(part 2) to think that Camila Batmanghelidgh must be lying when she says she has done nothing wrong in her spending of Kids' Company 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.

OK, what do you think to this?

Who has oversight? The Education Funding Agency, I think in this case.

www.gov.uk/government/organisations/education-funding-agency
We manage £54 billion of funding a year to support all state-provided education for 8 million children aged 3 to 16, and 1.6 million young people aged 16 to 19.

I therefore have a feeling it came out of the EFA budget (which was a bit higher then, I think it's been cut back by about £2 billion over the last five years).

And to get back to the underlying issues with the Charity Commission
www.nao.org.uk/report/regulatory-effectiveness-charity-commission-2/

Then again, the NAO is not exactly squeaky clean
www.accountancyage.com/aa/blog-post/1795060/sir-john-bourn-bae-nao-revelations
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1567357/How-unsackable-Sir-John-Bourn-sealed-his-fate.html

The trustees do have a lot to answer for. I am the treasurer for a small charity and recently had to take the 'president' to task over something she wanted us to pay for, but was wildly inappropriate.

She was really annoyed at my intervention and basically told me that none of the previous Treasurers would have made a fuss, and that all decisions were hers to make.

If you are a trustee then I think you should take it seriously. And that means making sure that money is properly spent.

That is useful, but it suggests that Gove was originally planning to absorb the costs of the expansion within the normal budget and then found it wouldn't be possible and that £1 billion more was required. Yes?

I have not pulled apart the NAO documents, as I have one eye on Breaking Bad on a box set (bit late to the party, me), but it is not clear to me how much of the £8.35 billion was spent on tuition (i.e. money that would be spent anyway) and how much was paid to academy chains as a levy plus professional costs for conversion.

AnneElliott
Absolutely.
Alan Yentob has serious questions to answer and his position in the BBC is a conflict of interest for their whole news team

Talkinpeace, that is really quite an expenses bill. I think our online expenses system at work would explode like the boxing machine on the Wii Fit software if one of us tried to enter all that lot.

List of trustees of Kids Company :
apps.charitycommission.gov.uk/Showcharity/RegisterOfCharities/ContactAndTrustees.aspx?RegisteredCharityNumber=1068298&SubsidiaryNumber=0&TID=3105221

Sunetra Atkinson is Rowan Atkinson's ex : a former makeup artist

Erica Bolton is a director of PR company Bolton and Quinn

Richard Handover - formerly of WH Smiths

Francesca Robinson is a motivational consultant

I'm yet to see anybody who would stand up to a dominant CEO in a £23m charity .....

Thank you to everyone who posted links backing up BoffinMum's £8bn figure. It's put me in a really foul mood, mind. Being even remotely politically engaged really pisses on my chips. There's just so much shit going on out there. You can see why the "bread and circuses" thing appeals.

Got it.

---

"Of this £8.3 billion total, £6.4 billion was offset by money recovered from local authorities, or was distributed to schools on the same basis, irrespective of whether they were maintained schools or academies – for example sixth-form funding or the Pupil Premium for children from low income families. The Department provided a further £0.9 billion directly to 103 academies for whose pupils itdoes not allocate any funding to local authorities, thus making recovery unnecessary."

---

So they are funding academies, the kids are going to those academies and they are clawing back the money for those places from the LAs, so it is being used for educational provision.

Then there is "a further £350 million was money the Department was not able to recover from local authorities to offset against academy funding."

The "actual" costs of implementing the programme on and above this, well, they are quite controversial in my opinion.

£49 million on central Programme administration -- this is high and involves two bodies: the DoE and the YPLA. This is a bad set-up. I know why it has occurred (because they underestimated demand and couldn't handle it all in the DoE), but it means extra cost incurred by two entities having to communicate. A significant single entity national quango required by legislation would operate on less than this.

£338 million on transition costs -- it seems £279 million of this is on "pre-opening and start-up funding to sponsored academies", which are larger grants paid both before and after opening, and covering a wider range of costs such as school improvement or diseconomies of scale whilst building pupil numbers. This figure makes me itch.

£92 million on academy insurance -- fair enough.

£22 million on support for academies in deficit -- okay.

£68 million reimbursing academies’ VAT costs -- This is just circulating money through the treasury, but hey.

£29million on other grants.

£21 million double-funding academies and local authorities to ensure sustainability of some local authority services -- okay.

£59 million protecting academies against year-on-year volatility in their income -- okay.

Okay, I suspect this academies programme is a two bird, one stone policy: the headline will be "raising educational standards", but the real reason will be to remove LAs from the stream of educational funding because it will be perceived to be expensive to route education funding through LAs. You have £60bn going into LAs and only £31bn coming out. It is to get rid of that layer.

I must admit I am fairly shocked to see that in a budget of £85bn, only £37bn is actually reaching schools.

£92 million on academy insurance -- fair enough.
NOT OKAY
Lea schools self insure so that the money stays in the education system rather than being siphoned off to Insurance companies.

Academy schools do not have the economies of scale to profits are made.

