A National Education Service has to fix the multiple problems created by a fragmented and fractured system which has been completely undermined by academisation. This article argues there can be no ambivalence about bringing academy schools back into a local authority system, but that a future Labour government must also reinvigorate what…

In this article the author examines the response of the Labour leadership to the Conservative-led Government's policies for restructuring and re-agenting the school system. His focus is on the role of local authorities and local democracy. He identifies two contradictory dynamics in Labour's current thinking. One promises to enhance local…

This article critically examines the Labour Party's policies for local school systems, focusing on its proposals for regional Directors of School Standards, for academies and free schools, and for local democracy, and offers an alternative approach.

Coalition government policies have put into question the role of local authorities in a "self-improving school system". In a number of local authorities new authority-wide partnership bodies are being set up involving all local schools, including academies, and controlled by headteachers. This article begins with an analysis of the new…

The Labour government showed no interest in extending local democracy in the school system, in spite of a policy rhetoric of local democratic renewal. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government's localism agenda promotes the autonomy of schools from local authorities without proposing alternative forms of local democracy in the school…

The UK government seized the opportunity of the Trojan Horse affair to launch a damaging Islamophobic attack, eagerly relayed by a racist press, on the Muslim community in Birmingham and beyond, abusing Ofsted and the Prevent strategy as blatant instruments of ideologically-driven policy. The various reports found no evidence of radicalisation or…

The Coalition Government, building on the foundations laid by its Labour predecessor, aims to dismantle the local authority system and with it what remains of the accountability of schools to local elected government. In this article, a response to Stewart Ranson's in a recent issue of "FORUM," the author examines his claims for the…

Free schools are new state-funded but privately-run schools set up under the academies legislation. Free schools represent the most overtly market-oriented policy within the Conservative-led Coalition government's school reform programme in England and have provoked intense controversy, centering on issues of pupil attainment, social equality,…

Academies (state schools owned and run by private sponsors on a non-profit basis) are a key element in Labour's education agenda. Proposals to set up Academies, in most cases by taking over existing schools, have provoked local campaigns of opposition in many areas. Replacing a Local Authority with an Academy entails a process of consultation.…

Distributed leadership has come to prominence in school management discourse as a means to achieve the participation and empowerment of teachers and to create democratic schools. In this paper I explore the contradictions between these claims and both the hierarchical power structure of schools and the use of distributed leadership to secure the…