Local government against local democracy
Local government against local democracy: a case study of a bid for Building Schools for the Future funding for an Academy
Paper given at ‘From Critique to Contestation’, Marxism and Education: Renewing Dialogues XII seminar, Institute of Education, London, 21 November 2009.
Richard Hatcher
‘…mass deliberation in the public realm […] is an absolutely crucial process in a democratic and open society’. (Power Inquiry 2006, p159)
This talk is based on a case study of the progress of Staffordshire County Council’s bid for £100 million Building Schools for the Future (BSF) government funding for Tamworth, including an Academy, during the period 2007 to 2009. Tamworth is a town of some 75,000 inhabitants in Staffordshire local authority, with five 11-18 secondary schools. It was Labour-led until the Conservatives won the county council elections in June 2009.
I have been researching developments in Tamworth since the ‘Hands Off Tamworth Schools’ (HOTS) campaign began in September 2008. HOTS is a parent-led campaign which has published leaflets and policy documents, held several public meetings of up to 100 people, collected hundreds of petition signatures, and won 1848 votes for its six candidates in all six Tamworth wards in the county council elections on June 4 2009, which represented 10% of the total vote.
My data sources principally comprise Staffordshire County Council (SCC) documentation, HOTS publications and numerous internal emails, interviews with key campaign figures, and field notes from consultation events. I have had some personal involvement in the campaign, including as a speaker at three of its public meetings. The analysis in this paper builds on my two previous studies of contested Academy policy processes (Hatcher and Jones 2006; Hatcher 2008).
The proposal to establish an Academy, contested by a local campaign of opposition and entailing, unlike any other education policy initiative, an element of local public consultation, provides an exceptionally revealing insight into the process by which education policy is translated from the national to the local level, and the role of local government in the process.
My starting point is the conception of the policy process in education as a field of contestation in which opposition and resistance to policy, actual or potential, are constituent elements.
In that context I conceptualise the local policy process to set up an Academy as the product of a particular governance regime.
The term governance encompasses a complex range of meanings in contemporary public sector discourse. In brief, it refers to governing which utilises a repertoire of hierarchical, market and network coordinating mechanisms involving state and non-state actors and agencies.
A specific governance regime ‘is assembled from a range of specific technologies, discourses, practices, and ‘empowered’ actors. Each is also likely to privilege particular logics of decision-making and particular forms of practice’ (Newman and Clarke 2009, p127).
The governance regime in question is the alliance of Staffordshire County Council, the DCSF, and Landau Forte, the would-be Academy sponsors, and the strategy they adopted to utilise the procedures of local government to translate the BSF proposal from formation to implementation. It is an example of what I have called elsewhere state governance networks, comprising a coalition of actors from the local state (both elected councillors and officers), national government, and the private sector.
In the case of the BSF policy process I conceptualise the governance regime as comprising two elements: a policy discourse and a process of regulative framing.
The policy discourse refers to the cognitive framing of the Academy proposal: how it is conceptualised, presented and justified. However, the focus of this talk is on the process of regulative framing.
I am using the term regulative framing – adapted from Bernstein’s concept of framing – to refer to the principle of political control of the policy process. It can range from closed framing, unilaterally imposing policy, to open framing, inviting meaningful and inclusive participation in negotiated decision-making. Regulative framing comprises both discursive and non-discursive or coercive elements.
An analysis of the Tamworth BSF process raises two interrelated issues which are central to the field of urban governance theory: democracy and conflict. Local democratic renewal through popular participation has been a theme of New Labour rhetoric for over a decade (Davies 2008, DCLG 2008). It finds an echo among those urban governance theorists who see it as the basis of a progressive consensus in local politics. However, the imposition of an Academy in the face of widespread local opposition puts into question not only the integrity of the consultation process but the democratic credentials of local government, and poses the question of whether the policy of Academies and popular opposition to them can best be explained in terms of incompatible class interests.
Exploring these issues involves a double movement: analysis of the Academy process is illuminated by situating it in the wider context of urban politics, and it in turn can make a contribution to debates within urban governance theory.
