Academics call for return of ILEA

London's education system should be replaced by a modern-day version of the disbanded Inner London Education Authority, according to a group of academics.

The authority - whose colourful initiatives in the Eighties included raising awareness about gay lifestyles with a children's book and branding Rupert Bear "racist" - should be reborn as a schools body with pan-London responsibility, they said.

The academics, led by Professor Tim Brighouse, the first London Schools Commissioner, said hundreds of thousands of children could suffer unless a London-wide authority took responsibility for "strategic issues of concern".

Transferring powers currently held by London's boroughs and the City Corporation to Mayor Ken Livingstone and the London Assembly would be the "logical solution", said Leisha Fullick, one of the co-authors of Education In A Global City, to be published tomorrow.

Professor Brighouse said: "Decisions on strategic issues of concern to the future of education are not being addressed because no one body has the remit to take this overview. There is an argument for a voice for London on issues of common concern to all the London local authorities - for instance teacher supply, their professional development, school improvement services and issues that impact on the wider context of education."

Professor Brighouse warned that London's complex system of faith schools, academies, specialist secondary schools and ordinary comprehensives was about to get more confusing, with the introduction of a new admissions code next year. Many children already crossed borough boundaries to go to school, he said.

This pattern was likely to become more intricate with the introduction next year of job-related diplomas, which will depend on collaboration between schools, further education colleges and commercial training centres.

A pan-London authority, which would go beyond the scope of the ILEA's 12 inner boroughs plus the City, could pool expertise to keep track of such developments, while ensuring there were enough school places, he added.

Professor Brighouse admitted any suggestion of reviving the ILEA would be controversial. He said: "For some, the ILEA represented the worst of Left wing and progressive tendencies in education: inefficient, and with low standards. For others, it represented a golden age in approaches to urban education, with a strong identity and commitment to education in the inner city, to social justice - for example in its banding of admissions so that pupils were more equitably distributed among schools - and to collaboration."

The ILEA was abolished in 1990 under Margaret Thatcher's government. In the Eighties it was pilloried for a series of "loony Left" interventions - including encouraging teachers to use a textbook called Jenny Lives With Eric And Martin, about a girl whose father has a male lover, which triggered accusations it was promoting gay lifestyles. The row led to the passing of the Clause 28 legislation banning the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities.

A HISTORY OF PROPAGANDA

Jenny Lives With Eric And Martin - The book showed a five-year-old girl sitting on a bed with two men under the covers. It described how a Jenny lived with her father and his male lover. The ILEA made the book available at its Teachers' Resource Centre. This was seen as an attempt to promote gay lifestyles to pupils.

Rupert Bear is a racist - In 1985, an ILEA advisory group said: "Many of the books read by children for pleasure at home are racist." Examples it gave included a Rupert Bear annual.

Wendy Houses renamed "Home Corners" - Proposed because the term Wendy House was seen as sexist.

Threat to withhold a grant from "militaristic" Scouts - In 1982, the ILEA threatened to stop a £62,000 subsidy to the Scouts Association because it objected to the "drilling" of boys in parades. It later launched an inquiry to see if the Scouts were homophobic after Scout Commissioner Alan Smith refused to countenance gay scout leaders, saying it would not "be right to expose young people to that sort of thing".

Anti-police propaganda - Also in 1982, young black lawyer Paul Boateng angered Tories after writing in a book financed by the ILEA: "Black youth see the police of Babylon as a force that they have to reckon with, a force which is opposed to them and which will seek to do them down at every opportunity." He was later made a Cabinet minister under Labour.