ABSTRACT
A county paper ‘After the 1988 Act-The Role and Work of the LEA’, circulated in January 1989, seemed to indicate a wish on the part of Cambridgeshire heads that the LEA should take a lead in formulating an educational vision and policy:
However, by 1992 that call for leadership seemed no longer so relevant to a third of the county’s schools which had sought, or were seeking, to opt out of local-authority control. The picture today is as follows:
This state of affairs took many of Cambridgeshire’s actors and onlookers very much by surprise, for the county, with its history of innovative village colleges, had been leading the way again in the 1980s and 1990s in its support of the self-managing school. No county, it seemed, could have done more to minimize bureaucratic control of schools and to encourage their independence within a local-authority context. John Ferguson, director of Cambridgeshire LEA, reflected on the situation in his address to a group of educationalists, the All Souls Group, in Oxford thus:
There is no doubt that John Ferguson was right in identifying two crucial factors in the reasons for the secession: the low SSA (Standard Spending Assessment) and a sense of history hurrying on after the election of April 1992 very much coloured the mood of many of the county’s schools in that year. However, at the root of the problem was a more profound social crisis, I would argue, and that was, and is, a crisis of culture in a world in which we can no longer assume common vocabularies and corporate ethical purposes. We have moved into an age in which traditional assumptions and authority are breaking down and we need new vocabularies to replace them. We have traded too long on what Nietzsche calls ‘the inherited capital of morality which our forefathers accumulated, and which we squander instead of increasing’ (Nietzsche, 1965, p. 11).
