School governance reform: what does it all mean?

[Arkadia]

I have just read this:

Scottish school governance shake-up to be announced - www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-40275330

But except from the obvious (no grammars :( ) I am not sure I understand what the goal is.

Translators into English may apply ;)

I think (but happy to be corrected) that the idea is to take some control away from LAs and to encourage decisions to be made by individual HTs.
I would imagine that at the moment some Las have more involvement in their schools than others.
I think is to reduce meddling by Education Depths who are further removed from the classroom and leave school decisions to the school community.
However all this will apoarently be managed at regional level with different council areas encouraged to collaborate presumably with a view to potentially reducing the achievement gap which currently exists between different council areas.
The cynic in me however wonders if these regional boards (whoever they are and however they will be appointed) will be sympathetic to the beliefs of the current Scottish Got and not necessarily be represented by cross party individuals as they may be within an individual local authority group. How much influence will they have on the curriculum in practice. I hope I'm proved wrong but I have niggling doubts as to what this is really about.

Reading that article I just couldn't work out what it would mean for ME and MY school. Just not a clue (and I must say I am not that much clearer now either :D )

And here is the update:

'Sweeping' new powers for Scottish head teachers - www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-40275330

With the exception of funding about which I know nothing, I thought my school was already doing all that.

Hmm, the cynic in me says that it's mainly about shifting of responsibility so that the SNP can just claim not to be responsible for declining standards - they can simply point the finger elsewhere.

But not sweeping enough - there's a school near me which has been campaigning to opt out of Local Authority control and to be funded directly by government instead (like the Academies in England) and the SNP are dead against it.

it's typical wishy washy stuff which teams of civil servants will have been paid a fortune to put together and which makes no difference at all. This isn't just something the SNP do, they are all as bad as each other with this sort of thing.

Parliamo italiano?

nah, just "Bella Bella".

Like all nationalist governments the snp wants to centralise control - bringing school governance closer to central govt and away from local govt. We have seen it with the police - a disaster - and these proposals likely to go the same way. Rather than wasting time and resources on this they should focus on the 3rs where there has been a decline in last 10 years under snp watch.

Whoops... Got mixed up. It is too late obviously ;)
So... As I was saying... Does it make any difference where the money comes from?

Had a quick look at the comments section in the BBC article, and it looks to me that nobody really understands what that announcement means (mind you, I went through only the last 100 comments).

The problem with central control is that those making decisions are far removed from the reality on the ground.

Central control is nanny state at its best!

To the cynic in me, I interpreted the fact that HTs are going to have responsibility for closing the attainment gap etc as the SNP absolving themselves from being responsible for failings and HTs getting the blame for everything that goes wrong

I thought it was desirable for head teachers to have more control over their curriculum and money etc?

Not at the expense of actually running a school. More time spent wrangling with money (and HTs are not accountants), dealing with bureaucratic nonsense = less time actually interacting with children and staff.

Was this in the snp manifesto?

Will this be voted on in Holyrood?

This thread on twitter is worth reading.

He's a nat, but is very scathing about the SG's governance reform. It seems in typical SNP style they ignore the experts and just bulldozer ahead with changes that will do nothing to improve education.

Interesting, but I am 62 (!!) tweets to go.
Couldn't he have written an article for any old site so i could have read it in one go?

Twitter is not the best medium for it I agree!! He quite often writes for commonspace so he might turn it into an article.

Besides, I wonder who the "practitioners" (as opposed to the "teachers") are...

I have to say, I am no clear at all what role councils should have on education... I would say none. Why would they know. Why would council involvement be synonim of public accountability escapes me...

Well, on Commonspace the guy has written this
www.commonspace.scot/articles/11042/james-mcenaney-its-not-too-late-snp-choose-right-course-education
which is fairly interesting (albeit rather complex)

This change was mooted ages ago.

It's been on the cards for a while - it's interesting but could be worrying depending what the Head Teacher is like.