The regulative framing of the BSF proposal
The origins of the Tamworth BSF proposal lie in 2007. Woodhouse school, one of the five Tamworth secondary schools, was in ‘special measures’. In May 2007 the Schools Commissioner, Sir Bruce Liddington, whose remit included developing early Academy proposals, recommended that Landau Forte should assist the Woodhouse school in coming out of ‘special measures’. Landau Forte is a charitable trust which is the sponsor of an 11-18 Academy in Derby, a nearby local authority.
Liddington has subsequently moved from the civil service to become director of the Edutrust Academies Charitable Trust, one of the largest Academies sponsors.
In July 2007 a meeting took place between Liddington, representatives of Landau Forte, Peter Traves, who was Staffordshire’s Corporate Director for Children and Lifelong Learning, and Lord Adonis, at the time the government’s minister responsible for Academies. Thereafter followed a series of at least six private meetings between the various proponents which culminated in March 2008 when SCC submitted its BSF Strategy for Change document, entitled Readiness to Deliver (SCC 2008a), to the DCSF.
By then the proposal comprised the closure of one of the five secondary schools, the removal of the sixth forms from the remaining four schools and their replacement by a sixth form centre, and the establishing of an Academy, sponsored by Landau Forte, to run both Woodhouse school and the sixth form centre. In short, a fundamental transformation of the school system in Tamworth. The DCSF approved the proposal in June 2008.
What I am interested in is the role of the constitutional structures and procedures of local government in the formation of the bid. The first reference to it was when it was tabled at the SCC Cabinet meeting, comprising five leading councillors, on 16 April 2008. There are two remarkable things about this meeting.
The first is that it was the first time that any SCC body had discussed the BSF bid, and that it did so a week after the BSF proposal was submitted to the DCSF (and some nine months after unpublicised discussions about an Academy began). In other words, the bid did not go through any Council body for discussion or approval before being submitted to the DCSF: it was submitted personally by the Deputy Leader of the Council, Robert Simpson, who was responsible for the BSF bid, under his delegated authority.
The second remarkable feature is that the proposal document itself, Readiness to Deliver, was not presented to Cabinet. What was tabled instead was a document called Manifesto for Change (SCC 2008b), which comprised a set of educational objectives for Staffordshire but made no mention at all of the proposals for Tamworth including the Academy, even though the minutes of the Cabinet meeting state that this document (not Readiness to Deliver) would be the basis for public consultation. Regarding the BSF bid itself, the minutes state only that the submission of the bid ‘be noted’. No discussion is recorded. A consultation document containing the actual BSF proposals, including the Academy, (Consultation Proposals for Tamworth, SCC 2008c), was not published until November 2008.
Following the Cabinet meeting in April 2008 the next Council body to receive a report on the BSF bid was the Children and Young People Scrutiny and Performance Panel (hereafter referred to as Children’s Scrutiny) on 17 June 2008, but there was no mention of the specific proposal for an Academy and no mention in the minutes of any discussion.
The first report to Children’s Scrutiny which included the actual proposal was in July 2008, a month after it had been approved by the DCSF and again with no discussion noted. Thereafter there was no further reference to the BSF bid at Children’s Scrutiny meetings until the meetings in January, February and March 2009, where brief reports were given on the stage reached in the policy process: there was no mention of the issues which had arisen during the six-week consultation period which had just concluded in January, and no discussion was noted.
Cabinet itself had no further discussion of the BSF proposal after April 2008 until it took a full report of the consultation process in January 2009 and decided to approve the original proposal, in spite of strong objections from HOTS and by the headteachers of the five schools.
This led to a ‘call-in’ of the Cabinet decision by four Conservative councillors, (perhaps prompted by a request by HOTS documenting their concerns with the consultation process), which enabled the decision to be questioned at the meeting of the Corporate Policies Scrutiny and Performance committee in February 2009. This was the only occasion on which the BSF proposal featured on the agenda of that committee.
