Satisfactory is no longer satisfactory...

[bigTillyMint]

Did anyone see Sir Michael Wilshaw on breakfast TV this morning? Satisfactory is going

I "leap to infer all sorts of accusations" because the points you are making cannot be read in any other way. If ARK were doing as you allege it would be breaking the law.

It is not clear from the accounts if ARK is purchasing goods or services from its subsidiary but can I say again - every penny in profits made by the subsidiary goes back to ARK as is clearly shown in the accounts. So, let us say ARK spends £100 with its subsidiary and the subsidiary makes £10 profit. What will happen to that profit? It will be handed back to ARK so that it can be spent on the schools. You don't seem to understand that basic point.

And you don't seem to understand the basic point that I'm not alleging they're breaking the law.

Your initial allegation was "they also own lots of profit making subsidaries like teacher training and building work, so that can cyphon as much public money as possible into their own pockets".

You seem to think there is some way they can do this within the law. You are wrong. There is no way they can "cyphon as much public money as possible into their own pockets" without breaking the law. You may not intend to allege that they are breaking the law but that is indeed what you are alleging.

prh47bridge is right.

The behaviour described by Rosebud05 as being that of ARK, if it were to occur would be a breach of the Charities Act and a serious criminal offence.

Charity Trustees are NOT allowed to profit personally or receive an income from the charity. This includes getting an income from any subsidiary owned by the charity.

The easy way you can syphon money from a charity into you own pocket is by paying yourself over the going rate.

Which of course nobody ever does.

BTW prh47bridge, do you have any financial interest in academies? or is it purely idealogical on your part?

If you are a trustee you cannot pay yourself, over the going rate or otherwise. As nlondondad pointed out, the trustees (who govern the charity) are not allowed to profit personally or receive an income from the charity. If you are a trustee and you pay yourself you are committing an offence. There is no easy legal way to syphon money into your own pocket from a charity.

To answer your question, no, I do not have any financial interest in academies nor do I have an ideological position. I am neither for nor against academies and free schools. I just want the debate to use genuine facts, not invented ones. When supporters of academies have made incorrect statements on here I have corrected them too. However, I'm afraid the vast majority of the incorrect statements I have seen on Mumsnet have been made by opponents of academies.

To give a more specific example of my position, I think that something needs to be done to improve standards in those primary schools that have consistently failed to meet the floor standard over the last five years. I am not, however, convinced that forcing them to become academies is the right solution. I hope, for the sake of the pupils, that any of these schools that are forced to become academies improve but that is by no means the same as saying I support their conversion to academy status.

If this - or any - government was serious about improving 'standards' in our schools, they'd tackle child poverty.

However, blaming teachers and repeatedly moving the goal posts to re-categorise schools as 'failing' or 'requiring improvement' so that the private sector can swoop seems to be the coalition's main game plan at the moment.

Unfortunately, many schools that have become academies are now failing (including those which were 'outstanding' as community schools) with 8 secondaries getting into serious financial trouble and being bailed out by central government to the tune of nearly £11 million.

choccy, Sally Morgan's doing quite well as the new Chair of Ofsted - £45K for 2 days work a week. Whilst still advising a major academy chain.

But this is all about raising standards, you understand.

Of course some academies will fail. Some will run into financial problems. Both those things happen with community schools. The question is whether or not academies and free schools will overall deliver better results and improve parental choice. If they do they will have succeeded. If they don't they will have failed. As far as I am concerned it is that simple.

So prh47bridge, are you, sorry the Government expecting all these professional people to put so much effort into improving educational standards for FREE?
And for all the organisations to provide educational services to the academies at exactly cost price?
RoseBud, precisely.

Well, so far it's not looking good, I must say.

The sensible thing would be to slow down, review and assess the financial, social and academic benefits and risks so far incurred by the academy and free school programmes and then decide which direction to take, rather than pressure/bully 100s of primary and secondary schools to convert with absolutely no evidence base that this will either deliver better results or improve parental choice.

I notice that Gove has had to back off one his attempts at forced conversion in a Haringey primary to avoid litigation from the school's governing body - good for them to stand up to a bully.

choccyp1g - I am not expecting anything. As I have already pointed out I am not a supporter of the academies programme but neither am I against it.

