Dr Ann Limb CBE DL is Chair of South East Midlands Local Enterprise Partnership and a leadership coach and mentor
This is the time for local government to embrace its role in helping raise educational attainment levels across schools and in ensuring skills gaps in local communities are identified and met.
Local leadership needed on skills Councils are the country’s pivotal and respected ‘leaders of place’. Working together with businesses and community organisations, through combined authorities and local enterprise partnerships (LEPs), they play a critical role in making sure the children and young people they represent receive an educational experience that develops the whole person. Every local area needs all its citizens to possess the skills, resilience, confidence, adaptability, creativity, and courage to navigate a complex, interconnected, fastmoving world, in which everyone has as much personal choice as possible over their lives and careers. Even in a post-Brexit world of rising demand for services combined with continued cutbacks in public resources, there are exciting opportunities for elected members to continue to transform public service delivery through the creation of new relationships, the revision of business models, and the development of different ways of working with local partners. National government has put in place four key policy drivers which local authorities can deploy according to their local situation and needs. These are the: repositioning of further education (see p8); reform of professional and technical education through apprenticeships and the Sainsbury Review; reorganisation of local government; and reorientation of the machinery of government following Brexit. Councils have an opportunity to take the lead in harnessing the energies and ideas of key players – businesses, LEPs, skills providers, the October 2016
“There are exciting opportunities for elected members to transform public service delivery through the creation of new relationships and the revision of business models” third sector and all other stakeholders including local MPs and ‘alumni’ – in determining a collective and practicable response to policy changes. Leaders of place are the people to bring their whole community together to agree the best way for their local area to take advantage of these levers for change. I’m currently the voluntary, independent Chair of the Doncaster Commission on Education and Skills, set up on behalf of the local strategic partnership, Team Doncaster, by the elected mayor and chief executive of Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council. The commission’s role is to help the borough create a clear and focused strategic vision for education, skills and the local economy so that the town can flourish now and in the future.
Coordinating ideas As part of our work, the commission has been encouraged by the amount of goodwill, energy, interest, commitment and good practice that exists across the largest metropolitan borough in England. Equally, we were struck by what a local head teacher told us early on in our enquiry – that “there’s a lack of infrastructure for coordination” of
ideas and practice across the borough. This is hardly surprising given the fragmentation of the education and skills system, but it is something that can be tackled through effective local authority leadership – something Doncaster has demonstrated it is open to developing, by establishing the commission. The commission’s report is due out on 21 October. This is a time for local authorities to push ahead with reform. Transformation is about building trust, managing ego needs, working collaboratively, working across political and executive boundaries, taking calculated risks, campaigning to bring all citizens on side, taking advice from independent voices, learning from best practice across this country and internationally, and above all ‘being human’. It takes time to create a functioning local authority-wide partnership in which each constituent part is committed to developing, delivering and monitoring a pan-community change programme. But it can and must be done if our councils are to fulfil their civic duties in 21st century Britain.
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