The four councillors raised several issues, including opposition to the sixth form centre run as an Academy, preferring two sixth form centres run cooperatively by the schools. As Councillor Simpson pointed out at the meeting, this was the first time that Conservative councillors had raised any objections to a proposal first published nearly a year earlier. In that context the most likely explanation for the four Conservative councillors’ departure from their national leadership’s policy of creating more Academies is that it took place four months before the county elections in June 2009 and they saw some electoral advantage in being seen to be responsive to the widespread public opposition to the BSF proposals. Shortly after the Conservatives won control of the council they accepted Labour’s BSF plan with only some minor additions.
The BSF proposal, unaltered from the January Cabinet meeting, received final approval from Cabinet in April 2009.
During the whole process Landau Forte was not required to make a presentation to Cabinet or Children’s Scrutiny or any other SCC body.
The failure of scrutiny
From the point of view of local government as a site of public deliberative democracy the regulative framing of the policy process was a particularly closed one, in two ways.
First, during the period of at least nine months leading up to the formulation and submission of the Academy proposal to the DCSF, while negotiations took place in secret between leading Council figures, the sponsors and the government, the proposal was not discussed by any formal body of SCC.
The second issue is the absence of discussion at the meetings where the proposal was reported on, even when it had become apparent, from September 2008 onwards, that there was considerable public debate and opposition. In particular it puts into question the function of the scrutiny committees within SCC. The White Paper Local Leadership, Local Choice (DETR 1999) outlined the government’s expectations that:
…the new forms of local governance will ensure that a council’s affairs are conducted openly and subject to effective scrutiny. Councillors, local media, and others interested will be helped by these new forms of governance to question those taking decisions and to hold them to account as never before. Open and accountable decision taking will become a reality. (para. 3.59)
Clearly Children’s Scrutiny failed to fulfil this function with regard to the Tamworth BSF bid. The explanation would seem to be that the Tamworth proposal entailed a fundamental change in the town’s whole secondary school system which would create widespread public opposition, the Council leadership decided to avoid it by keeping the proposal secret for as long as possible, and the members of Children’s Scrutiny acquiesced.
A significant additional contributory factor was the exclusion of teachers’ union representatives, who would certainly have questioned the BSF plans, from a role with speaking rights on the scrutiny committees (unlike in some other authorities).
Overall, the Tamworth experience provides forceful confirmation of Ashworth and Snape’s (2004) review of the research evidence on the effectiveness of scrutiny in local government: that ‘scrutiny has not yet developed into a robust accountability mechanism and therefore the work of local executives remains relatively unchecked’ (p553).
The regulative framing of the consultation process
If the first phase of the BSF process took place, largely in secret, from the spring of 2007 till the summer of 2008, the second phase centred on the period of public consultation meetings, which ran for six weeks from November 2008 to January 2009.
Here I focus on the secondary school parents and community meetings. Attendance ranged from 11 to 450 at QEMS, the school threatened with closure, and two consultation meetings for parents and others specifically about the replacement of Woodhouse school by an Academy attended by approximately 180 people.
The consultation process exposed the BSF proposal and its proponents to extensive criticism by HOTS supporters and other parents, teachers, school students, and community members. Again, my focus is not on the cognitive framing of the process – the ways in which the arguments for and against were posed – but on the regulative framing: that is, the way in which the consultation process was controlled and managed.
A standard format for the consultation process for BSF proposals is recommended by government and was followed by SCC in Tamworth. It was not conceived as a process of deliberative democracy (DCSF 2007).
- Consultation only took place once the Academy proposal was at an advanced stage (DCFS, n.d.).
- The consultation meeting period was short: six weeks.
- Consultation was structured around the ‘preferred option’ approved by the DCSF, not a range of options.
- There was no provision for a formal and equal presentation of dissenting and alternative views to balance the carefully managed presentation of the proposal (DfES 2003).
The rules of engagement (Barnes, Newman and Sullivan 2007) of the consultation meetings were designed to advantage the Academy proponents.