The government is expecting that the governors and trustees of academies and free schools will provide their services for free just as the governors of community schools and trustees of other charities do. The employees (teachers, admin staff, etc.) will, of course, be paid just as they are at community schools. But the charity is controlled by its trustees and the trustees cannot be employed by the charity, either directly or indirectly.

The charities that run academies are subject to charity law so all income must be spent on the objects of the charity, i.e. running the schools. If they make a surplus it must be retained within the charity and spent on the schools. If the charity is wound up any remaining assets must be spent on the schools.

I am not sure which organisations you are referring to that are supplying educational services to academies. If you mean suppliers of desks and other such equipment, they make a profit regardless of whether they are supplying academies or community schools.

Rosebud05 - Supporters of academies point out that so far academies have shown better results than community schools in the same area and that the proportion of academies failing or needing a financial bail out is below the proportion of community schools failing or needing a bail out. Supporters of academies would argue that they have been running for years and the benefits and risks are well known. However, as I am not a supporter of academies I would agree that there is reason to question whether those results will continue with the massive increase in academies given that there are some fundamental differences between the new academies and the ones set up under the last government, primarily the fact that most new academies will not have external sponsors.

Frankly, the local 'Outstanding' primary school was monumentally unimpressive. I do not even want to begin to think about schools that are 'Satisfactory'.

How interesting, prh, because sceptics of academies point out that community schools do better than academies result wise and that close analysis of the way in which academies achieve reveal much higher levels of exclusions (both by persuading families with children with SEN that they may be better off applying for a different school at the point of application and then both permanent and temporary exclusions when children are in school) and manipulation of results ie not entering children for Maths and English GCSE, so they don't show on the results. Regulations around this are able to change, I understand.

It's inaccurate to say that academies have been running 'for years' - they were set up under the last government, so 10 years or so? That's not long, especially in the currently unstable economic climate. Free schools are, of course, much newer.

I agree that it's unlikely that these 'results' will continue because evidence is accruing very quickly as to how results are being manipulated and there's a limit to how long this is going to able to be suppressed.

Also, many of the academies that get cited as centres of excellence were 'outstanding' community schools that chose convert - it's incredibly disingenuous of supporters of academies to give these as examples of how successful academies are (see article in Telegraph this Tuesday).

I'm very sceptical about external sponsors. In the case of Mossbourne, for example (and where would we be in a discussion about 'successful academies' without this), it has had money, resources and facilities absolutely thrown at it. Excellent staff/pupil ratios, it opened with half the number of pupils on FSM than the school that it replaced. The school it replaced, Hackney Downs, had been desperately under-funded for years, high proportion of SEN pupils, 77% FSM.

With no political axe to grind whatsoever, it seems to me that any school which is really well resourced with lots of staff, excellent facilities, wads of cash thrown at it and a government agenda that really wanted it to succeed would do so. An external sponsor is incidental.

If only all of our schools had this sort of backing.

A very reasoned argument Rosebud05. I don't agree with everything you say but that is an excellent post.

I think the argument about academy results depends on where you draw the boundaries (but don't quote me on this - I need to do some more research to be sure). The academies that converted under the last government were all failing schools before they converted. I believe supporters of academies look at their results compared to other schools in their area and claim they are producing better results and improving faster, whereas opponents compare them to schools generally and argue that community schools are doing better than academies. You pays your money and you takes your choice.

Part of the reason the government is promoting the English Baccalaureate is to stop the practise of schools (both community schools and academies) boosting their league table position by not entering pupils for the more academic GCSEs. A school cannot manipulate its performance in the Baccalaureate by not entering pupils for exams.

The exclusions thing is interesting and again rather complex. Failing schools generally have poor discipline so there is a need to regain control in order to turn the school round. You will therefore often find that a failing school being turned round has a high exclusion rate. I don't know of any research that tells us whether these exclusions are an attempt to manipulate league tables or a necessary step to regain control (or a bit of both), nor do I know of any research that shows whether academies have a higher exclusion rate than other failing schools in the process of being turned round.

