a Special Educational Needs:

• ensuring that individual children’s needs are quickly and accurately identified and matched by appropriate provision: this can in many cases be secured by delegating the necessary funding to the school taking the child, but some children with specific learning needs, emotional needs and more complex needs require support from specialist teachers and other professionals;
• running high quality Education Psychology and support teaching services, linking with social and health services and planning – often across Authorities – the use of scarce resources so that individual children can benefit from co-ordinated provision through their school;
• developing close inter-Agency partnerships with health and social services, to ensure that children with complex medical, emotional and behavioural needs and their families enjoy a co-ordinated service focused on their needs;

b Access and school transport:

• making sure there are enough school and pre-school places;
• securing fair school admissions policies, often through the use of Admissions Forums;
• enforcing school attendance;
• managing major spending on school buildings, in accordance with their Asset Management Plan; and co-ordinating the provision of networked information and communications technology across schools;
• arranging suitable transport for children who need it, especially in rural areas, to support parental choice: transport is best organised centrally to secure economies of scale, to maximise ’buying power’ and ensure an integrated local transport service. It would be hard to fund by formula for needs which necessarily change each academic year; and schools are not equipped to deal with the complexities of transport legislation, nor should they be diverted from their key education tasks by attempting this;

c School Improvement and tackling failure:

• monitoring the performance of all schools, and ensuring they have the necessary information to set and meet demanding targets for all groups of pupils, including those from ethnic and cultural minorities. In the case of successful schools, monitoring can be done largely through tracking performance and other information;
• focusing their school improvement services on schools which need challenge and further support to secure improvement – those which are under-achieving, low performing, have serious weaknesses or are in special measures – and intervening decisively where a school is failing its pupils;
• drawing together Education Authority and school targets and the Authority’s contribution to meeting them in an Education Development Plan;

d Educating excluded pupils and pupil welfare:

• ensuring that suitable education is provided for excluded pupils, in a pupil referral unit or otherwise;
• providing education otherwise than at school for children who are unable to attend – for example, because of illness;
• ensuring that those children, and excluded pupils, return to school when ready to do so;
• ensuring suitable provision for pupils with behavioural difficulties, including providing advice and resources to schools, where appropriate through pupil referral units;
• producing a behaviour support plan which sets out clearly what will be done for children with behavioural difficulties; and

e: if an Education Authority – or a Local Authority – is to continue to provide the above services, it will need a degree of strategic management and local accountability. While the Government believes that many Authorities have spent too much on administration and wishes to reduce that spending, it would be foolish to pretend that these services can be provided without some strategic management, by which we mean the capacity to develop policy, set priorities, allocate resources and draw up plans for delivery in relation to the Authority’s central functions. The Authority has a role also in:

• ensuring provision of factual information and advice (including on health and safety) to schools and that school governors are provided with the information and training they need to do their job effectively; and supporting parent governor representatives in their task of representing the views of parents on Education Authority committees dealing with education matters;
• auditing school spending (although we are considering with increased delegation the extent to which routine financial audit might become a school responsibility in future); and
• allocating spending to schools locally, taking account of the overall funding made available by the Government and the National Fair Funding rules governing the distribution of funds between schools. They can also help schools to pool their finances by recycling school balances.