£68 million reimbursing academies’ VAT costs -- This is just circulating money through the treasury, but hey.
That non recoverable VAT is stuff spent on other than education : ie legal and consultants fees

Don't start me on Gove and his dismantling of state education. Durham Free School hailed as wonderful by him, closed after a year when put into Special Measures by OFSTED. Run by fundamentalist Christians who employed part-time teachers nowhere else would have an put em in charge of curriculum areas. As a local councillor aptly put it 'They are all crap teachers'
Cost millions to open and then children had to be moved to other- perfectly Good - local state schools at the drop of a hat.

Local authority that borders the one where we live had a failing independent school- falling numbers, run by a creationist christian charity trust, poor outcomes for an independent school. 8 million pounds in debt. Gove allowed it to become a state funded academy, wiped out its debt of 8 million , promised it £10 million to build new Sixth Form accomodation- it had already had substantial new build in recent years. It refuses to take children with SEN- they are advised away from it if parents approach them and are told the school can't meet their needs. It has had 3 Headteachers in 2 years and is about to appoint its 4th. The staffing has been in uproar and unions have been involved.

It is in a small local authority where there are already many spare school places. It has now unbalanced local schools and two are at risk of closure because there are not enough children to go round.There are 5 Outstanding Secondary Schools in that LA and the other nearest school is Good with many outstading features. The chair of Governors and staff from the nearest local primary school were offered places for their own children when the discussions were taking place about which primary school would support it.

Why would Gove actively do that knowing the chaos it would cause? Because he wanted to destroy the power of local education authorities and state education. Why should our taxes be used to dig this christian charity trust out of debt to the tune of £8million? Why does this government think it is OK to put our children's education into the hands of people like this and the nutters who run academy trusts and fre schools? Because it costs the government less and is about deregulation of state responsibilities to agencies who are not bound by the same level of regulation or accountability.

It is a mirror image of KC.

Please don't get me started on Gove.

Talkin "Lea schools self insure so that the money stays in the education system rather than being siphoned off to Insurance companies."

How does this process work?

Thanks Werks - a comprehensive and lay person-friendly overview.

Please also bear in mnd that if your child's school is near one of these schools, it is your child who could find themselves in a good but closing school because it is to small to be financially viable, and when other local schools are full. Or it could be your child whose school suddenly finds itelf forced to take 50 extra children mid-year with no finance for them.
Schools are paid for new children the year after they get them. So a school that has 200 new children in Y7 now will get money based on how many it had in last year's Y7. The money for the extra 50 it had to take in suddenly two months into the year when the local Free School was closed does not arrive for another 10 months until next year.
But the extra teachers have to be found, employed and paid for immediately. Any school will tell you that good and outstanding teachers all have jobs at the start of September- oh but you could employ the crap ones the Free School has just made unemployed!

That's fantastic work, Werksallhourz.

I know they have been trying to kill off LAs for a couple of decades now. I believe the Conservatives brought out a report saying as much in the 1990s last time they were in power. It's a political philosophy thing.

In the meantime, I am wondering if academies are still playing the game they were a few years ago, when they used to boot pupils they didn't like out and hang on to the per capita funding for the rest of the academic year until the next school census. Meanwhile the LA would have to fund replacement provision in another school.

Do we want to get into exposing fraud in academies now or would people like to stay on the topic of CB in a more rigid sense?

Werks
a bit of background : I used to work for the Audit Commission
A big LEA like Surrey does not pay insurance premiums for any of its buildings at all.
Instead it puts money aside in its reserves to cover any required repairs.
If none are needed, that money goes back into the pot.
If it is, they spend it.

The Buildings and contents Insurance premium for a decent sized secondary school is around £200,000 a year.
If there are no claims for ten years, the insurance company is £2m quids in.
Chances are that the whole school will never be destroyed so huge claims are incredibly rare.

When academies started, I asked the Dfe the question through one of their consultations and the wonks in London admitted they had no idea about self insurance

Slight xposts, lulu. You are spot on with all that.

Werks,

£338 million on transition costs -- it seems £279 million of this is on "pre-opening and start-up funding to sponsored academies", which are larger grants paid both before and after opening, and covering a wider range of costs such as school improvement or diseconomies of scale whilst building pupil numbers. This figure makes me itch.

That is where academy chains and so on make their profit-we-don't-call-profit.

Like Durand Academy and Sir Greg Martin.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2832337/Head-230k-extra-cash-running-health-club-school-Auditors-launched-probe-academy-teacher-employed-ex-wife-deputy.html

Let's stick with CB and KC. We can start an academy thread next.

Dead interesting book on how all the people in the great big privatisation of education are connected to each other, and stuff like that.

Education PLC by Stephen Ball

xpost

Let's stick to that then. The academy thing would fill several threads in its own right.

Oo, that would be EXCELLENT but I think it already exists and it is basically called MI5

Yes let's Stay on topic.

Trustee of KC Richard Handover is apparently the Chair of Governors of Dauntsey's School, where the infamous chauffeur's daughter went with fees paid by KC.