- A platform of leading councillors and officers spoke to Powerpoint presentations and then responded to questions and points from the floor.
- The first set of meetings were chaired by Councillor Robert Simpson, the leader of the BSF bid, not by a neutral chair.
- The additional Woodhouse meetings, on 18 March 2009, were chaired by Louise Allanach, Project Director for EC Harris Built Asset Consultancy, the project managers for the proposed Academy.
- Comments were taken in groups of three or four, enabling the platform respondents to select which to focus on.
- No supplementary questions were allowed, preventing continuity and dialogue.
The regulative framing of consultation extended from the meetings themselves to how they were reported to Cabinet. Three written submission by HOTS were excluded from the reports tabled at Cabinet. They were not appended, summarised, or referred to.
At stake in how SCC managed the consultation process is a particular construction of the public. For SCC the legitimate public were those whose identities are defined by the institutional context of the school – as the parents of pupils at a specific school – and by the constitutional context of the consultation process as the sole legitimate site for the expression of views. What was regarded as illegitimate was a collective cross-school community-wide identity with a campaigning orientation beyond the bounds of the formal consultation process.
Underlying this were two competing discourses of local democracy: representative democracy and forms of participatory democracy.
While in theory they can coexist and complement one another, elected representatives become uneasy about the prospect of community involvement in decisions that have hitherto been seen as their prerogative. Such initiatives require councillors to share their power with others whom they may think ill informed, lacking legitimacy and scarcely representative of the communities they claim to speak for. (Rao et al 2000, pp3-4, quoted in Barnes, Newman and Sullivan 2007, p41)
The claim to representation was a key theme of regulative framing. HOTS claimed to represent the majority of parents’ interests, as evidenced by the overwhelming support for their position in consultation meetings and, later, their 10% vote in Tamworth in the county council elections. SCC rejected their claims: they represented sectoral interests, in contrast to the Council’s claim to represent the electorate as a whole. (The views of the teachers unions were rejected on similar grounds.) One expression of this conflict was SCC’s rejection of the call by HOTS supporters for a public vote on the BSF proposals.
If the purpose of the consultation process was not to engage in a process of deliberative democracy one might ask what was the purpose of consultation? It had three objectives.
- First, to claim democratic legitimacy for the policy process, in accord with government policy (DCLG 2008).
- Second, as far as possible to construct support for the policy, in line with the government booklet entitled the Academies marketing toolkit (DfES 2003).
- Third, to register the strength and key themes of opposition in order to adjust subsequent policy presentation, as SCC did.
The local state against local democracy: Academies and class interests
The experience of the Academy policy process in Tamworth can be situated in the context of current debates about public participation and local democracy. These have been prominent themes of New Labour since it was elected in 1997 (Davies 2008). The most recent policy statement is the White Paper Communities in control: real people, real power, published by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG 2008). It ‘aims to pass power into the hands of local communities, to encourage vibrant local democracy in every part of the country, and to give real control over local decisions and services to a wider pool of citizens’ (p1).
Labour’s discourse is an expression of what Davies (2005, p312) calls the ‘orthodox’ position within urban governance theory. ‘Local managers have to mobilise citizens and include local knowledge in public policies.’ (Kjaer 2009, p141)
It is evident that the Tamworth experience does not correspond at all to the visions of popular participation and local empowerment of either Labour policy or urban governance theory.
I asked a leading activist in HOTS, a mother of a student at one of the secondary schools, what she thought they had learnt most from the whole BSF policy process. Carolyn’s blunt answer was ‘That there is no democracy’. She continued:
As a parent I am a stakeholder and we have completely been ignored and this consultation process has been so fast, so short that nobody’s been listened to. (Interview)
Carolyn’s views resonate with many research studies which have criticised the failure of those in power to allow meaningful popular participation in local policy-making. For example, Barnes, Newman and Sullivan (2007), speaking of their case studies, conclude that ‘our findings have often led us to be relatively pessimistic about the potential of new initiatives to overcome entrenched institutional or political forms of power’ (p184).
