Commentary by Chris White

The Prime Minister is expected today to announce new powers for parents in primary schools over secondary school standards. Councils might be forced to act in response to primary school parents who have not been able to get a place at a school of their choice.

Certainly any move to break the log jam on school standards is welcome: the Thatcherite reforms, continued by this Government, have meant that schools have astonishing levels of autonomy, when you consider that they are spending our money. This can work well when there is good leadership from headteachers and their team. But when things start to go wrong the role of local authorities, once clearly in charge of schools and accountable to you and me, has become unclear.

Even with recent new legislation giving back to local education authorities the power and duty to look after school standards, intervention is often too slow and too mild. Meanwhile parents attempt to vote with their feet – but find that there is too little slack in the system for them to choose to send their children to alternative schools.

We do need the ability to challenge the inertia of bodies like Hertfordshire County Council. Local county councillors, who know local schools and talk daily to local people, are almost entirely excluded from the system with the result that we have the absurd situation in which one man – a councillor from Letchworth whom none of us has elected – has the key decision-making role over local schools in St Albans.

That role should be removed from him and his ilk and be given back to local people and their chosen representatives.