to think Camila Batmanghelidjh must be lying when she says she has done nothing wrong in her spending of Kid's Company Charity Funding?

[LuluJakey1]

She is like Jimmy Saville in that what she has been doing has been under all of all our noses and we have refused to speak up about it or believe it.

It is not just the luvvies who have been up close and personal with her- involved with the charity and CB at a very close level, some even Trustees. It is also the employees and the parents of children, the children themselves, the volunteers. We are not talking about a hidden mis-use of funding. We are talking aout a whole culture of open waste and self-indulgence.

I know it is from The Daily Mail but it is actually an interview with het.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3199527/My-heart-clear-says-Kids-Company-boss-Batmanghelidjh-admits-charity-paid-school-fees-employees-children-denies-wrongdoing.html

£5000 a month rent on an Art Deco House with private swimming pool - which houses a member of staff, and the swimming pool is used by CB but hot by any children- they are 'not allowed' (her words)

£40,000 chauffeur- now a specialist worker (according to CB). also has private school and therapist funding for his 2 children.

Staff( how many?) have their children sent to private schools because the job is stressful and it is part of a 'staff well-being package'

The Chauffeur's sister is also employed - now as a 'brilliant accountant', last summer as 'the woman who does my sewing' (mind you that would be a full-time job in itself, but it does imply the charity pays for those vile outfits much as I suspected)

25 young people given £769,000 a year funding - £31,000 a year each, to do nothing. They are CB's specially selected young people- many of whom have received funding for many years. She describes them as 'like a family, hanging round the house'. She deals with their funding herself.

Yet STILL CB complains staff should not have spoken up about any of this and implies those who have will suffer for it.

In my view this woman and her behaviours are corrupt, dishonest and immoral.

Are my views unreasonable? I feel this could be jus the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is yet to emerge and prosecutions will be very likely.

I think there should be a down- to the -bone, in-depth investigation of every aspect of the work of this charity and of CB. Not simply any concerns that have now been raised but a complete trawl of the spending, the practices and the behaviours of CB herself.

Re: the point above about 'number of clients'-

I've worked with several big name charities and it's common practice to count the number of contacts with the same client as if they were different clients.

Eg they will record that they provided support to 52 clients in a year when in fact it was the one client seen every week.

I've also seen for example, 'support delivered' recorded when clients do to turn up to meetings/sessions. In this line of work no shows are very common.

Putting together what we know now it seems that the kids co model was actually giving high levels of monetary 'support' to a very small number of clients, most of whom seem to be teenagers/young adults rather than young children.

There has been no evidence of any help being given to under 5s, unless as a by product of helping their young parent.

This is in the context of current policies/research which show that early intervention is key to helping vulnerable kids.

I'm also pretty p**d off that central government funding was given to a local charity. Local charities should be funded by their own local authorities not centrally.

I know through my involvement with another charity that they have received new clothes for children under 5. My assumption was that these children were the younger siblings of clients who were also lacking in basic parental care (CB spoke a lot about children who didn't have birth certificates & who were not registered with GPs etc).

I have come across the odd counting method with other charities, they claim they help 3000 clients a year and then it turns out someone eats there 10 meals a week...

I know several people aged 40-60 who find computers incredibly hard to use. Many can scrape by with apps on their phone, but put them in front of a keyboard and they just can't do it. Their typing is so slow and laborious that it impedes any flow of thought and the ability to navigate around a computer. It is a barrier to seeking work and makes day to day life harder now so much is done online.
BUT none of these people are graduates. They generally left school as early as they could with minimal qualifications. They have usually worked very successfully in trades such as driving, building, hairdressing, waitressing etc. Then one day they find themselves unemployed and unable to complete an online application for a job in a supermarket.
None of them have staff to do admin for them.

One feature of their programme was that they allegedly offered hot meals and homework support to school aged children.

Their largest individual donor sold her house to give them £200,000, and was told some of it was spent on the ingredients for hot meals at one centre for a few weeks.

She was not able to establish the veracity of this statement as the figures did not make sense.

So my next question is how many school aged children received hot meals provided by the charity each week? Did they attend every day or just occasionally? And how many school aged children received homework support each week? Every day or just occasionally?

Without being able to record those figures, and project forward from them, it would be impossible to provide any kind of reliable service, so somebody, somewhere must have a record.

