Gordon Brown: I will end ‘take it or leave it’ public services

More than 1,000 mediocre or failing secondary schools will be taken over to drive up standards, Gordon Brown promises today ahead of a manifesto launch centred on a pledge to end “take it or leave it” services in education, the NHS and police.

On the eve of a launch that is critical to persuading a wavering electorate that he has the energy and ideas for a fourth term, Brown claims in a Guardian interview that his goal is to bring reform right into the mainstream of public services.

He promises that inadequate schools, hospital authorities and police forces will all be subject to forms of takeover if either objective results or parental ballots demand new leadership. In education this could mean being taken over by successful state or private schools, education chains, or universities.

“The days of take it or leave it public services are over,” Brown says. “The days of just minimum standards are over. The days of the impersonal are finished. It has to be personal, accountable and tailored to your needs, and with a mechanism to trigger change if the service does not meet your needs.”
He says the aim is to unleash the highest quality providers, whether public or private, so that they can meet needs, not just in their local areas, but to turn around performance in other areas too.

He also admits it may take “until the last week” of the campaign for the electorate to recognise the scale of the choices facing the nation, and so give him the mandate he needs to deliver change.

Brown promises the manifesto will be business-friendly, realistic about future public resources, and address disillusionment with politics. “We are putting forward a bold, but realistic programme of reform. It is not an expensive shopping list, spraying promises as the Tories have been doing, it’s a manifesto of substance.”

Brown also defends his decision to focus relentlessly on Tory economic plans in the first week of the campaign, especially the pledge to make a £6bn public spending cut this year: “This is central. There is no country in the world I know – France, Germany, the US, Japan – that is pulling money out of the economy at the moment.”

In what is seen as a centrepiece of Labour’s public service reforms, the manifesto promises a big expansion in the use of takeovers and school mergers to help drive up standards. Brown said: “In total over the next parliament we will have created 1,000 federated schools, and 400 city academies.”

Labour said it expected to accredit as many as 500 school institutions to run federations by 2015, including large education providers such as the Harris chain of academies, maintained schools and further education colleges, as well as independent schools such as Wellington College. Schools taken over by academies will have freedoms from local authorities and the national curriculum, Brown’s office said, and would be run on a not-for- profit basis.

A federation or chain will be able to run as many as 12 schools. Labour says the target of 1,000 federated schools in England is realistic by 2015, an outcome that would affect nearly a third of all secondary schools.

Brown promises the government will stick to its target of doubling the number of city academies to 400 by the end of the parliament, with at least 100 of these federating with another school.

Schools will become part of a chain through three alternative routes:
• If sufficient parents demand the local authority hold a schoolwide ballot to reveal support for a new provider.

• If a local authority believes new management is needed to improve a coasting school, or published surveys of parents seeking to place their child in a local secondary school say the quality on offer is inadequate.

• If the school itself sees benefits in being part of a chain, including being able to offer a wider curriculum, access to specialist facilities or simple economies of scale.

The federation model will also be used in primary schools, Brown says, but the bulk of the changes will come in secondary schools. He adds: “This is working on a new model of voice and choice – parent voice, parent power and parents being able to change the management of the school. What used to be a public service becomes a personal service.”

He also claims Labour has built a generation of public service leaders capable of running difficult schools, and sharing their leadership skills with other schools. He told the Guardian that his plan was better than the Conservative proposal to introduce a wave of new schools built on the Swedish model, since the Tory system required a costly surfeit of places. He said: “The Swedish free market school experiment has not been successful. The evidence of the Swedish equivalent of Ofsted is that it has led to lower standards and growing inequalities.”

The federated schools plan was endorsed yesterday by David Carter, executive principal of the Cabot Learning Federation in Bristol. He said: “In almost every other profession experts learn from each other and share ideas yet until recently this was almost untried in education.”

Brown also reveals Labour’s manifesto will tighten the rules on company takeovers, saying he wants to address people buying shares at the last minute to influence a takeover, and what the vote should be for that takeover to be allowed.

The issue has been highlighted by the US firm Kraft taking over Cadbury, but he says: “The issue is not British control. The issue is good management and the best way forward for the company. Sometimes people pile in on a takeover in a way that is not necessarily in the public interest.”

Brown says the first era of Labour’s public service reform was dominated by investment and the second focused on helping failing services through academies and foundation hospitals. Now the aim is to spread reform through every public service.

He also insisted he was addressing the issue of immigration, which Labour expects to feature prominently in the first televised debate on Thursday. “As we train more people up to take the jobs that are available then the need for skilled or semi skilled migration is lessened. The biggest group of people coming into our country at the moment is British people returning to our country.”