13th May 2014 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Labour has announced their plans to scrap the education reforms introduced by the government this year, promising that, if elected, they would undo the confusing ‘sink or swim’ system currently in place. The opposition described the education secretary’s reforms as a ‘Kafkaesque’ system in which the government controls thousands of atomised schools, leaving them fundamentally confused and mismanaged. The free schools and academies programme also came under fire, as questions are being asked about the accountability of the new schools. Labour have proposed that a new system of local school commissioners would allow appropriate decisions to be made locally about raising standards and deciding on proposals for new schools.
Shadow education secretary and former education secretary David Blunkett have designed a new system in which schools commissioners would replace the current system in which 20,000 schools are for the most part autonomous, reporting only to the secretary of state. The proposed reforms are Labour’s most comprehensive for 10 years, and are designed to assimilate Labour’s education policies with some of the changes made by the current government. The key principle of the proposed reforms is to introduce a system of cooperation between schools, and do away with the current system of competition in which failing schools are abandoned. Under the scheme, local authorities would have directors of school standards, responsible for the welfare of the schools in their area.
The opposition’s plans have already come under fire from both the far left and the right. The plans give less weight to the traditional role played by local education authorities, which deviates from past labour strategies. Criticisms from the right focus particularly on the fact that the proposed system would undermine the autonomy of academies and free schools, a principle tenet of the government’s education policy. The system would also allow Ofsted the power of inspection for academy chains, something which schools inspectors have been campaigning for under the current government.