One of the great paradoxes of public service reform is that when politicians say (and often think) they are handing power away, they end up centralising more of it. The NHS reforms were trumpeted as pushing power down to GPs and patients, but ask most people in the system and they will tell you that the centre in the form of NHS England is now more powerful than ever. Similarly with schools: Michael Gove heralded his academies and free schools reforms as a triumph for local institutional autonomy and removing the dead hand of the state control. And yet because of his determination to remove local authorities from any meaningful role in schools, Gove has ended up creating a Napoleonic system in which half of all England’s secondary schools are directly accountable to the Secretary of State.
This problem has been described as the so-called “missing middle“, with too much power held in the centre without any kind of mediating local tier between schools and the government. This has led to three problems. First there has been poor place planning because local authorities have no powers to force academies to expand where there is demand, and because free schools have been opened up in areas where there is already a surplus of places. Academies can also open sixth forms without reference to wider local needs.
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