Ed Dorrell hit the nail on the head this week when he wrote that the middle tier of the school system is in need of a good tidy up.

Just as a garden needs an autumnal cutting back and reshaping after the growing seasons, so the changes needed now are a natural consequence of the successful expansion of the academies sector. This, plus the shrivelling away of local authorities’ capacity and the refocusing of Ofsted taking place under Amanda Spielman’s leadership, mean that now is the perfect time to be thinking about what kind of set-up we need as recent reforms ripple their way through the system.

My starting point is the belief that a school-led system is still the best way to unleash the talent of educational professionals to do their best for children.

The big idea behind most of the structural changes in the last thirty years or so was that power was best placed in the hands of people who know kids best, those on the frontline. And even though there have been some very high-profile failures of governance and leadership in schools recently, I would still argue that having teachers in the driving seat will ultimately be for the best. Failures have always happened - much of their greater visibility is because of the greater transparency and accountability that schools face today.

Schools and teachers in charge

However, if we are truly going to have schools and teachers in charge we need to be disciplined during the transition. Politicians and LAs have stepped back to create space for schools and MATs to fill, but this takes time and power abhors a vacuum.

It will always be tempting for civil servants and politicians, for the noblest of reasons, to be seen to be acting when things go wrong, but getting more involved in school improvement again would be a big mistake. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in the system, only to see them re-imposed at a regional or national level with a super-department exercising a new dominance from Whitehall and its regional outposts. We have to trust school leaders to know and do what is best for their pupils day-to-day, and only intervene when things go really wrong and can’t be put right by those concerned.

I say this for a number of reasons. If RSCs get too involved in things then headteachers have yet another group of people to consider when making decisions, on top of pupils, parents, teachers, governors, the wider community, and Ofsted, plus the various statutory and official obligations they have too. The more stakeholders to consider, the less likely it is that the most important ones - kids and staff - are at the centre of decisions.

There’s also a workload and resource allocation issue. Amanda Spielman, Sean Harford and others have done so much to try to reduce the stress and workload Ofsted creates for schools, it would be a real shame if more was created through the good intentions of the RSCs.

Special forces

Finally, a broader RSC role means accountability becomes blurrier again. If RSCs advise schools on how to improve, and schools follow the advice but don’t improve, who is responsible for this failure? If Ofsted say you’re “good” and should be left alone, but the RSC thinks you might be a “steady decliner”, should you expect a knock on the door from someone? This was exactly the kind of grey area that LAs faced when they had control of schools, and we moved away from that system for this very reason.

This is why I am in favour of the RSC function being much more tightly defined in scope. We are lucky to have had such a great bunch of people in the roles so far. They all had to take a big leap of faith to leave previous jobs and take up a newly created and still-to-be-defined role. There is a risk though that we end up asking too much of them and their teams - and they end up unable to fulfil their most important function: ensuring struggling schools find a safe berth within which to improve.

And for this all-important task, I would give them even more resources and power. RSCs should be the special forces of the school system: limited in number, highly skilled, only deployed in very specific circumstances, but when unleashed given carte blanche to get their mission done any which way. They should leave good leaders to lead their schools and only be called into action when schools are clearly unable to provide a good quality of provision for kids.

Cutting back a civil service function is never easy for politicians to do, but Justine Greening has shown, through the work she has done on school funding, that she is more than capable of making hard decisions. With her eye for detail and determined manner, she is perfectly placed to carry out the bureaucratic topiary the middle tier now needs.

Mark Lehain is the director of Parents & Teachers for Excellence, is on the advisory council for the New Schools Network and was the founder of Bedford free school. He tweets @lehain

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