sandwell:
privatise. If a local authority is not providing education services
efficiently, sprinkle some private-sector gold dust over it. It's
a one-size-fits-all prescription.
So Waltham Forest's councillors have spent a fraught year watching
the unedifying sight of competing companies scratching each others'
eyes out to get the business. Next month they have to decide who
gets the contract, and they find themselves with only one choice
of company. It is, in many ways, a thoroughly unattractive one.
Local education authorities no longer run schools. They have been
stripped of their powers, but they still have responsibilities.
They provide services, ranging from special needs teaching to
clerks for governing bodies, which schools can buy if they wish.
They help and advise schools in trouble, and the best LEAs provide
valued support to headteachers in their lonely and stressful work.
By common consent, Waltham Forest has not done this effectively
for some years. Ofsted listed five failings, including not doing
enough to raise standards in secondary schools, and not giving
sufficient help to schools with behaviour problems. Former Ofsted
chief Chris Woodhead characteristically went further than his
own inspectors: the LEA, he claimed, had a "culture of failure
and hopelessness".
The local branch of the public sector trade union Unison, whose
members work in the LEA, said: "The au thority's failure
to act on schools which have been failing . . . has led to parents
voting with their children's feet." There was not enough
investment, poor collection of statistics, and above all, rotten
communications with staff: "The unspoken message is clear:
it does not matter that staff . . . are ill-informed because their
opinions don't matter."
As with other councils flayed by Ofsted, education ministers made
it clear that they would use their power to take over the authority's
functions if the private sector was not called in. In came the
management consultants PriceWaterhouseCoopers, whose report said:
"The LEA does not currently have the capacity to bring about
the required improvement," and offered four possible privatisation
models. How much Waltham Forest ratepayers paid for their report
is a closely guarded secret, but it was at least £250,000.
So in came a company called PPI, to run the education department
on an interim basis until a long-term solution was found. And
that's where the ethics of private business started to clash head-on
with those of the public sector, and things started to get messy.
PPI's core business was doing inspections for Ofsted. It was Ofsted's
biggest supplier. Its boss and the owner of a third of its shares
was John Haslett, an old friend of Chris Woodhead. He led the
PPI team in Waltham Forest, becoming the borough's acting deputy
chief education officer.
Then PPI was bought by a much bigger company called Tribal, which
sells training packages. Tribal joined forces with the security
company Group Four in order to bid for major education projects
such as Waltham Forest.
Now that his company was big enough to bid for the £15m
a year contract, Haslett, as deputy chief education officer, was
in the awkward position of helping to award a contract from which
he might ultimately benefit. He claimed that a system of "Chinese
walls" would prevent any conflict of interest. But Tribal
also agreed that, if they got the contract, they would give Haslett
a one-off payment of £5,000. Unfortunately for Haslett,
this deal was discovered by another bidder, Nord Anglia's Kevin
McNeany, who gleefully exposed it. PPI said the offer had been
made before the bidding formally began. But that was the end of
Tribal's chances.
By then the bidders had been whittled down to two, and with Tribal
safely out of the way, Nord Anglia - which put in a joint bid
with the construction company Amey - is the only survivor.
Meanwhile councillors considered the options offered by PWC. They
wanted to avoid the virtual annihilation suffered by Islington's
education authority. They decided that the council would employ
the chief education officer, and take policy decisions, and a
company would be appointed to look after the borough's schools
and employ all the staff responsible for schools.
That's the contract which Nord Anglia and Amey expect to get next
month. Yet there are serious reservations in the borough about
them. All three trade unions - Unison, the Transport and General
Workers' Union and the National Union of Teachers - are to ballot
their members on the question of strike action.
The borough's year-long association with private-sector management
in the form of PPI is far from happy. Haslett's £5,000 was
an embarrassment. And local heads are not impressed. "They
have not delivered," says John Cullis, head at Barclay Junior,
who has taught in the borough for 32 years. "We have part-time
consultants who are not from our patch. We have not been served
well this last 12 months. We have not been getting people who
will listen, who appreciate what school improvement is about,
who understand the job teachers do."
As for Nord Anglia, staff have failed to take a shine to their
style. Union leaders say that their understanding of equal opportunities,
vital in a borough with a rich ethnic mix, is rudimentary, and
point to a celebrated case in Hackney where Nord Anglia was taken
to an industrial tribunal by a black staff member. "I asked
them what they understood by institutional racism," said
TGWU branch secretary Bob Tennant. "They said they had no
experience of it. That indicates that they have no understanding
of racism."
There is resentment that the profit for Nord Anglia's shareholders
will come out of the borough's education budget. John Cullis says:
"Our children should have any help that is going. We don't
want a lot of part-time consultants on large salaries." What
heads need, he says, is a supportive education service. "Heads
are isolated and on their own. If they pick up the phone at 7.30pm,
they should expect someone to be there for them."
And there is concern about accountability. Once you privatise
a service, it ceases to be directly accountable to voters. A company
is employed to run a service, and make a profit. Voters cannot
expect to control its decisions any more than those made by their
local branch of Tesco.
Kevin McNeany's answer is that although local people cannot control
the company with their votes, they can control it by using consumer
power. If we fail, he says, you won't send your children to our
schools. However, no one has yet devised a school admissions system
which gives effective parental choice.
The Waltham Forest proposal is to create a management board consisting
of teachers, governors, heads and a very few councillors to oversee
the operation of the contract. There is an alternative. Over the
last year, the council has recruited some experienced educational
administrators as caretakers. Why not ask them to carry on, permanently,
and make the changes that are needed?
Unions would welcome it. Unison branch secretary Paul Martin says:
"The government has built a set of hurdles which LEAs cannot
jump over. Teachers say the government loads schools with too
much bureaucracy, but that's true 10 times over for LEAs. When
an LEA gets into trouble there is no recovery plan. We need to
get a competent set of senior managers and support them."
But ministers are determined to see the contract going to a private
company, and councillors fear that if they don't deliver this,
the government will conduct a scorched earth policy on the council's
powers.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001