‘’Overall, we need to move to a system that is more rooted in partnership and collaboration… [The system] has become fragmented, and we need to find ways of working together to deliver better life chances for our children,” education secretary Bridget Phillipson told Tes in a recent interview.

I have been watching with interest the debate about regional or national versus local leadership of school systems, with both multi-academy trusts and local authorities (LAs) claiming to lead where we go next.

For over a decade now, the leadership of our school system has been contested in this way. While on the ground around schools, sensible professionals just get on with working together, the national debate has on occasion become binary and polarising, characterised by mistrust, blame and a lack of understanding - to be generous.

Frankly, there has been a lot of nonsense written, particularly on social media.

Local authorities and trusts

But we are now at a crossroads. Decisions need to be made. The last decade of austerity, Covid-19 and cost-of-living challenges have pared back school funding and public services making collaboration essential.

If, as the Labour government want, we are to run a system “of opportunity”, which overcomes the deep challenges our vulnerable children face, then trusts and LAs must work together.

I am able to see the opportunities and challenges of this from both sides.

For five years, I was regional schools commissioner for the stunning south-west region, trying to grow trusts in ways that best improved progress for children. We worked with trust leaders to build partnerships and grow capacity for school improvement.

In February, I became director of children’s services in Bristol. I was born in Bristol and it is an amazing city, but a big reason I took the role was to try to bring local schools and services together with the trust system in a way that transforms outcomes for the most vulnerable children.

It’s clear from both these experiences we have a great deal of work to do to get trusts and LAs working better together.

A trust-led system?

The opportunity - and necessity - is clear.

Nationally, more than 80 per cent of secondary schools are now academies, so half of all schools and two-thirds of all students are in educated in academy schools. To fulfil their aims for the improvement of the lives of young people, the trusts and LAs cannot ignore each other.

LAs must recognise the reality of the system and recognise the worth of trusts. While there will always be poor or immature examples, overall, the trust movement has improved the outcomes of children, particularly in schools in intervention.

The best trusts are leadership development vehicles where staff learn alongside each other, leaders develop together, practice is shared, resources are put where they are needed and, yes, efficiencies are found - ie, small schools made more viable - in a tight financial climate.

Local authority role in schools

But trusts know they can’t do it alone. Whether a child is fed, loved and lives in safety in a warm house with space to study will directly affect their ability to learn.

Trusts have attempted to move into a space that ensures those things, led by the inimitable Confederation of School Trusts, which has developed its “anchor institutions” strategies. The excellent Reach Foundation’s cradle-to-career model achieves phenomenal results. John Barneby, CEO of Oasis Community Learning, wrote recently calling on trusts to be “integrated with local provision” rather than be “islands”. I’m looking forward to the Oasis Bristol schools leading the way!

But what of the role of LAs? In national policy development, social care, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), and education seem to sit on different landmasses, drifting separately, colliding sometimes but never joining together.

What local authorities do

But LAs do make things happen in a joined-up way. And trusts need to recognise and appreciate that role.

Back in the early 2000s, when we were fortunate to work with the very great late Tim Brighouse in the London Challenge programme, it was with the LAs that schools joined arms, metaphorically speaking, to move forward together.

And during Covid, the LA was the only player who could effectively coordinate across partners in a place, regardless of structure.

The entire point of the LA is to lead joined-up services in the community - bringing health, housing, youth, schools and early years services together to prevent crises and make sure children are safe and, yes, ready to learn. They do that better than many give them credit for, on a diminishing budget.

Collaboration is key

But like schools, LAs can’t do this alone. LAs rely on schools to take the lead in a number of areas.

LAs are rightly proud of the exceptional work that social and family workers do to support the most vulnerable families. However, the legal duty in the Children’s Act on keeping children safe rests on effective prevention and early intervention, including, crucially, that a child attends and achieves at school.

When we don’t manage to do this and care orders are essential - we often end up paying extortionate costs to residential homes, which is in no child’s best interest. And it’s where the scarce resources are going.

Meanwhile, every local area is struggling to meet the needs of more children with SEND and many of these children will require specialist places. We all know that the only solution is an inclusive school system where quality first teaching and effective support mean most children can remain happily in mainstream schools.

Tackling lower school rolls

And what about the falling birth rate? It is the role of the LA to plan places and oversee fair admissions, but due to that falling birth rate, there is an urgent need to reduce primary class sizes. But LAs can’t force academies to cut classes. If we do nothing, every school will suffer “a death by 1,000 cuts” and the small schools most of all.

The message here is clear: LAs and trusts need each other- we are interdependent.

To make this work more effectively, we all have to give a little. Trusts working across more than one LA border need to think about how they engage as part of the local community of schools, and ask what’s really “fixed and flexible” about their trust delivery model.

The Department for Education Regions Group can help by sensibly growing trusts, agreeing priorities for each place, working hard at communication locally and using intentional design to bring fewer trusts at scale to work together. One good example is the secondary system in Plymouth.

LAs need to engage better with trust leaders and recognise that trusts bring value but probably can’t be entirely devoted to that LA.

Where local authorities and trusts can work together

There will be exceptions but in many areas, the friction will take time to overcome. We may all need to be patient.

Some examples of where we can develop our joint work are:

• Encouraging a place-based model to improve attendance.
• Bringing trusts and maintained schools together to reduce class sizes.
• Working subregionally on school improvement, place planning and inclusion.
• Learning from many excellent special schools by networking new specialist resource bases and mainstream practice, reducing reliance on costly independent special provision.
• Bringing services together - Sure Start like - schools, LA services, health and the voluntary sector to meet the needs of communities.

It’s an exciting time. We should get on with it.

But how do we govern such a local improvement system together? How do we improve the local system in context, drawing on the best providers? How do we govern without recreating the huge bureaucracy of “the Children’s Trust” in the early noughties?

That’s the next question...

Hannah Woodhouse is director of children’s services in Bristol

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