A personal hobby horse - anti-academy campaigners often point to high exclusion rates for SEN pupils but omit to mention that community schools also have the same problem. A pupil with a statement of SEN is 8 times as likely to be permanently excluded as a pupil with no SEN. A pupil with SEN but no statement is even more likely to be permanently excluded. Pupils with SEN are also more likely to undergo fixed period exclusions and illegal informal exclusions. I believe that is a huge problem.

The first academies were established in 2000. I would personally say that means they have been running for years but, as I've said before, the new academies aren't the same as the existing ones. For a start, all the academies that converted under the last government were failing schools and had external sponsors. I would therefore be very nervous of assuming that any performance, good or bad, seen in the existing academies will be repeated in the new ones.

I haven't seen the article in the Telegraph. Can you post a link?

Apart from the academies being forced to convert, the new academies generally won't have external sponsors. The government hasn't prohibited them from having sponsors but has made it clear that the preference is for no sponsor. Where there is to be a sponsor it could be another school or a university.

I'm not personally convinced that success in education is all about the amount of money spent on schools. There is obviously a minimum level of funding below which education will suffer, but once you've got there I think the quality of the head teacher matters far more than the amount of money spent.

I'll come back to this later, as I've got to go to work now, but here's the article from last Tuesday's 'Telegraph'.

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/9017862/Downhills-primary-school-takes-on-Michael-Gove.html

It discussed the improving community primary school in Tottenham which, according to the last OFsted, 92% of parents are happy with, which Gove wants to force sponsored academy status on against the wishes of - it sounds like - pretty much the whole school community eg governors, parents, staff with an academy primary school in Enfield whose head exposes the virtues of academy status. Unfortunately, neither she nor the journalist point out that Cuckoo Hall became 'outstanding' as a community school, then chose to convert.

There are other significant differences between the schools - SEN sig higher, +20% more children with EAL, 10+ FSM in first school, 10% Roma/Irish traveller in first school.

Most importantly, this is another example of the community school = bad and academy = wonderful fairy tale which seems to be one of the foundations of Gove's intention to either persuade or force schools to become academies which, when the surface is scratched a little, is based on factual inaccuracies.

our local secondary was rated 'satisfactory'....whilst attaining 35% a-c....whilst in special measures......when it closed and re-opened as an academy....

was it satisfactory?

no!!! and no-one thought so either.

it did face challenges, but no less than it did when i was there and it was rated 'good' and getting 56% grades a-c....

I don't understand your post, edless, sorry.

Are you saying that your local secondary was in special measures, then closed and then opened an academy, and then judged to be satisfactory or something else?

prh, yes, a comparison between for example Hackney Downs and Mossbourne will show a startling improvement in results. This tends to be attributed to the shift to academy status, rather than the vastly different cohort, greatly improved resources, lots of additional staff and a management team and government who believe in it which would all seem to be obvious factors in an improvement in a school.

Academies do, overall, have higher exclusion rates. The problem is that there are strong motivating factors for schools to 'manage out' certain parts of the community which affect all schools, increasingly so with the current bordering on pathological focus on performance data. Academies are more vulnerable to this, I would suggest, because their governing body doesn't have a variety of people from the local community on and hence don't have a corresponding loyalty to the community and real awareness of the undesirable social consequences of dividing communities.

I agree about the vulnerability of SEN pupils - the paragraph above applies to this. There was a terribly sad piece on Newsnight last Monday, which showed young people were being managed our of secondary academies into 'vocational education' at 14 years or so - no opportunities to take GCSEs. This is one very undesirable consequence of de-regulating educational provision. The article also produced some very convincing statistics about the difference in GCSE entries between community schools and academies - the latter entering fewer children so that they don't show on their stats.

I agree that the amount of money spent is only one factor in addition to good teaching and leadership that makes a school good, but it is an important one. I recently did some work in Tower Hamlets primaries and the difference in the number of staff compared to my children's school in Haringey is striking. An extra teacher or TA in each class (which would be possible if Haringey schools received inner London funding as they're compared to inner London schools) would really, really, really make a difference. 50% of the children at my kid's schools live in poverty - this disadvantage needs to be adjusted for at school.