She ran it as though it was a personal pet project - which , if you have your own money, and use that , is fine. Unfortunately, it wasn't her own money and she had duty to those who donated and those she professed to care about that she failed to fulfil through running it on 'personality' not structure and organisation and planning. Perhaps next time the Govt donate such large sums they will request 5yr history/view of a Charity's accounts and a meeting with an appointed/existing Finance Director, or, no donation.

Actually it's not fine to do it as a pet project with personal money if it screws up the social order.

Patricia Hodge would add a real hint of class of the Public Accounts Committee, and presumably has the time now Miranda has finished, but I presume is here a portmanteau of Margaret Hodge (until recently, but sadly no longer, the committee chair) and Patricia Hewitt.

Were people just afraid to expose her. Why would Ofsted ignore DFE? They are bloody quick to inspect ordinary schools. Too much risk of bad publicity if they found her provision inadequate?
She has been allowed to bypass regulation and safety .

www.express.co.uk/news/uk/597373/Officials-probing-if-Kids-Company-school-was-UNREGULATED-when-ministers-paid-out-3m?_ga=1.88898719.587591370.1440280662

I don't think Ofsted regulate charities for young people, do they? In fact apart from the Charities Commission I'm not sure who was regulating KC... A big part of the problem.

www.express.co.uk/news/uk/596502/REVEALED-True-scale-cash-black-hole-Kids-Company-closed-3m-bailout?_ga=1.59527337.587591370.1440280662

Good God! 500 full- time staff. we run a school for 800 with 110 staff in total - about 15 part-time - and a budget of less than £5 million and we are not in debt. Look at the detail of wasted money and nepotism in this article. It is immoral.

In fact apart from the Charities Commission I'm not sure who was regulating KC...

The problem is that once you get outside formal state school settings (which Ofsted have jurisdiction over as part of the funding stream from the DfE) there's no clarity of regulation. There's an independent schools inspectorate whose name escapes me, which is paid by private schools to provide some semblance of inspection, but once you get outside things that are recognisably organised as formal schools, there's no governance.

If you home educate, or two of you get together and educate both your children, or three of you get together and educate your children and a friend or two's, there's no registration, never mind inspection, and the same goes for private tutoring, private music lessons, Saturday morning football, madrassas, Sunday schools, private dyslexia consultants (unless otherwise regulated by their professional body if they have such qualifications), etc, etc, etc. Anyone can run a school, and Ofsted can't do anything about it. Any attempt to change this would provoke the ire of churches, mosques, music and drama associations, private tutors, home educators, etc, etc, etc.

So if you have a charity and can get the cost of running a school past your trustees and the Charities Commission, there's no requirement for you to be inspected or, indeed, registered. No one need know, so long as you don't awake the interest of social services or health and safety people.

If you are running an independent school (roughly translates as 15+ hours a week tuition for 5+ children) you have to be registered with the DfE and meet the same regulations as other independent schools. Ofsted have certain powers to inspect the school - or what appears to be an unregistered independent school - for the purposes of determining whether the regulations are being met. The Education Secretary can remove registration from schools who are not meeting the regulations, and it is a criminal offence to run an unregistered independent school.

I'm not sure whether what KC was running would count as a school, though?

Oh, and you still need to meet other requirements such as planning permission for use of buildings, health and safety / fire regs etc etc even if the school doesn't hit the threshold for an independent school.

Thanks for that: I didn't realise there was a formal definition of what looks like a school and therefore falls under the inspection regime.

Sazzle- KC's 2013 accounts are available online and have been linked on one of these threads. It wouldn't have taken much for a civil servant or minister to google it and if they are fit for their job they should have realised how much bollocks the whole operation was.

Irene- the point is that the DFE reported what she was doing to Ofsted in Feb 2014 and asked them to inspect the provision because they were concerned it met the criteria for a school- number of teachers and other educational staff employed, open 7 days a week and trialling a new cruuiculum for 14-16 yr olds. They prompted Ofsted agan 6 months later. No checking of the provision took place. Ofsted did nothing!

Yet if parents ring them with complaints they very quickly visit schools and are capable of destroying them.

They have recently visited a school near us - Cramlington Learning Village- which was graded as Outstanding 5 X in a row by them - the last time just 2 yrs ago. It has been a nationally known teaching school and teacher training school and they have graded it as Inadequate in everything- teaching, achievement, leadership and behaviour and safety and put it into Special Measures - just like that.

Cramlington has lost its teaching school status and teacher training provision. I hear its results this summer are no better really than last year so may be it deserves it but CB appears to be beyond any scrutiny at all. She is educating children at her provision and that education is not under any scrutiny at all- despite the DFE reporting their concern that it should be scrutinised by Ofsted 18 months ago as they felt she was runnng something that qualified as a school. Why is that the case? That is the question I would like answered.

