An education body for the whole of London? ILEA 2 ?

[TalkinPeace2]

Boris wants to undo what Maggie did ...
www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-19980071
your thoughts?

There definitely needs to be cooperation - lots of London schools have converted to academy status and are now beyond LA control but competing with each other rather than sharing good practice. Councils are still responsible for providing places even when for 20 years (since the Greenwich ruling) it's been impossible for them to reserve places in their own local authority schools for children of that borough.

The report makes it clear that a group of London councils also met with the DfE a few days ago and have been lobbying the government for a while on this, so Boris is trying to take political advantage as usual. But it would be good to see them working together towards the same end. There's another BBC report linked to this article about striking improvements in London schools which are a result of investment, teacher recruitment and training that predates this government. Good practice should be shared - I'm wary of Boris's proposal for a 'Gold club' of elite schools - but partnership and cooperation are definitely the way forward.

The 'gold club' idea was in the Standard but the BBC has a different emphasis in its report.

Tiggy - I don't think it is borough boundaries that cause problems -i didn't think schools were allowed to discriminate between applicants within thier admissions policies based on borough boundaries?

It is certainly true that there are 'balck holes' and that families can live inbetween schools with no chance of admission to either.

But with the gvt introduction of Academies and even more so Free Schools it is hard to see how any control over the siting of schools in reponse to provision can be regained. . For example there is a Free School being planned for the N of Lambeth. The shortage of school places is actually in the S of the borugh and on the border between Lambeth and Southwark. Local councils are powerless to influence this for the benefit of their residents.

The problem with London - from where I sit out in the sticks - is that there are too many tiny LEAs and nobody taking into account the fact that parents can cross 6 LEAs in a single days travel.

Part of the driver of the whole Academy thing is to weaken LEAs - which is stupid in the shires where they tend to work well

• One set of top admin people each on £90k to several hundred schools

but in London you have one set to thirty schools or less - so the effectiveness is much less.

It is INSANE that there is no standardised school application form for the whole of London (and the country)
The LEA boundary here is 100 yards from my house ...
Friends in London live at the junction of three ...

It is INSANE that there is no standardised school application form for the whole of London

Actually there is, at least online. You apply at www.eadmissions.org.uk for all London boroughs and Surrey County Council. Your application will then be handled by the admissions team where you live.

sorry yes, I meant process rather than form.
it should be an online, done and dusted, put the codes of the schools you want and they fill up their places geographically starting with the nearest, regardless of boundaries and stuff.

Isn't it just faith schools that require another application form? Some of the grammars too if pupils are sitting tests. But there are some areas that have banding tests (Wandsworth?) - not sure about them. I didn't think many areas still had feeder schools either but perhaps that's also religious schools.

Tiggytape, no Richmond is not, it abolished the feeder school policy this year so it's all distance now.

It doesn't look remotely like LEA2, as it doesn't seem to have much (if anything) to of with the running of schools.

It could do a great deal if good if it is going to help in the provision of more (sorely needed) school places in the places where they are needed, not just the first site a particular borough comes up with within its own boundaries. Even more important to extend this to Free Schools, I'd have thought.

It's been abolished for those applying now for 2013 if you mean the same thing. It was an old policy, unchanged since 1993 when the Greenwich ruling meant that LAs had to admit children from other boroughs but most schools were located close to boundaries. The (mainly) LibDem council just never got rid of it but it was way out of date. Two schools in the borough were so oversubscribed, no one got in just on distance without a link, but there were feeder primaries in Hounslow and Kingston while some Richmond children living closer didn't have a chance as not all primaries had links or had lost them.

... not all Richmond primaries had links I mean.

Yes, I do agree. Kingston council was as bad as Richmond because it has been planning a big school near the borough boundary while playing down the links it did have with two Richmond schools. It didn't get the funding but now there's fairer access to other nearby schools, although there may still be a shortage of places further away. It's irritating to see how local politicians bend the arguments but local papers play into that too so parents get a filtered view. We need local accountability but definitely London-wide coordination.

But once the majority of schools in a borough are academies or free schools, faith, endowment or grammar, the LEA has no say at all. All those categories of schools can set their own admission criteria and processes. Southwark does not have a single community secondary under it's control!

But that must increasingly be the case nationwide as more schools become Academies.