Schools accused of wasting £1bn every year | Education | The Guardian .

Billions of pounds pumped into schools by Labour have remained unspent or been wasted on expensive contracts, according to the spending watchdog which accuses ministers of failing to hold headteachers to account for their expenditure.

The Audit Commission report, published tomorrow, concludes schools are wasting nearly £1bn of public money every year by "hoarding" it in bank accounts and failing to shop around for the best deals on meals, equipment and cleaning. The intervention will add pressure on the government over its spending plans and decision to delay its long-term spending commitments in the comprehensive spending review until after the general election.

The Audit Commission has got this one wrong.

When you devolve responsibility for schools and say they have to manage more than 90% of their budgets including repairs they have to save for big bills.

And when you ask people who are trained as teachers to run repairs budgets, health and safety policies, employment issues, and a myriad of other issues for which they have little training, and at most the experience of getting in a home decorator, then of course they'll make mistakes.

The reality is education policy has to be devolved locally: that's where teachers have the expertise to make a real difference by reacting to local need. But that has not happened. Education policy has been centralised.

And the reality is that there is no gain at all from devolving central services such as property maintenance to headteachers - who should be considering education issues.

The whole model of decentralisation is wrong because neither Labour or the Tories before them trust people to exercise professional judgement - at most they trust them to run a budget for which they have no training.

The saving from bringing back central management of school admin and devolving education policy to schools would be enormous, but I can't see the education white paper delivering it. So the mis-management will continue.

There's a big win in here for the party with the courage to pick this up. And do it in the NHS too.