Education reform has moved forward with an agreement between Education Minister Charles Clark and most of the teaching unions. Teachers will be relieved of many non-teaching functions and they will have assistants in the classroom to share the teaching burden. These developments will allow teachers to devote more time to the higher level task of managing teaching and to focus on the individual learning needs of all their pupils.It is planned to recruit an additional 50,000 teaching assistants. Assistants already in post and the new recruits will operate within a professional standards framework and training will be developed by the Teacher Training Agency and linked to relevant Qualified Teacher Status modules. The framework will provide a foundation from which many teaching assistants could progress, in time, to become qualified teachers.

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Claims by Ministers that the Public Finance Initiative gives better value for money, improved design innovation and better risk management than traditional funding have been challenged by the Audit Commission. Auditors looked at PFI funded schools opened up to September 2001 and compared them with a traditionally funded sample. PFI schools came out worse on a range of measures.The quality of school buildings built via more traditional means was better than the early PFI schools. There was little evidence of design innovation and some school users were critical of important design aspects such as classroom size and layout compared with non-PFI schools. Unit costs varied widely, with no clear-cut difference between PFI and traditional schools in either construction or running costs. Cleaning costs appeared to be higher in PFI schools, probably reflecting higher standards. Risk has been reallocated, but important features and risks have sometimes been left out of project specifications. The early PFI schools were not delivered any quicker than non-PFI schools.

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By David Walker.Localism is currently all the rage among policy “wonks” and cerebral politicians, and is coming to be seen as a “new consensus” in British politics as Labour, Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats all push competing variants of a similar theme. The creation of quasi-autonomous “Foundation Hospitals” and the loosening of financial controls on local government are examples of new localism. Labour has come in for criticism from some quarters for not “letting go” enough, and still being wedded to a “command and control” regime of performance targets and inspectorates emanating from central government. Now a leftwing thinktank has come to the defence of the “control freaks” with a pamphlet arguing that a centralised mechanisms of standards monitoring and resource allocation are often essential to achieving basic goals of fairness and equality. In praise of centralism argues that in recent history progressive policies have largely flowed from central initiatives while local politics have more often than not been “the homeground of reaction”. It warns that while devolving power and decision-making from the centre always sounds good, there are hard questions to be asked about whether this is a genuinely radical or, in some contexts, ultimately conservative agenda.

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