ABSTRACT
Governing bodies do not have a free hand in their direction of schools. Even in grant maintained schools, they have the support, and the constraints, of local education authorities.
A Brief History of the Local Education Authority
Local education authorities are powerful creatures but nowhere near as powerful as they once were. In order to understand where the present day animals are coming from, and what baggage they carry with them, we need to understand something of their history. The modern structure of local government was created in 1888, but education was still provided by the directly elected School Boards until 1903 (see p. 13). When the decision was made to subsume education provision into the 15-year-old structures, it probably could not be foreseen that this cuckoo would eventually take up 80 per cent of the nest. How democratic the new structure was, and is, is open to question. Voting figures in local elections hover somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent of the electorate. Local government was an irredeemably middle-class pastime. In 1900 in one rural county, more than 25 per cent of the county councillors described themselves only by their rank, and over 30 per cent were farmers. All were men. Probably no more than 12 per cent could describe themselves as ‘working men’.
