抄録
From 1980s, the government of England has addressed the reform of its schooling system,
especially with many sides of school governance. They put emphasis on the rights of parents
to schools that their children go to, including the right to choose and take part in its decision
making. For ensuring the latter right, they made each schools to have a school governing body
to run itself. On the other hand, the roles of local (Education) authorities to manage and control
schools within each area has been reduced under successive governments. The purpose of this
paper is to pose a question on and examine the correctness of such local governance of schools
in the theory, the political discourse and the actual policies, using some studies and
investigation of the same framework, political documentation of Education of England or
articles by press.
There are two important policies in reform of school governance; enhance of academies and
school governing bodies which was already referred. An academy is a kind of schools, which is
not put under the control of local authorities, therefore is ensured that they can get autonomy
with its management and self-improvement. Governments have considered that by making all
schools in England academies would be an effective mean to make performance of whole
schooling increased. Academies also have to have their own governing bodies. Governing
Bodies have to be made-up with parent governors, staff governors, governors from communities
or parishes, local enterprises and from local authorities. The school governing bodies would be
an engine of the improvement of schools, regardless of academies or maintained schools under
local authorities. They got strong power to appoint its head teacher, to decide its budget and
daily management and so on. But recently, Sir. Michael Wishaw appealed that school
governing bodies must be reformed to fulfill its roles. He complained that many of school
governors have remain to be mere figurehead. His opinion affected the parliament to review
the system.
In such discourse of the reform of educational governance, where are the local authorities
put? Checking the political arguments, we have found the place of them very small. But very
recently, a very important example which suggests a local authority could take a responsibility
to produce improvement of schools of a whole area, which came from Hackney area of eastern
part of London, which had been known as a poorest area. There, a non-profit organization ‒
The Leaning Trust ‒ made a reform of education system a success. Though there are some
points to examine the reasons of success, the idea of CEO of the body can suggest much for
the role and raison d’être of local authorities, to say, one of important roles of them would be
‘mediating layer’ between each school and the State. It is the role that local education
authorities of old times had been played and local authorities from now on have to play again.
There are some signs of change of policies with local authorities, we have to watch it
carefully.
