ABSTRACT
Writing in 1927, a quarter of a century after the creation of the Board of Education (the first statutory central government education ministry) and local education authorities (LEAs), Sir Amherst Selby-Bigge, the Board’s recently-retired second permanent secretary, described the administration of the national education system as one of ‘active and constructive partnership between the Central and Local Authorities’.2 Over 50 years later, a former permanent secretary of the Department of Education and Science (DES), Sir William Pile, could describe it in almost identical terms: ‘the education service … is operated as a partnership between the central authority and the LEAs’.3 How were responsibilities shared between these ‘partners’? Essentially, central government determined national policy, while the local authorities ran the schools. Twenty-one years later, the situation is very different.
