The third anniversary of the 1992 general election now approaches. There is no education Bill this parliamentary session and none planned for next. It seems that the consolidation successive Secretaries of State have promised may at last be available. But the best efforts of Sir Ron Dearing to repair Baker’s curriculum, and Mrs Shephard’s undoubted skill at pouring oil on the choppy wake of her predecessor, may not be enough to deliver the desired stability. The world of education remains volatile and unstable.

Grant-maintained status is, of course, a major political battleground. However, the introduction of local management of schools has had the greater impact on the education service as a whole. The National Commission recognised a key point when it said: “The benefits of greater autonomy made possible by grant-maintained status are in principle available under LMS.”

Much play has been made of the abolition, or not, of grant maintained status if there is a change of government. Promoters of the sector have tried to argue that it will be practically or politically difficult for a future Labour government to abolish more than a thousand GM schools. This view tends to gloss over the rather important point that it is not the schools themselves, merely their special privileges, that would be abolished, but technically there is no problem at all. In fact it is arguable that further legislation will be necessary if only to resolve the wasteful duplication and inherent instability that is built into current arrangements; and the question is not whether, but when and how.

One way or another the issue of opting-out will eventually go away. If GM status is not explicitly abolished after a change of government, or made compulsory after the re-election of the present one, the convergence between powers and funding that is already evident will quite rapidly mean that the distinction between GM and non-GM will be no more significant than that between county and voluntary schools. The end result can therefore confidently be predicted but the process by which it arrives is still to be determined. The choice of funding mechanism is perhaps the most important factor.

Until 1994 the LEA funding formula was the basis for resourcing all schools. GM schools got more but all budgets were calculated from the LMS baseline. The advent of the common funding formula sought to change that. Despite brave assertions as to the success of the pilot, the CFF has been problematical.

(i) Standard spending assessments (SSA) have proved inadequate to distinguish between historic spending differentials based on policy as well as differing needs.

(ii) The need to identify that part of the SSA which can properly be attributed to schools reveals indirectly the Government’s view of what the LEA should be spending on everything else - and is susceptible to challenge.

(iii) Continual methodology changes complicate transitional arrangements. With ministerial insistence that no GM school should lose out, the result is an elaborate system of cash protection which was justifiably criticised by the Education Select Committee for its impenetrable complexity.

The central dilemma of the DFE however has been to reconcile a common approach with local variations. To avoid turbulence and anomalous funding shifts it has been compelled to include LEA specific elements at all stages of the process. The five first-round pilots differed significantly in order to achieve a distribution of funds to schools similar to that produced by LMS.

Despite the falling away of interest in GM status, DFE ministers have decided to push ahead with extension of the pilot into 1995-96, adding a further 17 authorities. The Choice and Diversity White Paper said that the CFF was designed to take over from LEA LMS schemes when there were too few LEA-maintained schools to provide a sound platform upon which GM funding could be built. But authorities with as few as 30 per cent of the secondary population in GM schools have now been included, demonstrating that this justification has been abandoned. Is there another agenda? In a 1994 speech to the heads of grant-maintained schools, the Secretary of State said that she was “wholly sympathetic to the principle of greater standardisation in GM funding over time”, but that she did not “regard a national funding formula as a viable option for the immediate future”. This seems to point to a long-term project to replace local discretion by wholly centralised funding unconnected with the pace of opting out.

The most contentious aspect of the second tranche CFF pilot has been the so-called “top-slice” in respect of LEA continuing responsibilities, because it most sharply highlights the crucial constitutional issue. There is some merit in the proposition that all schools should be funded according to a common assessment of need. But for central government to determine the amount an LEA will spend on its own direct responsibilities - both obligations and discretionary powers - strikes at the heart of local democracy.

The Department of the Environment, the ministry responsible for the standard spending assessment system, is less than happy about the CFF. The Environment Select Committee noted DFE’s use of SSA in the CFF to determine what “should” be spent on schools. This conflicted with the statement by the Environment Minister, David Curry, who “made it absolutely clear that although the SSAs are calculated by reference to service-based control totals, the SSAs for individual local authorities are not meant to be hypothecated - and the individual elements are not intended to be used as spending targets for individual services or service blocks”. In one recommendation, the committee warned that the CFF would put “added pressure” on an SSA system that was already under considerable strain.

How can local government respond to the legitimate needs of its electorate when not only the total amount it can spend but the detail of how that expenditure is deployed is dictated by central government? One thing is certain, the current dual system is inherently unstable and inefficient. In so far as it produces the same results for GM as for local authority schools, public money is being wasted on separate delivery mechanisms for achieving the same ends. However, if the actual level of resource is different in each sector, then one must inevitably be better and the other worse-off. This lack of equity must plainly be seen as unfair, creating a first class and a second class within the publicly funded service. When this is fully understood, it must be widely condemned and deeply resented by the parents of children being educated in the less well-funded sector. Inevitably, therefore, funding mechanisms must sooner or later be rationalised. A sensible, fair and robust mechanism for resourcing all self-managed schools will be vital. At the point when central government decides to take this step, it will need to make a choice between a national and local solution - in practice that will mean developing national funding from the CFF base or pursuing a local solution derived from LMS.

So far CFF has been a fraught and problematic experiment, while LMS has arguably been the major success story of the last decade. It is for this reason that the Association of Metropolitan Authorities sees the consolidation and improvement of LMS as central to encouraging the positive development of the education service.

There is a crucial role for the LEA as the custodian of LMS schemes, and the basic framework of the 1988 Act is largely adequate. There is, however, scope for some improvement. The starting point must be raising quality and achievement, with a balance between support and accountability in relationships between schools and the community.

AMA believes central government should prescribe basic parameters and requirements for local management. LEAs should devise detailed management schemes which meet local needs and are appropriate for their area. As now, these would be subject to full consultation and approval by the Secretary of State; but the role of the Secretary of State in granting approval should be to ensure that the LEA has acted reasonably, and not to prescribe the detail of schemes. The most important message is that LMS must focus on the creative partnership between the LEA, governors and professional educators and be a vehicle for improving the quality of public education.

Alan Parker is AMA education officer and writes here in a personal capacity. The interim report of the AMA working party, “Reviewing Local Management of Schools”, was published in November 1994 and is currently out for consultation. The association intends to produce a final policy in the summer.