Tameside councillors have voted to leave a partnership with Stockport and end a system of sharing a single education chief amid falling grades. The executive cabinet agreed in March last year to explore a ‘trial partnership’ of having just one director of education operating across both boroughs.
It was proposed that the shared position would support the ‘exploration’ of how things could be done differently in education services ‘with less money’. The officer was Tim Bowman, who is employed in the senior management team at Tameside council.
The arrangement had sparked consternation in Stockport last year, with councillors in that borough claiming they had been kept in the dark about plans to share an education chief. However the Tameside authority has now decided to leave the partnership from January due to the ‘significant demand and extra pressure on the council to reform and improve systems for children’.
Since the shared system was introduced Ofsted has inspected Tameside’s services for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and found ‘significant areas of weakness’.
The watchdog also carried out a focused visit to parts of the children’s services department in April which reported that some parts of the services had ‘deteriorated’.
And statistics from the council’s ‘scorecard’ show that children have performed less well in school, with the percentage of pupils in Key Stage Two meeting the expected standard in reading, writing and maths falling from 63 pc in 2019 to 57 pc this year.
The percentage of pupils achieving a passing grade in their English and maths GCSEs was also down nearly 5pc since 2019 to 64.9pc.
Officers say that Tameside no longer has the ‘capacity’ to share services beyond 2022, with the exception of the early years service.
“Since the agreement was taken to share the director of education role, Tameside in comparison to Stockport is embarking on a significant journey to improve, including having a formal Improvement Notice from DfE (Department for Education), significant improvements in SEND Written Statement of Action and formal monitoring response plus a need to remodel our Social Care and Early Family Help service in to localities,” the report to cabinet states.
Director of children’s services Ali Stathers-Tracey said: “In terms of the reason why we are reviewing this partnership with Stockport is about that commitment from the council to make sure we are focusing all available resources to improve opportunities and outcomes for children and it does relate to some of the performance issues spoken about in respect of the scorecard and some of the educational performance.
“We need to be making sure that our schools are supported and challenged to greatest effect, so hence we need all the dedicated resource that we can for children here in Tameside.”
The decision means that the earlier commitment to explore further models of shared services across education care is ‘no longer appropriate or deliverable’ as leaders need to focus on Tameside’s ‘improvement agenda’.
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