When the Conservatives came to power they prided themselves on reducing the head count in the Government and in the public sector more widely. At the Conservative Party Conference in October 2009 David Cameron stated “We will have to tear down Labour’s big government bureaucracy, ripping up its time-wasting, money-draining, responsibility-sapping nonsense,” Five years later in June 2014 Eric Pickles was interviewed by the Telegraph and stated “Senior town hall pay was allowed to spiral out of control under the Labour Government and we have been very clear that councils need to show much greater restraint. All local authorities should be focusing resources on protecting frontline services and keeping council tax down rather than throwing away taxpayers’ money.” While David Cameron and Eric Pickles have now long since gone from the Tory front bench, there are many Tories who would claim they still believe in a small State. Yet despite this there are many questions about how truthful these claims are.

In 2012 Michael Gove announced that the Government was going to create a new role to oversee the work of Academies. The proposal to create a National Schools Commissioner and a number of Regional Schools Commissioners was argued as not being a middle tier of educational bureaucracy by Gove. In 2014 the role was finally launched and at that time the running costs for all of these new roles along with their support staff came to a shocking sum of at just over £4 million as explained in this article. This sum represents the amount of money spent on around 1000 students on Secondary Schools. This funding came from the Department for Education’s existing budget and covered July 2014 to March 2015. The following year this budget was extended slightly to £4.7m in the financial year 2015-16. However this sum pales into insignificance to the 2016/17 year costs which were five times larger at £26.3m and the projected sum of £31.2m in the current year. That will equate to the education of around 8000 secondary students.

It seems vital that the Department for Education is held to account for its failure to control this budget and for sending out such a negative message to Schools and local authorities.

In the absence of David Cameron and Eric Pickles, who will do this?

These names are the MPs who are the members of the Education Committee – let us hope some of them are prepared to take Justine Greening to task for what appears to be an out of control form of big government bureaucracy.