LEA

I was reminded by some advertisements in yesterday's Guardian that we once had things called local education authorities. There was even the big daddy of them all, the Inner London Education Authority, sometime purveyor of education to (the often deprived) children of inner London and sometime employer of BH.

Reminded because the Guardian carried several advertisements from outfits like the 'Outwood Grange Academies Trust' (aka OGAT), which appeared to operate at the same sort of scale as the LEA's which they appeared to be displacing. Some at least of which also appeared to have chief executives who had been head teachers and who were now on very fancy salaries.

Turning up the website for Outwood (reference 1), I find that they talk of family in rather the same terms that Walmart talks of Asda. Lots of management speak. They also have a well staffed senior team, presumably very roughly the same sort of people who would have otherwise staffed up the upper reaches of an LEA, albeit on fancier salaries. Digging a bit deeper I find some small print: 'OGAT is a company limited by guarantee and an exempt charity. This means we are regulated by the Department for Education rather than the Charity Commission. Our academies are funded by the Department for Education on a per pupil basis in the same way as maintained schools. Embedded below are our annual accounts'.

I took a peek at the latest accounts to find that, oddly for an outfit which had appeared to work on presentation, that the accounts came as a rather carelessly scanned image, rather than as a proper pdf file. But they were legible and as far as I could make out they had a balance sheet of around £100m, presumably almost entirely the schools which they had been given, and a turnover of around £40m, presumably mostly the salaries of the staffs of those schools.

Taking a peek at Surrey, I find the comparable figure for turnover (if I have read the runes aright) is around £400m, ten times the size. So the academies have got a way to go before they push the LEA's off the raft altogether.

Time will tell whether they make a better fist of things - but my present take is that around 50 LEAs were perhaps a better place to start than several hundred trusts. Certainly a better basis for planning area provision.

And will they morph from a sort of charity to a sort for-profit outfit? Get some proper incentives in place so that we can really get things moving (for David and his friends from the Bullingdon Club).

PS: the same edition of the Guardian also included very heavy coverage for David Bowie. More, perhaps, than they accorded Margaret Thatcher on her death. Leading me to wonder whether this master of self-publicity had signed off on the whole package before he 'passed over'.

Reference 1: http://www.outwood.com/.