This poses a problem for ‘orthodox’ urban governance theorists. If local participation is in the interests of a modernising local government, why does it not act in accordance with those interests?
The source of their dilemma lies in the consensus model of local politics which underpins orthodox urban governance theory:
…participative governance is strongly oriented towards the production of consensus. The ‘partnership’ model of participation is one which assumes that different interests can and should be subsumed by a common goal. (Newman 2005, pp131-2)
If consensus is possible then failure to achieve it tends to be explained in terms of institutional inertia and bureaucratic path dependency. In contrast, critics adopting a ‘sceptical’ (Davies 2005, p312) approach within urban governance theory argue that many of the contested issues in local politics arise from opposed and irreconcilable interests (Davies and Imbroscio 2008). However, they often display a reluctance to identify these as predominantly conflicting class interests.
Newman and Clarke (2009), for example, foreground the complexity and ambiguity of local politics at the expense of obscuring its dominant capitalist logic. One consequence is that the coercive, as against discursive, power of the local state is underplayed.
In contrast, marxist approaches see urban contexts as sites of the contested and crisis-prone processes of capitalist production, consumption and accumulation, including the reproduction of labour power, giving rise to struggles around not only production but also reproduction (Geddes 2008; Jessop 2002).
Governance theory has no concept of the local state as capitalist, but in a marxist perspective the local state is subordinate to the class power of the central state.
The local state has both been the principal agent of the neo-liberal transformation of urban space through deregulation and privatisation and had the principal responsibility for the management of the ensuing contradictions and crises at the local level. In this context there has been a policy convergence between the two main political parties in local government (Eisenschitz and Gough 1993; Whitfield 2006).
This theoretical approach can provide an explanation of the BSF policy process in Tamworth and its centre-piece, the proposed Academy. Capitalist class interests provide both the principal object of education policy – the efficient reproduction of labour power to produce the future workforce – and one of the means to achieve it: the handover of schools which are public assets, accountable, at least to some extent, to local communities both through elected local government and through representation on governing bodies, to private owners and managers without local accountability. In the case of Landau Forte, it is a trust controlled directly by two multimillionaire capitalists (a property developer and an international hotelier).
This act of privatisation cannot be justified on the grounds that Academies represent a convergence of class educational interests: there is no evidence that Academies are more effective at raising the educational attainment of students from poorer backgrounds than comparable schools (Machin and Wilson 2009), and in fact the proportion of such students in Academies has greatly declined (PWC 2008). Class interests are also in play in Landau Forte’s refusal to recognise trade unions and to allow staff governors.
The role of the local state has been to implement this element of the neo-liberal agenda by managing the privatisation of part of the Tamworth school system. The Labour leadership of SCC has proved itself reliable agents of government policy, at the cost of abusing the structures and procedures of local government and abandoning any final remnants of an independent local social democratic tradition in education.
The implementation of the Academy policy did not require concessions to the governance agenda. While, for example, managing a housing estate may benefit from some low-level ‘empowerment’ of local citizens to help implement government agendas, establishing an Academy entails their disempowerment, at both local authority and governing body levels, and the transfer of power to a private sponsor. While consent was sought through the consultation process, the Academy proposal did not depend on it; its implementation was assured regardless by the uncompromising coercive power of the local state. That is why Academies do not feature in the government agenda for ‘communities in control’ (there is no mention of Academies in the White Paper (DCLG 2008)), and why, as we have seen in Tamworth as elsewhere (Hatcher and Jones 2006; Hatcher 2008), the process of policy formation and implementation at the local level has been tightly regulated, closed and exclusive.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all those who cooperated with this research, and especially Julie for the comprehensive supply of information. Named HOTS supporters are quoted with their permission. Thanks also to Ken Jones for his comments.
All the Staffordshire County Council documents and minutes of meetings referred to can be found on the Council’s website http://www.staffordshire.gov.uk/. ‘Hands Off Tamworth Schools’ publications can be found on the campaign website http://www.freewebs.com/handsofftamworthschools/.
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