Plans to merge children’s services in Stockport and Tameside in a bid to ‘improve the life chances’ of young people have been seriously questioned.
A new report on how the two boroughs will work more closely to support children and families went before a recent Stockport council scrutiny committee.
The paper set out how the authorities will seek to ‘deliver the best possible services with diminishing budgets’, with an emphasis on collaboration and partnerships.
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But Conservative councillor Linda Holt was left unconvinced and ‘really, really worried’, by the report.
She told the meeting that, while the paper nodded to shared expertise and economies of scale it contained ‘no performance data, whatsoever’.
“How can we know that bringing together two boroughs with different challenges will improve things and not result in thinly stretched resources ,not meeting the individual needs of both boroughs’ schools,” said Coun Holt.
“These are the things that I’m really, really worried about.”
The report outlines a shared ambition to ‘develop a model of school improvement across both authorities’.
It would initially focus on early years education, and involves creating four new posts to be ‘funded half by each authority’.
This prompted further questions from Coun Holt.
“How many childminder and early years settings are there across both the authorities? Are we going to spread too thinly?” she said.
“That’s quite a worry.”
Addressing Tim Bowman, joint director of education, she added: “You talk about paying for half. Is that going to result in half a service?”
“Do we know that Tameside and Stockport are performing well in service areas now - and is there any evidence of the benefit of sharing this best practice?
“It says there are capacity and resource challenges.What exactly are these capacity and resource challenges?”
Mr Bowman told the committee that a ‘squeeze’ on school budgets meant bosses ‘do not have all the resources we would like to meet the challenges we have got’.
And he said a ‘further squeeze on local authority finances’ - Stockport has to close a £10m budget gap next year - was having an impact on plans to improve schools.
“Local authorities at the moment receive a grant in order to discharge their school improvement duties,” he said.
“That grant is being phased out by the government so it will be 50pc less next year and all gone the year after.
“One example of the investment that use to come into local authorities to discharge their responsibilities to schools that has been squeezed over these last few years.”
Mr Bowman added that, while there had been a big increase in the number of academy schools, town halls were still left with ‘very significant statutory responsibilities’.
He continued: “That squeeze, particularly on the resources that local authorities have, but not on the statutory responsibilities puts us in a space where we want to think about doing things differently.”
“Doing things differently is always about making sure that we can have the maximum amount of staff on the ground working directly either with schools, or children and families to impact on improvements.”
Mr Bowman also assured Coun Holt that data from both Tameside and Stockport would be included in future updates to the committee.
Stockport council’s children and families scrutiny committee met on Wednesday night (January 19).
