The Government’s education strategy is beginning to take shape as the focus of attention moves from inadequate performance of teachers in the classroom to the big issue of leadership at the top. The quality of leadership is equally as important in education as in any other activity. The new approach looks to Chief Education Officers to deliver better results and to school governors to provide firmer leadership.School Standards Minister Stephen Byers today called for top quality candidates from business and education to take on the post of Chief Education Officer. He said: “Raising standards in education is not just our top priority for schools but also for local education authorities which should give schools vital support. The role of Chief Education Officer can make the difference between the success and failure of an LEA – it’s vital that quality people with vision and determination take on this pivotal role.” He added that he wanted to see more head teachers and business people becoming Chief Education Officers.

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The transition from Compulsory Competitive Tendering to the Best Value initiative has receive a boost with the announcement more flexible rules and incentives to seek competition.Regulations on CCT are being relaxed to make them more flexible as encouragement to local authorities to move to a Best Value-based approach to service delivery. Best Value aims to ensure that local authorities provide quality services at a price that local people are willing to pay. Hilary Armstrong, Minister for Local Government, made it clear in June that the Government intends to replace CCT with a duty of Best Value, as soon as Parliamentary time allows. This relaxation of the rules paves the way for developing the principles of Best Value in advance of the new legislation.

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Councils and their private sector partners are to get more help with Public Finance Initiative projects. Government support for projects, (PFI credits) is to be doubled and development procedures will be streamlined. The measures are aimed at removing the twin disincentives where local authorities incurred development costs with no assurance of revenue support and potential partners had to bid for projects uncertain of whether there would be any Government support. The Local Government (Contracts) Bill will shortly receive Royal Assent and this will also help by removing private sector concerns about the powers of local authorities to enter into PFI deals.Local Government Minister Hilary Armstrong said: “We have swept away the barriers to successful PFI projects and partnerships in local government, as we said we would. Authorities and the private sector can now use the opportunities PFI provides to remedy investment backlogs in schools, transport systems, police, fire, waste and other services. Every authority should now consider how they can use public/private partnerships and the PFI to benefit their own areas.”

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After a four month delay at the final contract stage, building is about to start on the Sir John Colfox School, in Bridport, Dorset. It has taken Dorset County Council and their private sector partner Jarvis plc eighteen months to reach agreement on the details of the contract. The school will be built and run using private finance and management expertise.Education and Employment Minister Kim Howells welcomed the signing of deal worth around £12 million in capital investment. He said: “Through this deal, Dorset County Council has shown the way for others to tap into private sector investment for the benefit of parents and children. The existing Colfox school suffers from design and maintenance problems – through PFI the people of Bridport will benefit from a new school in two years’ time. That would not have been possible without PFI.

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David Cooke has been appointed as the new Director of the Central Information Technology Unit (CITU). The work of the Unit is to influence and co-ordinate strategy in relation to Information Sytems to ensure that the latest technology is harnessed to improve co-ordination across government.There had been expectations that the post would have been opened up to candidates from the private sector. The argument against this is that the Unit already has a number of people on secondment from IT companies and that a principle task of the Director is to understand issues on the inside of government.

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Harriet Harman, Secretary of State for Social Security said social exclusion is the “big issue” for the Government. Speaking at the launch of the Centre for Analysis for Social Exclusion, an independent unit at the LSE, she said ‘social exclusion’ is complex. It includes adults deprived of work, children deprived of a decent education, families deprived of the material goods that many take for granted. It also includes communities deprived of proper access to transport, to healthcare, and to financial services.She described how this impacts across the whole of society, but stressed that it is the excluded who suffer the most. Families are trapped in dependency and they inhabit a parallel world where income is derived from benefits, not work; where school is an option not the key to opportunity; and where the dominating influence on young people is the culture of the street, not the values that bind families and communities together.

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The lead role in the New Deal for eight new areas has been given to private sector organisations. The Local Government Association has protested to the Government at the way in which the decision was taken without consultation with other partner organisations at local level. There was particular disappointment because councils in the areas concerned have a good track record of partnership working on welfare to work issues.Sir John Harman, chair of the LGA’s urban commission commented: “Local government has proved that the partnership approach can work in delivering key elements of the New Deal and it is bitterly disappointing for local partnerships with a good track record to be sidelined in this way, especially without prior notice of what was afoot. At the very least local partnerships should be able to bid for the lead role on a level playing field with the private sector. We have stressed to ministers that we do not object to private sector leadership but that we think decisions about who should lead should be made locally by the local partnerships, not by central direction.”

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Partnership between police forces, police authorities and local authorities will give the best results in tackling crime and disorder. This was the theme of a speech by Dr Ruth Henig, chair of the Association of Police Authorities, speaking at a conference arranged jointly with the Home Office.She explained that through a consultation process involving local authorities, the constabulary, charge payers, local interest groups, racial equality councils, neighbourhood groups, tenants’ forums and community safety groups the APA had discovered the concerns about community safety. They had also identified the issues that must be addressed to deal properly with those concerns.

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Elected councillors and officers of local authorities are overloaded with information from the Local Government Association. This is one of the key findings of the MORI Survey which examined communication between the LGA and member authorities.The Survey revealed that although the information provided by the LGA was timely, topical and relevant: “everybody gets everything”. As a result of this deluge of information the important messages often fail to get through. Elected members felt particularly that the arrangements are not meeting their need. They believe that they are less well informed than officers.

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Earlier reforms of government such as contracting out have failed to address wicked issues such as crime, ill health, and poor education. The reason for the failure is that government is still organised against a 19^th century model of separate departments spending their own budgets. This analysis is set out in a report by Demos, the independent think-tank. The author, Perri 6, argues that without radical reform, fundamental problems that cut across departmental boundaries will not be properly addressed. Agencies will continue to shift problems on to others, schools will go on excluding pupils who will commit crime and mentally ill people will be dumped into the community.Currently budgets are divided into separate silos for health, education, law and order, etc. The horizontal links between the professions, such as police, teachers, doctors and nurses, are weak. Improving these arrangements is unlikely to bring any substantial improvement The report urges the Government to take an holistic approach to achieve greater integration across the public sector. This would involve a fundamental re-think of structures and processes, moving the emphasis from functions and services towards a focus on solving problems.

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