Like many other places around the country, in Birmingham, an organisation has emerged that is endeavouring to hold all its schools together with some kind of coherence as a successor to vanishing local authorities.

The Birmingham Education Partnership (BEP) has 360 schools as paid-up members and a key contract with Birmingham City Council for school improvement; the course of its development has, however, been unusual.

In 2013, a significant proportion of Birmingham heads took the decision to form BEP, in an attempt to counter the atomisation of the city’s schools. With seriously failing children’s services determining the focus for city leaders, education had become the poor relation.

In the ensuing vacuum, individual school leaders forming their own power bases and the so-called “Trojan Horse affair” meant there were some big fault lines that grew across the city. Birmingham had previously been a place with a healthy tradition of collaboration contributing to some big educational success stories; now there were declining standards and isolated schools behaving in ways that exacerbated our very divided neighbourhoods, estates and communities. Behind Birmingham’s apparently dynamic, mixed city image, school and civic leaders had good reason to worry about deepening cracks that threatened community cohesion and reinforced the barriers that trap families in poverty.

Failure of courage

In summer 2014, journalists forced the Department for Education and Ofsted to engage with a set of problems that had been building for several years - problems that in many ways were the direct consequence of government policy to empower parents and diminish local authorities. The depth of the problems in Birmingham was exacerbated by the local authority’s failure to understand or to act with courage. The response resulted in a wave of strident inspections and two major reports, which in turn led to the appointment of Sir Mike Tomlinson as the city’s education commissioner.

With ongoing cases still being heard and the alleged wrongdoing still being argued about, this has not been a time of great educational insight or confidence-building and learning by school leaders. Rather, we have seen Ofsted and the DfE stretching the use of the inspection framework and giving us new Prevent duties, using all their powers to try to create simple answers to complex challenges that are not going away.

In this untidy and sometimes awkward space, one thing that Sir Mike could be sure about was that Birmingham City Council did not have a strong enough handle on its schools and that it wasn’t leading them effectively, both in terms of governance and the whole standards agenda. The newly formed BEP was therefore a convenient asset that Sir Mike discovered on his arrival. Here was a body that had set itself up to fulfil the rhetoric around a school-led system. It was committed to school improvement, committed to inviting every school to be part of the Birmingham family and it had already been given the blessing and support of the council.

Over the subsequent school year of 2014-15, BEP was developed into a charitable company that could take on responsibility for the local authority’s formal duties around schools that were causing concern.

Tough messages

Today, BEP benefits from a maturing set of governance arrangements led by (former education secretary) Estelle Morris with a capable mix of external and home-grown school improvers doing the hard work. BEP now has a growing body of evidence for its impact in some of Birmingham’s most broken schools. We deliver tough messages to schools that are underperforming and broker interventions and support with teaching schools.

At times, all of this can appear to be at odds with our initial role of being a positive membership organisation developing peer review and sharing best practice across all shades and types of schools. But balancing business acumen and moral purpose, while carrying the weight of many different expectations, is just one of the challenges facing school-led organisations.

In all this, maintaining a strong sense of place remains a common, shared enthusiasm. As Birmingham gets used to the big national chains cutting across our local arrangements with differing degrees of sensitivity or disruption, it makes sense to school leaders and to major external partners in both the public and private sectors that someone holds a vision for the whole family of Birmingham schools. The ideal is a partnership that is able to provide a coordinating point of access for those who need to do business with Birmingham schools.

The questions are who will pay, what happens about those who insist on not respecting the arrangements of a locality and how do once big, proud local authorities come to terms with their displacement?

These, of course, are national questions, and make it even clearer why the most appropriate classical myth for schools is not so much the Trojan Horse as the labours of Hercules.

Tim Boyes is chief executive of the Birmingham Education Partnership