Decentralised Management of Secondary Schools

Abstract

The schools sector has a particular significance for our analysis because it is the only sector where — perhaps by accident rather than design — the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s afforded local service-providing organisations a genuine choice between opting for independent self-managed status or remaining within a locally coordinated yet managerially ‘liberated’ system. As we have seen, by the end of 1992 NHS acute hospitals were faced with a situation in which there seemed to be no viable alternative to applying for self-managed (that is, trust) status. Equally, as will be explained in Chapter 7, the ‘choice’ facing local authority housing departments was a powerfully constrained one. The large-scale voluntary transfer (LSVT) route offered housing managers strikingly more freedom and a far more flexible set of financial arrangements than they could possibly hope for if they remained in a local authority housing department. In the schools sector, however, the development of LMS during the late 1980s meant that there was much more of a real choice. On the one hand schools could ‘opt out’ by applying for grant maintained (GM) status. This would bring an immediate financial boost plus considerable managerial autonomy. On the other hand, however, it was possible to stay within the LEA sector whilst achieving — through Local Management of Schools — a significant enhancement of managerial autonomy, including far greater control of the school budget. Delegation to schools of at least 85 per cent of initial school budgets (as defined by the Department for Education and Employment) became mandatory. Many LEAs decided to delegate an even higher percentage than this. As the Local Schools Information Unit put it: ‘As a result of LMS all schools are far more autonomous than they used to be and the differences between GM and LEA schools have diminished greatly’ (Local Schools Information, 1996, p. 5).