Richmond Borough Schools Chat 6

[BayJay2]

Hello! This is the latest thread in a series originally triggered by Richmond Council's Education White Paper in Feb 2011. We chat about local education policy, the local impact of national policy, local school performance, and admissions-related issues.

Please do join in. There’s a bunch of us who’ve been following the thread for a long time, and we sometimes get a bit forensic, but new contributions are always welcome.

If you have a few hours to spare and want to catch up on 4 years of local education history, then below are the links to the old threads. We have to keep starting new threads because each only hold 1000 posts. The first two run in parallel, as one was started on the national Mumsnet site, and the other locally:

1a) New Secondaries for Richmond Borough? (Feb 11 - Nov 11)
1b) New Secondary schools for Richmond! (Feb 11-Nov 11)

1. New Secondary Schools for Richmond 2 (Nov 11-May 12)
2. New Secondary Schools for Richmond 3 (May 12-Nov 12)
3. New Secondary Schools for Richmond 4 (Nov 12-Oct 13)

1. Richmond Borough Schools Chat 5 (Oct 13-Nov 14)
2. Richmond Borough Schools Chat 6 (Nov 14 - ????) : This thread!

Hallo Hightsma I set out some of the cons of the Teddington Imperial College site in a post on 17th April. It's certainly not ideal for a secondary school and isn't in the TH catchment area either - there is just a lot more publicity about the disadvantages of the Whitton site at present. As Heathclif says there are no ideal sites left (apart from parts of Fulwell or Strawberry Hill golf courses which would be in the right catchment area!) I am constantly on about the Clarendon School site which is on the Hampton Hill borders in Hampton. I haven't heard any strong reasons for not keeping it in educational use - the fact that the Council wants to flog it for housing isn't a strong enough reason in my view given the planning problems associated with all the other options!

"I haven't heard any strong reasons for not keeping it in educational use"

Well it's presumably too small for a secondary.

three or even four schools with 70-120 pupils each, within a mile or two of each other ... 'To clarify, you mean in the sixth form?'

No, going into year 7. Might be 100-150 pupils but those are still small numbers - TA/HA combined had 280 pupils in Y7 last year and TH will be restricted to 100 in temporary site. It was the same case for RET in Hove but numbers dropped to 70.

Meanwhile sixth forms still small at the sponsored academies. Census figures for Jan 2014 had 77 combined in HA and TA.

Hi BayJay it's probably about half the size of the Imperial College and Whitton sites but not much smaller than the sites of TA, HA and Teddington School. It's close to the 3 schools in Hanworth Road, LEH, Hampton and Hampton Academy (the latter being furthest away - about half a mile) so potential to share sports facilities and also near sports pitches in Bushy Park. (Would be nice to see LEH and Hampton actually doing something for a lot of local kids rather than just asking 2 children from the top maths set in a cohort of 240 to come to a maths day once a year!) Obviously bigger would be better but it's far more suitable than office buildings like the one being used for that born again school in Norbiton.

I haven't heard any strong reasons for not keeping it in educational use

Sounds like a good proposal LProsser, I will look back over your other posts

some of us are indeed far more knowledgable

Fabulous Heathclif, yes you are very knowledgable and experienced

All these conspiracy theories about Lord True and his rich mates are not actually relevant on this one, though they were on other sites that were or came into public ownership

Interesting

so potential to share sports facilities and also near sports pitches in Bushy Park

This is a good idea LProsser

bluestars the map of bulge classes is here.

Numbers from 2014 census, so 'Y6' is 2014 secondary transfer and 'Y3' is 2017 secondary. Correct me if I've added up wrong - I've got breakdowns per school.

Hampton Hill, Hampton Junior, Stanley*, Buckingham
Y6 - 303, Y5 - 310, Y4 - 301, Y3 - 380

Collis, St John the Baptist, SMSP
Y6 - 210, Y5 - 234, Y4 - 229, Y3 - 234

Archdeacon C, Trafalgar, St Mary's, St Stephen's
Y6 - 293, Y5 - 280, Y4 - 294, Y3 - 253

Heathfield, Chase Bridge, Bishop Perrin, Nelson
Y6 - 235, Y5 - 237, Y4 - 261, Y3 - 270

So a 2017 bulge in Hampton Hill and Fulwell, and smaller bulge in St Margaret's/Whiitton in time for REEC, but not as many as all those scary figures that cover all children all over, including in RC schools, and perhaps not quite enough to fill one new school by 2017, let alone two, or to replace 75 children at Twickenham Academy should TH be sited there with a 50/50 split and draw from it.

