LGA response to the Department for Education’s School accountability reform – school profiles, improvement and intervention consultation

The Local Government Association (LGA) is the national voice of local government. We work with councils to support, promote and improve local government.

We are a politically-led, cross party organisation which works on behalf of councils to ensure local government has a strong, credible voice with national government. We aim to influence and set the political agenda on the issues that matter to councils, so they are able to deliver local solutions to national problems. The LGA covers every part of England and Wales, supporting local government as the most efficient and accountable part of the public sector.

We are concerned that the consultation does not clearly set out who is responsible for what in the proposed new improvement system, including the role of councils. It would be helpful for the Department to clarify who is in charge of making decisions, based on consensus, relating to improvement for individual schools. The focus should be on challenging and supporting those schools that require some form of intervention and we believe that this can only be provided if it is clear which partner has the responsibility for providing that challenge.

We ask that the Department is clear on who RISE teams, which we acknowledge are a new entity, are accountable to and for as well as how they will work collaboratively with individual councils. We would also like to see the Department, working with Ofsted and councils, work to develop a proactive system of school improvement support where support can be accessed before serious performance issues are identified.

Given the current crisis in supporting children with Special Education Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and the broad consensus on the need to educate more children with SEND in mainstream settings, we believe inclusion or inclusive practice should be a standalone principle for delivering school accountability, while accepting this is implicit in many of the other proposed principles.

It would be helpful for the Department for Education to clarify who the audience is for the proposed school report cards; are the aimed at the general public, including parents and carers, to allow for comparisons to be made between schools, or are they aimed at education professionals to help drive improvement? We are concerned that a single school profile may not be able to provide useful information to two very different audiences. It would be helpful to better describe the audience under the purpose and principles of accountability in the school system. 

We are also concerned that one unintended consequence of school profiles will be to drive harmful competition between schools. It is also unclear how profiles will drive collaboration between schools to solve many of the problems with the education system, for example increasing levels of mainstream inclusion. School profiles could also influence parental choice when making decisions on which schools to apply for and this could drive children away from some settings, having an impact on their financial sustainability and the council role in ensuring a sufficiency of school places.

We would expect to see information on pupil characteristics, particularly with regards to SEND and Education, Health and Care Plan numbers and how they compare to the local population, routinely included in a school profile.

The Department’s intervention work must have a single focus; improving outcomes for children and young people as quickly as possible and we are concerned that focussing on structural change, whether involving schools moving from maintained to academy status or moving from one Multi-Academy Trust to another, can be a distraction for the school concerned. The focus must instead be on working with partners locally to identify the best-placed person/organisation to provide the appropriate improvement support.

The focus of any form of intervention should be for the school concerned to be able to make quick and sustained improvements; if this could be achieved by means other than structural intervention, for example receiving support from a strong local council maintained school, that should be the preferred method of improvement support. Decisions should also be influenced by the performance of local academies and Multi-Academy Trusts and their capacity to drive rapid improvement.

It would be helpful for the Department to set out how they envisage the RISE teams driving improvements in school performance and how they will work with existing council school improvement teams locally. The Department should clarify how RISE teams will add value where schools are already in receipt of improvement support locally, whether that is from the council or a MAT.