So they can go to Cramlngton twice in two years and ignore CB and her provision despite being asked to look at it. It is another example of her getting away with something that has turned out to be a complete sham.

Thanks Lulu - I didn't know that bit of the story, about the DfE asking Ofsted to inspect KC. Actually I had thought (until looking it up just now) that Ofsted was an agency of the DfE, but apparently it's a non-ministerial department.

Ofsted only regulate educational standards, don't they - financial regulation of academies is done by the Education Funding Agency (which really is an agency of the DfE), and of maintained schools by local councils. So an Ofsted inspection of KC wouldn't necessarily have picked up on all the financial irregularity, but I suspect it would have raised enough red flags for the Charities Commission to get involved.

Charity regulation in the UK is a joke.

I mean when elitist public schools have 'charity' status the word becomes to mean nothing.

The only real scrutiny comes when you apply to funders eg big lottery. But charities like KC who avoid this model and rely on corporate/individual cash fundraising have a lot more free reign to do as they please with the money they raise. They aren't accountable to anyone.

They don't even work to targets let alone have to show that they've been met.

We need a proper system of auditing imo.

Who read that annual report? Why didn't it concern them? All of the KC board should be up in front of a select committee justifying why they allowed a 'charity' run in their name to be so badly managed.

There are too many trustees who like to use their status as a nice tick box on their cv but don't give the role the time and effort it requires.

All of their names need to be highlighted in this- not just CB's. Ultimately they employed her and she seemed to be guilty of gross misconduct in her job. Why does it feel like she acted like the boss of them?

Looking into the Urban Academy a bit more, it seems to be technically an FE college, as it provides course for 16+ year olds. It isn't an academy in the now common sense of the word - ie it isn't funded directly by the government - and would fall under the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills purview, so far as anyone looks after that particular sector. Ofsted would only have been able to inspect it if there were reasonable grounds to suspect that it was in fact operating as an unregistered independent school - ie providing tuition to under 16s for 15+ hours a week - and I haven't come across anything that would support that concern.

FE colleges are inspected by Ofsted.

Here is KC's most recent Summary Information Return to the Charity Commission.

SIR of KC

Have a look at Question 1 - The Charity's Aims. Nowhere does it mention "young people" - it is all "children"

Normally the answer to this question is taken from or modelled on the charity's "charitable objects" (objectives) which are enshrined in the articles or memorandum of association from when the charity was first set up.

What this means is that by spending money on "young people" e.g. all those twenty-somethings we keep reading about, KC has actually contravened its charitable objects, e.g. the purpose for which it was set up in the first place.

The lawyers from the Charity Commission are going to be all over this.

So the Urban Academy for 16+ was funded by Kids Company, which was funded by a mix of government grants and private donors. But since the Urban Academy wasn't funded directly by the government (via the Skills Funding Agency, which funds the FE sector) it wasn't regulated or inspected in the same way as a standard FE college would be?

There have been various regulations since the 2000s about Ofsted inspecting care provision for children of certain ages (it was under 8s, but I am not sure what it is now), which meant we had to close a free creche we ran, as we were not allowed to open for more than two hours a day without registration, and frankly as a completely free creche completely staffed by volunteers (in this case all qualified as doctors and teachers, but volunteers none the less), we simply didn't have the means to continue, given this hurdle.

Yet KC is claiming they ran a childcare setting of some form or another, but it's clear it was not subject to inspection. They also ran things like counselling services on school premises (Place2B). This also does not seem to have been subject to inspection. Why?

But was this provision actually for children at all? This comes back to the issue of the charity tugging at the heartstrings asking for money for the poor leetle childrens, but in actual fact appearing to provide services for adults between the ages of 16-25, where a number of other charities are in operation, not least the Princes Trust. At best they misrepresented their activities, and at worst it did not appear to comply with legal registration and inspection requirements.

Right, who else is busy running 'charities' like this?

Charley - apologies, you're right, Ofsted does inspect FE colleges. But they are under BIS rather than DfE responsibilities (though confusingly DfE has responsibility for 6th forms...)

Anyway, I think BoffinMum has it right that what ever KC were up to, it wasn't quite what they were claiming to do, they can't demonstrate positive outcomes for all the £££££s that they have spent (both public and privately donated), and in all likelihood were not properly registered to do the things that they were actually doing.