Why RSCs need to be accountable to parents, not heads

Ben Gibbs carries out research and consultancy to improve schools as organisations through his company, Restart-Ed. An early member of the Department for Education & Skills Business Development team and long-time governor, he has extensive experience of academies policy and practice.

Since they were installed in September 2014, the eight Regional Schools Commissioners (RSCs) have each been supported by a headteacher board (HTB), comprising academy heads and other sector leaders from the region who ‘advise and challenge’ RSCs on the decisions they make. 

 

This is fine with regard to accountability, of course, but has always been a bit iffy in terms of conflicts of interest, whether potential or real. After all, if the RSCs’ role includes:

 

• taking action where academies and trusts are underperforming
• deciding on applications from maintained schools to convert to academy status, and pairing them up with trust ‘sponsors’
• encouraging new ‘sponsors’ to establish trusts, and
• oversight of funding agreements with academies and free schools, including with respect to significant change

 

… then designing a structure in which interested parties (whose jobs and reputations are on the line in a high stakes system) play a key and apparently influential role in these decisions is a bit silly, at best. Although it’s fair to say that the DfE has tightened up its procedures around registering potentially conflicting interests, this isn’t the same as mitigating potentially conflicting interests.

 Just a quick glance at the current register of interests, for example, raises more questions than answers for me, at least. And I can’t square it with the government’s own ethical standards for providers of public services, which start with the seven principles of public life that apply to anyone who works as a public office-holder:

1. SELFLESSNESS - holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest.
2. INTEGRITY - holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. They should not act or take decisions in order to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves, their family, or their friends. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.
3. OBJECTIVITY - holders of public office must act and take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias.
4. ACCOUNTABILITY - holders of public office are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.
5. OPENNESS - holders of public office should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from the public unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.
6. HONESTY - holders of public office should be truthful.
7. LEADERSHIP - holders of public office should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and be willing to challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs.

 

These were established as objective principles rather than as standards against which to judge people, so I’m not questioning any of the HTB members’ or RSCs’ own integrity when I propose that (2) is almost impossible for them to uphold, and (3) is very, very difficult to promise or sustain. Moreover, the structures established around them by the DfE do not enable them to be as transparent and open as (5) requires, nor to submit their decisions and actions to public scrutiny as specified in (4).

 So that’s a bit rubbish!

 Stepping back a pace or two from ethics, one also questions the logic of having HTBs engaged at all in challenge. Are the RSCs accountable to them? No, they’re not. So what sort of challenge is given? And if it’s not real challenge, with teeth, then where does that come from?

 The answer is ‘from upwards’; from the National Schools Commissioner who appoints and pays them. But this sort of accountability is not quite the same as that implied above as a principle of public life. Because, of course, the fact is that the RSCs should be accountable to the public. Even though they are appointed and not elected, they hold a public office and, as such, are both servants of the public and stewards of public resources.

 So the answer is that the challenge with teeth should come ‘from outwards’; from the parents and communities who depend on RSCs’ competence, fairness and hard work for the effectiveness of their children’s schools, and whose taxes pay for their salaries and the vastly increasing cost of their offices.

I’ve seen this work informally. I was engaged as a noisily active parent as the trust that ran my daughter’s school first ran it down from an Ofsted ‘Good’ to ‘Special Measures’ in three years, then panicked and made some stupid kneejerk decisions, and then failed - over the course of a year - to take any effective action to improve matters. In fact, everything it did made things worse. One of these was to appoint an inexperienced head, who singularly failed to engage in any positive way with parents. So instead, we engaged first with the trust, and when they also ignored us, with the RSC.

 To give him his due, Tim Coulson (then RSC for the East of England & North East London) was extremely open to such engagement, and was usually quicker at responding to our emails than the school or trust, and was far more open in his communication. But he didn’t have to be, and others are far less so. And that’s the point.

 So, by all means, let’s have professional school leaders and teachers and support staff (because where are the teachers and support staff in all this?) advising the RSCs through broader Practitioner Boards, but let’s have parents and community representatives holding them to account through Parent Boards for the impact of their decisions where it matters; in the classroom and the playground; in public life.