I'm also very, very concerned about the fundamentally undemocratic issue of forced academies, particularly at primary level. In his parliamentary address last week, David Lammy MP pointed out that there are 26 schools in Mr Gove's own leafy Surrey constituency (much less FSM, ESL etc) which perform worse than the schools in Haringey that he wishes to force to convert. Haringey comes 35th out of 141 LAs nationally, Surrey Heath 57th - given that, it is hard to see how Gove's actions in this borough aren't politically motivated.

I agree the journalist should have made it clear that all existing primary school academies were outstanding schools prior to conversion.

I don't really want to discuss Downhills in detail as I don't know the school or the area. However, my views for what it is worth:

Downhills is clearly struggling to produce an acceptable level of performance. I hear all the reasons given to justify this (Roma, churn, etc.) but personally I don't think that is good enough. These children are clearly disadvantaged. One of the few ways they can break free from their disadvantages is through education. I therefore think it is vital that schools in disadvantaged areas perform well, with results at least in line with the national average. If that means they have to be the best schools in the country then that is what we should deliver.

Downhills, in my view, is not doing well enough. I'm pleased it is finally improving but it has been below the floor standard for far too long. I am therefore of the view that Downhills needs to improve. That means something needs to change. I am not dogmatic about that, however, as I realise I am arriving at that view on limited information. I am willing to be persuaded otherwise.

I note that Haringey is one of the LAs identified as having a particularly high concentration of failing schools. There is a small group of LAs that has been in that position for a number of years. Research for the last government criticised these LAs for not doing anything to sort out their underperforming schools. That obviously plays into the hands of those who believe that removing these schools from LA control is an essential step in turning them round.

It may be that conversion to academy status with a successful school as the sponsor would be exactly what Downhills needs. However, I am not convinced that forcing them down this route is the right thing to do. I am very uneasy about forced conversions. Having said that, I would like to hear what the campaigners opposed to conversion think should be done to improve the school. I am uneasy with a campaign which seems to suggest that everything is fine already. But I haven't been following the campaign closely so it may be that they have made such suggestions.

So, to sum all of that up, I'm not happy with the arguments made by either side!

I should note that all three major parties seem convinced that academies are the way to go in order to improve school results. When I last checked, Labour was officially in favour of academies, at least for secondary schools (although clearly some Labour MPs are not, nor are many local councillors of all parties), but they argue that the differences between the new academies and the old ones mean the new ones won't work.

Cross posted - that was in response to your 7:33 post.

Looking at your latest post, I should point out that the new academies will generally not have sponsors and therefore the make up of governing bodies will be similar to that prior to conversion.

Regarding your comments about Tower Hamlets, I note that one Downhills campaigner suggested Haringey's schools grant from the government is on outer London rates but it pays its staff inner London rates. I haven't checked whether or not that is true but, if it is, it would explain some of the lack of resources in Haringey.

I have no idea where David Lammy gets his statistics. Surrey has 18 schools that failed to meet the floor standard in 2011 out of 204. Haringey has 14 out of 54. There aren't 26 schools below the floor standard in the whole of Surrey, let alone in Michael Gove's constituency. In Surrey 85% of pupils achieved the expected level in English, 82% achieved the expected level in Maths and 71% achieved the expected level in both. For Haringey the figures were 80%, 77% and 65% respectively. Haringey is one of the LAs identified by both this government and the last as having a high proportion of failing schools, defined as schools which have failed to meet the floor standard for five years. Surrey is not one of those LAs.

I am aware that the campaigners in Haringey like to suggest that Gove's actions are politically motivated. They won't, of course, tell you that the last Labour government identified Haringey as an LA needing intervention, nor will they tell you that some of the schools being targetted by the DfE are not in Labour controlled areas. If you sit down with the league tables for 2006-2010 inclusive you can identify the 200 schools that have been consistently below the floor standard and the LAs that have high concentrations of failing schools. Those are the ones Gove is targetting. He appears to be doing so regardless of the political colour of the controlling LA.

