LMS

abbreviation (People and Society) Short for local management of schools, a system set up by the Education Reform Act of 1988, providing for a large proportion of the financial and administrative management of state schools in the UK to become the responsibility of the governors and head teacher respectively. Etymology: The initial letters of Local Management of Schools. History and Usage: The Act set out the two basic principles of applying formula funding to all primary and secondary schools, based on the need to spend, and of handing over budgetary control to the governors of schools over a certain size; funding was to be linked to pupil numbers, giving schools an incentive to attract and retain pupils. It did not, however, introduce the terms local management of schools or LMS--these terms came in a Coopers & Lybrand report on the scheme, published in January 1988: The changes require a new culture and philosophy of the organisation of education at the school level. They are more than purely financial; they need a general shift in management. We use the term 'Local Management of Schools' (LMS). From here the phrase was taken up in a Department of Education and Science circular, and soon became institutionalized. The idea had its origins in an experiment carried out in a village school in Cambridgeshire in the early eighties; at that time the scheme was known as Local Financial Management (LFM). The main consequence of LMS itself was that, for the first time, many schools' budgets would be controlled by the governors, who would also become the employer of all the school staff. The role of the head teacher centred on the day-to-day management of the school. Each Local Education Authority had to devise and submit its own scheme for approval; most had done this by 1991, but the Inner London schemes were left for approval and implementation later. The key to future waves of opting out...lies in the Act's provisions for local management of schools (LMS)...Heads and governors operating LMS will control 90 per cent of their budgets, increase their funds on the basis of the number of pupils they attract and have power to hire and fire staff. Daily Telegraph 23 Feb. 1989, p. 15