Metro mayors in two major northern cities are calling for an increased role in overseeing schools in their regions, amid a government revamp of school improvement.
In exclusive interviews with Tes, the Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and the Liverpool City Region mayor Steve Rotheram said regional mayors should have greater responsibility for their secondary schools and multi-academy trusts (MATs).
The calls from the two prominent Labour mayors come as the government prepares to open a consultation over giving local leaders more powers and improving local decision making as part of its proposed English Devolution Bill.
Meanwhile, Sam Freedman, who was instrumental to the 2010-2013 academy reforms as adviser to the former Conservative education secretary Michael Gove, said that oversight of schools - among other powers - should be transferred from the Department for Education regions to mayors.
Enhanced role for councils
School oversight has not previously been part of any devolution to the 10 regional mayors in England.
Speaking to Tes, Mr Burnham said he wanted to see “an enhanced role for councils in relation to education again”, adding that schools being accountable to local communities “should be a principle on which education should always be based”.
He added that his recent launch of the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate was part of a drive to reverse the “ridiculous” idea that schools have nothing to do with regional mayors.
He said: “There’s an English devolution bill coming forward and there will be consultation around this... I think there is a big question that needs to be answered, which is, ‘what is the devolved role when it comes to secondary education? And I think that there does need to be one.”
And Steve Rotheram, mayor of the Liverpool City Region, told Tes that MATs should be more accountable to metro mayors and local authorities, adding that he wants to do “a lot more” to encourage collaboration.
DfE regional directors should “report directly to metro mayors and be accountable” to them because a mayor’s influence on education is “so restricted” despite having a responsibility to “rectify a lot of issues from the education system” post-16, he added.
Mayors ‘should broker academies’
Speaking to Tes after the government revealed plans to introduce Regional Improvement Teams from early next year, Mr Freedman suggested that DfE regional teams should be aligned with mayoral regions, with powers - including oversight and school improvement - slowly transferred.
“My view is that the DfE shouldn’t, in the long run, be doing oversight and it would make sense for some of those powers and responsibilities to go to mayors, but it needs to be done really slowly,” he said.
He added that it “would make sense to have mayors brokering academies over time”, as mayoral teams will “see more context than a large regional team”, which means policymakers could “push things like SEND [special educational needs and disabilities] and exclusions” on to them.
Lord Knight, former Labour schools minister, agreed that MATs could be more accountable to the areas they cover, adding that they could become trust shareholders through governance reforms.
However, he said power should not be placed solely with mayors, emphasising the need for “a disparity” of views.
“I think the basic principle should apply that we share the accountability of academies to democratically elected leaders of councils and local authorities,” Lord Knight said.
And Jonny Uttley, CEO of the Education Alliance Multi-Academy Trust, said that metro mayors are “well positioned to have oversight of the experience of young people in their area” in education, health, justice and care.
The trust leader also wants to see a rule change that would mean trust growth “can only happen in a single metro mayor area”, but added that this should not involve “unpicking trusts that already exist across multiple metro mayor authorities”.
But, Kim McGuinness, mayor of the North East, who is working with ministers on the role that mayors can play “in directly delivering some of the solutions” to problems identified by the child poverty task force, cautioned against mayors getting more involved in schools at the moment.
“We are not in a space where we should be devolving schools to mayors,” she told Tes.
Instead, Ms McGuinness said she is more focused on how young people can be supported both in and out of school, including finding a regional solution for free school meals.
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