So I disagree with David Lammy but apart from that I agree with much of your 14:01 post.

Just for clarity, the statistics I gave in my last post relate to primary schools.

Just lost a huge post, so long question simplified:
After conversion to academy status, what responsibility does the sponsoring school take for the performance of the sponsored school?

I don't think the Downhill campaigners are saying that there aren't any problems. They're saying that the school is improving as a community school and they they don't want to be forced into being an academy with some unknown sponsor. The school is improving, that's very clear.

The funding disparity in Haringey is well-documented. Lynne Featherstone was very local about it until the LibDems got in and suddenly changed their stance on academies.

www.lynnefeatherstone.org/issues/haringey-schools

I didn't research Lammy's figures but even the ones you give don't show a dramatic contrast between Haringey and Surrey considering they're extremes of the social and economic priviledge/deprivation pole.

Haringey is 35th out of 141 LAs nationwide. The statistic that frequently gets trotted out about 'poorest performing in inner London' is unfair as Haringey gets funded as an outer London school, though pays teachers inner London. It isn't one of the worst LAs in the country and there's no way that a reasonable discussion about educational standards in Haringey can take place without acknowledging that an average form entry primary is over half a million ££££ down on schools in neighbouring Hackney and Islington.

There weren't any Haringey schools in Gove's original 200 list. In fact, Gove stopped talking about '200 schools' many months ago (though the media still trots this out) and is very openly talking about 100s.

choccy, some of the opposition to sponsored academies is that it's very clear that it's unlikely to be schools benignly sponsoring other schools. It's more likely to be academy chains, especially when numbers grow.

Just one last word on Downhills; their SATS went from 40% in 2009 to 61% in 2011. This is obviously an improving school, which the DFE would be crowing about if it was one that had already converted to be an academy. I don't think the parents there can all be deluded - it clearly is a school with a lot of loyalty behind it, which just isn't apparent in undesirable, unpopular schools.

Another stat Lammy quoted was that 2,500 or so primaries did worse than Downhills in 2011. I did a quick bit of googling and this looks about right, I think?

choccyp1g - Sponsors have responsibility for all aspects of the academy.

Rosebud05 - I'm enjoying this discussion!

I have come across some people denying that there are any problems at Downhills but I'm happy to take your word for it that this isn't the position the campaigners are adopting.

My understanding, by the way, is that the school is being forced to convert but is allowed to choose its own sponsor, although a sponsor will be imposed if they don't choose one for themselves.

Having investigated further since my last post, I am amazed the last government allowed a situation to arise where Haringey has to pay inner London salaries on outer London grant levels. I note that the current government is committed to changing school funding to avoid this kind of thing but that hasn't happened yet.

On the figures, it is true the differences don't look big but only 7 LAs performed worse than Haringey in terms of the proportion achieving the expected level in both Maths and English whereas only 21 performed better than Surrey.

It is certainly true that Downhills has improved and that there are a lot of primary schools that performed worse than them in 2011.

There are three sets of criteria being used by the government:

• The poorest performing primary schools, defined as those which have failed to meet the floor target for five or more years. These are the oft-quoted 200 that are being forced to convert

• The next layer of underperforming primary schools, defined as those which failed to meet the floor target for three or four of the last five years. There are around 500 such schools. They are not being forced to convert as yet but their LAs are being asked to come up with plans to improve them.

• There are a number of LAs that have a particularly high proportion of underperforming schools (I think there are 8 LAs but I can't find my notes). The underperforming schools in these LAs are being forced to convert, apparently on the basis of the research I mentioned previously which suggested that the LAs were not addressing the poor performance of these schools. Haringey falls into this category.

Note that what matters is not the performance of schools in Haringey overall but whether or not it has a high proportion of underperforming schools. With over 25% of its schools underperforming it clearly has. The figure for Surrey is less than 9%. I am not sure on what measure Haringey is 35th in the country. It certainly isn't 35th in terms of the proportion of pupils reaching the expected level at the end of KS2.

Note that the government looked at performance from 2006 - 2010 in drawing up its lists as the 2011 figures weren't available when they started.