We don’t have the details of Angela Rayner’s speech to the Labour Party conference yet, but let’s reflect on what we know so far.

At last year’s conference, Rayner, the shadow education secretary, made it clear that she was less interested in debates on the merits of certain types of school and more interested in the use of public money.

She appears to be holding the line at the conference again this year. There is no suggestion that Labour would return all academies to local authority control.

But there is a suggestion that Labour would return admissions to local authorities and would allow failing schools in multi-academy trusts to be “re-brokered” to local authorities.

The problem for the Labour Party will be the fact that many local authorities do not have the capability or capacity to support schools.

Increasingly, the evidence suggests that the impact of cooperation and partnership is greatest where schools work together in structural groups, notably federations and multi-academy trusts.

The fact of being “maintained” by a local authority quite simply does not make a school part of a strong and sustainable group. Local authorities have many other duties and responsibilities, from waste collection to housing. They are not entities whose sole focus is education.

The impact of school partnerships

And the evidence increasingly suggests that school improvement is most effective across a group of schools that are governed as a single entity. It is this that we need to focus on now.

So Rayner’s support for co-operative academies is good, but she needs to go further.

There should be two principles at the heart of Labour’s policy on schools:

• All schools must be in a strong and sustainable structural group;
• The group should be established purely for the advancement of education in the public interest - this puts moral purpose at the heart of the group of schools.

It may be interesting to note that Ontario, one of the highest performing education jurisdictions in the world, has structurally integrated groups of schools, separate from municipal authorities.

So is there a role for local government in education?

A key role of local government is as a convener of partners in a place to promote economic development, create the conditions for good social outcomes and protect and promote the life chances of local children and young people and their families.

Local government should have a more strategic role in education, using their civic capability and capacity to unblock challenges in the local education system. This is nothing to do with maintaining schools.

Local authorities’ role in education

There is an opportunity for the Labour Party to articulate through the National Education Service a future-orientated vision for schools in England with all schools in strong and sustainable groups. It would be a terrible loss if this opportunity was missed.

Once and for all, let’s move beyond the hopeless oppositional debates about academies versus local authorities.

Let’s create something powerful and visionary that defines a proper role for the different parts of the system in a way that creates a coherent whole.

Leora Cruddas is CEO of the Confederation of School Trusts (CST). She tweets @LeoraCruddas