Letwin to “save billions” on education bureaucracy
The Conservatives would cut £5.7 billion from the education budget while maintaining standards, according to the Shadow Chancellor, Oliver Letwin.
He believes this “fat” government needs to be thinned down by getting rid of “unnecessary layers of government bureaucracy”.
Speaking on BBC Radio Four’s ‘Today’ programme on Monday, Mr Letwin explained how his party would go about this.
“We’re proposing to reduce the number of officials in the Department for Education and Skills by 2,700 which gets rid of roughly speaking two-thirds of that,” he said.
“We’re proposing to re-focus the inspection regime so that it’s much more focused on those schools that are failing and doesn’t give notice of its inspections but has a lighter regime for those schools that aren’t failing and that gets about 10 per cent reduction in the number of Ofsted inspectors, another 800 officials disappear.
“Then we have seven funds and quangos which between them employ around 850 people; another £170 million a year of savings in thinning down government. Things like the National College for School Leadership which we don’t believe needs to be funded centrally anymore.”
Mr Letwin denied that this would have a negative effect on standards in education. Indeed, he suggested that it would be beneficial.
“I very strongly believe that by releasing schools to run themselves and by releasing about £1.2 billion a year currently being absorbed in local education authority bureaucracy right to the front line, letting the money from what is now going to bureaucrats go instead to schools and head teachers for them to use in educating pupils, I believe we can see a substantial rise in educational standards,” he said.
The Shadow Chancellor also echoed Conservative leader Michael Howard’s recent attack on “political correctness”, characterising it as a symptom of “fat government”.
“The fact is that at the moment fat government has gone crazy in schooling. Do you know that a head teacher has to consult 200 pages of directives before sending children on a school trip?”
