Save our schools from chaos

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Tony Blair is about to give London's battered school system its "most radical reform since 1945". He said so at the Globe Theatre on Monday. He has just won a war and wants it known that he is in charge. Except that only last year we were told by Ken Livingstone that London's new "schools commissioner", Tim Brighouse, was in charge, indeed was going to transform the schools.

Mr Brighouse is not alone. In my part of town, Camden Council is supposed to be in charge. Back in Whitehall the education secretary, Charles Clarke, also wants to be in charge, and has appointed a "Minister of London Schools", Stephen Twigg.

There must be as many generals trying to run London's schools as are trying to run Britain's trains. And this from the people who invented "joined-up government".

Mr Blair's approach to public service reform is that of a teenager on speed. He hypes himself up with spin, gabbles out a stream of bromides, initiatives and vague pledges and then clears off to the next rave.

He says anything that comes into his head. This week's stream of consciousness promised 30 privately funded London "academies", 290 " specialist" schools, 20 new secondary schools and 20 new sixth forms.

Something called "London Challenge" is to replace something called "Fresh Start". There will be extra money for " talented teachers" and help with housing, as promised five years ago. There will be fixed penalties for truants and "zero tolerance" of violence, bad teaching, bad parenting. There will be zero tolerance and perhaps fixed penalties for Islington and Hackney.

To crown it all, Mr Clarke announced on Monday that the habit of London parents "travelling across London" to get their children into distant selective schools was " completely unacceptable and we need to change it now".

This attack on the Blairs' parenting skills was extraordinary. What does Mr Clarke mean by "now"? Surely he does not mean now.

The gulf between fantasy and reality is total. The Evening Standard has calculated that some 300 schools in the capital are contemplating a four-day week, as a result of budget shortfalls caused by Mr Clarke's schools budget. The basis of this budget, including its "missing £500 million", is now relatively clear.

Councils have been clobbered by adverse London weighting, the latest pay deal, National Insurance increases and a fiendishly complex shift in grants between so-called ring-fenced items and general spending. The fact is that local authorities such as Croydon, Westminster and Essex find themselves overnight million of pounds in the red.

At the heart of this mess is the campaign to nationalise all London's schools, which the rabidly centralist Mr Clarke, Mr Twigg and David Miliband have been selling this week to pliant journalists.

An article in Public Finance magazine, by David Blunkett's former education spin doctor, Conor Ryan, claims that parents and head teachers are crying out for Mr Clarke to save them from dastardly local councils with his "clarity, consistency and transparency in school budgets".

Any school tempted by such sycophancy should remember that these ministers and officials are the ones who lost £500 million. They are the ones who brought them the Individual Learning Accounts fiasco, the paedophile-vetting fiasco, the A-level results fiasco and the Southwark privatisation fiasco.

It was Mr Ryan's former boss, Mr Blunkett, who sent each London school the famous wheelbarrow-load of bumf each week, even before thinking to take control of budgets.

Only total administrative breakdown has convinced those running the National Health Service that central funding of institutions is a disaster. They end up topheavy and "working to target".

Nowhere abroad would contemplate giving the task of fixing school budgets - which means determining every facet of a school's policy - to central officials. Nor is it remotely justified in London.

The boroughs, with some of the toughest schools and most desperate challenges of any city in Europe, have not failed completely, despite constant criticism from Mr Clarke and his colleagues, who have never run anything.

If Mr Clarke's lot were in charge of Britain's navy, every ship would still be in Portsmouth, filling in forms, awaiting paedophile clearance and searching high and low for half a billion pounds.

Four London boroughs have been "named and shamed" by Mr Blair as failures: Islington, Hackney, Southwark and Lambeth. He did not mention that one of them, Islington, was plunged into the mire by his friend and current education minister, Margaret Hodge.

If she ran a company like she ran Islington she would be disqualified from politics for life. Does Islington really want her back? Local democracy needs reform, not abolition.

Mr Blair and Mr Clarke hold to the old Tory d ream that every stat e school can be like every private one. The rich and clever rush to the best. The poor and dumb are left to the "bog standard". The academies initiative, with more money for teachers in the pukka schools, is designed to make this differentiation worse. I wonder how these ministers can call themselves Labour.

I doubt if any public service has been upheaved more often than London's schools. They have seen 11-plus selection invented, abolished and now revived. They have seen the fall of the London County Council, the rise of the Inner London Education Authority in two guises, its abolition, the rise of the boroughs and now their impending collapse.

They are ruled by a Prime Minister, a minister and a commissioner. This is chaos.

The last things these schools need is "the most radical reform since 1945". They need a period free of all political gimmick. They need scope to raise money locally and account for it locally. They need inspection, not the monster apparatus of shaming, targets, league tables, budget cuts and weekly monitoring.

As for nationalisation, Heaven preserve them.

 

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