Government Promises Local MP to Cut School Bureaucracy

10.32.10am GMT Tue 1st Jul 2003

Vincent Cable MP with Whitton School Students

The schools minister, David Miliband, has promised MP Vincent Cable a drastic cut in the bureaucracy required to obtain 'specialist school' status.

Several local secondary schools have obtained such status (Whitton for Sports; Orleans for maths and IT) but others have been refused (Teddington; Hampton CC) despite spending an enormous amount of staff time on applications.

Vincent Cable said: "I gather that local schools, which are often

desperately short staffed, are having to set aside a vast amount of senior staff time to fill in 250 page applications as well as raising money for local businesses. Yet they may have nothing to show for it".

"To give the schools minister some credit, he freely admitted that the situation was unsatisfactory and has cut the application form from 250 pages to 50. But the whole episode illustrates the extent of mindless red tape and bureaucracy which is suffocating schools as it is business".