It was on the 9th November 2009 that I woke up to hear BBC’s Radio Good Morning Scotland programme announce that East Lothian Council was going to transfer ownership of local schools to Charitable Trusts. At the time I was Executive Director of Education and Children’s Services and had been publicly exploring these ideas on my Learning Log for three years prior to that revelation.

However, as can often be the case, an exploratory idea and public consultation was transformed into a ‘madcap’ scheme which was definitely going to be implemented.

The headline from that time give a small indication of the frenzy which was created:

Plans to increase independence of schools attacked

Yet here we are six years on and the whole issue of school governance  is reigniting the option of state schools being more autonomous.

Our initial idea at that time was captured in a very simple proposal which received unanimous approval from East Lothian Council’s Education Committee in November 2009:

“To consider and explore a model for educational delivery based upon cluster working through greater devolution of budgets and associated responsibility to local communities.”

Over the next year the proposal evolved from ‘Community Based Management of Schools’ to ‘Community Partnership Schools’ and was taken forwards by a representative stakeholder group who put forward recommendations with an emphasis upon the principle:

“It takes a community to raise a child”.

For those who wish to find out more about these proposals they can be accessed here .

However, as the documentation records, there was no appetite from parents, teaching unions or headteachers for moving to Trust status at that time. Fears about too much governance responsibility falling upon the shoulders of parents; transferring employment of teachers and other staff from the Council to a Trust (TUPE); and, parental intererence in the management of schools, were the prime concerns of parents, teachers and headteachers respectively.

Having said that there were some very clear findings from our series of stakeholder events. For example, all groups wanted to see greater local control of budgets and the curriculum. There was also a strong desire that schools be more closely affiliated to their local communities; be more accountable at a local level; and adopt a more “outward facing” perspective.

There was also a clear preference to see more diversity amongst our schools, as opposed to uniformity, and a clear call from all stakeholder groups to share more performance information with parents and other stakeholders so that they could be involved in the school improvement agenda.

However, crucially, with the exception of one Headteacher, there was no desire to take the governance model a stage further by setting up a charitable trust that would employ the teachers and deliver education on behalf of the local authority.

With the benefit of 20:20 hindsight I can see a number of errors I made during that exploratory phase. These were primarily connected to my explicit desire to think so publicly and openly, without first taking forward, in confidence, the key group in these deliberations, namely the headteachers.

I appreciate that many of my colleagues felt sidelined in the debate, whereas they should have been central to the exploration of new governance models.

I also think the project was undermined by a desire to take things forward on such a wide front, i.e. all schools in East Lothian. Given the radical nature of the proposals it would have been better to seek out a school, or schools, that had volunteered to be involved in a prototype programme.

From my own point of view I have moved away from the simplistic idea of breaking schools away from Local Authorities, to a position where schools themselves should take statutory responsibility for raising standards and school improvement – as an alternative to the vicarious responsibility currently held by local authorities.

I have explored this in a more detailed fashion in a chapter in the most recent edition of Scottish Education. (Scottish Education: referendum 2013)

My own thinking has also been influenced by my recent experience of working in leadership fields beyond the narrow and inward looking world of education. For there can be no doubt that we need to bring a fresh perspective to the problem which builds from a powerful evidence base – but without experimentation and change that evidence base will never be available, allowing all sides to retreat into their traditional positions.