Emerging local schooling landscapes : the role of the local authority

SIMKINS, Timothy, COLDRON, John, CRAWFORD, Megan and JONES, Steve (2015). Emerging local schooling landscapes : the role of the local authority. School Leadership and Management, 35 (1), 1-16.

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Link to published version:: https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2014.962501

Abstract

The school system in England is undergoing rapid change, with the government creating more than 4000 ‘independent publicly funded schools’, known as academies, since 2010. The potential for fragmentation is considerable with diversity of governance emerging as a key feature of the new schooling landscape. Consequently, a major and widely recognised issue to which these reforms give rise concerns the future of the ‘middle tier’ –that layer between individual schools or groups of schools and central government. There are competing visions of how a future middle tier might evolve: one focuses entirely on a middle tier of individual schools and chains as a ‘self-improving system’; others conceive a continuing but revised role for the local authority (LA). The aim of this paper is to begin to explore the latter position, and in particular the potential role of the LA as a ‘broker’ of new patterns of school organisation. Drawing on interview data from three very different LA areas, the findings show that LAs differ in how they conceive their role and, consequently, on the strategies that they pursue.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: Published online: 10 Nov 2014
Research Institute, Centre or Group - Does NOT include content added after October 2018: Sheffield Institute of Education
Identification Number: https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2014.962501
Page Range: 1-16
Depositing User: Hilary Ridgway
Date Deposited: 08 Dec 2014 09:53
Last Modified: 18 Mar 2021 03:58
URI: https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/8946

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