Information and Planning in the Education Sector

The local education authority (LEA) is the key provider of state primary and secondary education in Britain. The role of these bodies is under constant reappraisal in the light of sweeping new legislation that has redefined the provision of education. Under the 1988 Education Reform Act, the Conservative Government created a state education system in which parents were given free choice in deciding the schools to which they would send their children. This Act also introduced devolved financial budgets, the choice for schools to ‘opt out’ of local authority control and the establishment of a centralised, national curriculum. In addition, the Government’s hallmark of encouraging competitiveness underpinned the requirement for secondary schools to publish ‘performance’ information on an annual basis, detailing the academic achievement in examinations of their pupils at ages 16 and 18. Thus, a ‘market’ system has been introduced and subsequently been developed, in which schools compete for pupils and LEAs have much reduced powers, monitoring the performance of schools over which they have little or no direct control. Before 1988, state schools had fixed pupil catchment areas and few financial responsibilities. Moreover, information on achievement, if available, was not widely circulated. Now, schools without fixed catchment areas have to manage large budgets based on their pupil rolls and compete with each other in the fight for the ‘best’ pupils whose examination results are published annually for all to see and compare. The importance of achievement has been brought into focus by the publication of ‘league tables’ for primary and secondary schools throughout the nation. Thus, in the past decade there has been a continued movement away from a producer-controlled state education system towards a much more consumer-oriented system where ‘choice’ is very much the watchword. Recent legislation, including that introduced under the Labour Government, has strengthened emphasis on market-led education. Schools are now freer than ever to introduce selective schooling. The management information requirements placed on schools and LEAs are ever-increasing, enabling the imposition of ‘hit-squads’ to deal with schools (or even whole LEAs) considered to be ‘failing’ in their results; the case of The Ridings school in Halifax received national publicity in the press.