Education boss meets heads to discuss handing over school purse strings

Don Ledingham, the education director of East Lothian Council, revealed he has met headteachers in the area to discuss the plans to create trust schools and devolve funding to them.

The local authority sparked a national debate last year on how schools are run after proposing to group schools into clusters run by community boards.

Mr Ledingham also revealed, in his latest blog posting, that these new boards would ultimately be accountable to headteachers.

The proposal was exclusively revealed in The Scotsman last November through a leaked report. Critics said taking schools out of council control could damage education.

However, education secretary Michael Russell promised to listen to the plan, and any alternative models for running schools suggested by other councils.

Mr Russell has agreed to speak at a conference on the East Lothian proposal on 22 April, to be held at Queen Margaret University in Musselburgh. He is due to speak on how he will provide "space" to allow councils to innovate on school management.

Mr Ledingham was writing in advance of the conference, to which nearly half of Scotland's councils have indicated their intention to attend.

The response indicates a willingness to investigate the model by other local authorities across the country.

Headteachers in Scotland have less freedom than their counterparts in England, with councils taking more direct control over schools.

However, English devolved schools are often seen as less accountable to parents.

East Lothian Council hopes that creating community-based management boards – made up of local residents, parents and others – to run schools will circumvent this.

Mr Ledingham said that taking the step of making the trust into a charity could save 1.9 million in non-domestic rates, which other charitable trusts, such as private schools, universities and colleges, do not pay.

However, this would not happen in the near future, he said, and only with community support.

Professor Richard Kerley, a professor of management at Queen Margaret University, said the model would mean more decisions being made locally, fitting in with the interests of particular communities.

However, teachers fear that the model would be a return to the opt-out policies of previous governments, which had failed.

A spokesman for Scotland's biggest teaching union, the EIS, said:

"At a time when many schools are already suffering as a result of financial cuts, asking headteachers to take on additional financial responsibility over diminishing budgets would add to the pressures upon them."

Analysis: Putting trust in budget control may not pay

Fiona MacLeod

SCHOOLS in England have far more autonomy and power over their budgets than in Scotland.

However, the plethora of models and management arrangements south of the Border has led to confusion amid a seemingly endless variety of school types, from grant-maintained schools, to academies, foundation schools, and community secondaries among many others.

Many initiatives are simply swept under the carpet by an incoming administration which then creates its own model, leaving many schemes such as beacon schools redundant.

Under the English trust model, schools are funded by councils, but run by governing bodies which can employ their own staff, make separate admissions arrangements and manage their own assets. But, controversially, governors of trust schools can include representatives from private business, who then have a say on what is taught in the school in return for investment.

When that comes to children being taught creationism over evolution, that can cause controversy.

Professor Geoff Whitty, an authority on education trusts, has said the move might help to improve weak schools. But the director of London University's Institute of Education, insists that the move would work only if trusts were created for clusters of schools, rather than individual institutions.

A system where solo trust schools were created in New Zealand was dumped after they ran into financial troubles. The problem with schools being run individually is that the better improve and the weak get even worse, according to Prof Whitty.

Working together as a group and retaining some local authority control would allow councils to make big-budget decisions, such as new buildings, he believes.

Crucially, the scheme would work through economies of scale in purchasing, allowing schools to share resources such as a specialist teacher of a minority subject, for example, Mandarin.

A key reason to create trust schools in Scotland would be the ability to obtain charitable status for state schools. This would remove their liability to pay rates, and free up millions of pounds.

Whether more money equals better education, however, remains to be seen.