Elaine Simpson is Global Director for Children’s Services with Serco
The new Education Bill (which has passed its third reading in the Lords) heralds fundamental changes to the roles and responsibilities of schools and local councils in the way educational support services are commissioned and provided.
Policy is just one driver of change. Finance, or the lack of it, is another powerful catalyst. Education has not only borne a share of local authority cuts but has been hit by the loss of national grant funding, such as the national strategies funding that provided around £100 million a year to support school improvement. Moreover, the pace of change has never been faster, with increasing numbers of secondary schools applying to become academies in order to take advantage of the unprecedented freedoms the model entails.
One emerging trend, much encouraged over the past few years by both local and central government, is for collaboration: schools within a region support one another in driving up the quality of commissioning of their support services. A key challenge here is that relationships could all too easily become one-way, with stronger organisations providing weaker institutions with the help they need but receiving little in return. The support should be mutually beneficial – even the weakest schools have areas of strength that they can share. It is in this area that responsible and responsive external service providers are likely to have an important role to play in helping to develop and support the most appropriate management disciplines and ways of working to foster the shared benefits.
Another model is emerging where academies, having received their funding directly from central government, continue to look to their local authority to act as the broker for such services. Councils are responding in different ways, from those that are changing little, with a view to adopting the most appropriate position in the future, through to those that have anticipated the scale of forthcoming change and are establishing new delivery models founded on a clear customer/supplier, commercial relationship. In short, they have already concluded that the old ways of delivering services are no longer sustainable.
As schools’ abilities to select their service providers and partners grow stronger, the rules governing their relationships with local authorities are changing fast, reflecting a move from being statutorily bound together to becoming customers in a competitive environment. Increasingly, local authorities are coming to recognise the need to develop and implement a more commercial, market-led approach to underpin future education services provision in their areas.
This dramatic shift in service procurement poses quite a challenge. But it is not a step into completely unknown territory. Many lessons have been learned in recent years and effective collaborations and partnerships to drive up service standards and introduce innovative working practices are nothing new.
Over the next few years, many different models of local education services will appear throughout the country, leading to varying degrees of success. But one fairly certain prediction is that, as ever, those who do not act are those most likely to be bottom of the class.
Serco’s services
Serco has been a provider of several education service streams to local authorities for over a decade. Working collaboratively with schools is a primary focus for us, responding to the different environments in which they operate, their individual strengths and weaknesses and the varying levels of support they require.
For example, we helped to set up a series of Local Achievement Partnerships (LAPs) in Bradford. Here, the authority’s 231 secondary schools, primary schools and children’s centres have been divided into 14 groups of between ten and 25 schools, with the principal objective of raising achievement through shared approaches to common priorities. Shared initiatives include out-of-class literacy activities, a specialist sports college providing sports training to primary school leaders, mentoring strategies, and training programmes for staff helping to improve writing skills. While still in its relative infancy (just two years old), the governance brought by such LAPs is leading to good mutual school improvement.