• Waldegrave takes 170 from Middlesex.

And a couple of interesting news items.

The only Catholic Diocese-backed free school, a former private school in Cornwall, has ended up an expensive disaster - with terrible GCSE results, an unpublished Ofsted and the Diocese pulling out over its finances, the school likely to be absorbed into a local academy.

The looming education budget squeeze story has been reported by Chris Cook at the BBC. While school budgets have been frozen, costs may rise by up to 16% in the next 5 years. There have been lots of warning by head teachers recently: e.g. budget shortfalls of £750,000 over the next three years which means redundancies and increases in class sizes. Richmond schools are being hit with the same problems and Vince Cable has been lobbied on this issue.

Thanks muminlondon very aggravating to read these stories having just heard David Cameron on Radio 4 boasting about the fact that 1 million more children are being educated in outstanding or good schools thanks to his free school and academy programme. That would be almost entirely due to the fact that existing outstanding and good state secondary schools like ours were bribed to become academies - and now they are facing the withdrawl of the extra funding and being left in financial difficulties.

Just rereading that Guardian article I linked to and it's desperate:

“Funding per pupil has been decreasing steadily year on year and individual schools, particularly those with lower pupil numbers, are particularly exposed to this. When you consider that a large secondary academy we are advising received an additional ESG grant of £500,000 four years ago and in 2015-16 will receive just £130,000, it is easy to understand how drastic the situation has become for some schools.”

Those are exactly the sort of budget gaps Waldegrave and Orleans Park are worried about, and why they are so keen to take on 16 extra students each this year, for as many years as they can house them. Faced with a choice of increasing tutor groups from 25 to 27 or even 30, or getting rid of 15 specialist teachers, what would you do?

That's I am so angry about the billions overspent on the academies programme and free schools in areas of surplus - much of it going to brokers, lawyers, insurance companies, consultants, and construction companies or agents like the Place Group. This has been economic wastage without proven benefits. Future cuts because 'there is no more money' will end up affecting and destabilising many more of our schools.

Lottie I appreciate that in the context of the scandalous effect of this government's strategies on state education (and indeed in terms of their interference with the exam system and curriculum the whole education system) which I won't argue with, it is being a bit trivial. However as we have discussed before both LEH and Hampton have active public provision programmes including membership of the Richmond Schools Partnership that amount to a little more than two top set Maths students going to revision days per 240 person school, even just at Teddington. www.lehs.org.uk/public-benefit-provision/81.html I do not doubt TH will find them receptive to sharing resources and expertise wherever the site.

MrsSalvo I am very familiar with the lengths and journeys Sheen parents took to find places in good state schools, if moving or going private wasn't an option (and indeed the stress on families even if it is), in the past. I am also familiar with the long running will amongst parents to invest in Shene School / Richmond Park Academy to make it into the same sort of outstanding school serving their community as Teddington, East Twickenham and now, again, Ham and Petersham have. But in the past serving as Governors and planning to send cohorts from schools like Barnes Primary all came to nothing. What I gather has changed is that effective leadership has resulted not just an improving school but also one that has worked closely with all the feeder primaries to convince parents that RPA is now the school serving the community that has long been wanted. The irony is that some of those parents now feel very let down because they find themselves out of catchment of a now oversubscribed school.

There seems to be a lot of education money paid to companies and directors here and not going to front line services.

For example, in the opening of a new free school there are at least the following companies involved:

1. Achieving for Children company
2. Russell Education Trust company
3. Education London company
4. RET Twickenham trust company

www.richmondandtwickenhamtimes.co.uk/NEWS/12925313.No_answers_over_Achieving_for_Children_s___7_5m_spending_cuts/

www.brentwoodgazette.co.uk/Becket-Keys-School-make-trust-pound-800k/story-16521453-detail/story.html

www.companiesintheuk.co.uk/ltd/ret-twickenham-trust

How much of the money that could be available for schools is being creamed off by company directors in their salaries?

It's interesting that 3 of the company directors of the RET Twickenham trust company are also members of the Turing House Steering Group.

Deborah you may well have a point in relation to other Free School sponsors in the area as you will discover with very little googling of Belleview or GEMS. However if you go back through this thread, or indeed Google, you will not find any indication that Turing is other than what it says on the tin, a group of parents responding to the widespread concerns about LBRUTs school place strategy (and we can and have argued endlessly about whether it will in fact cope with the pupil bulge, it just might but only with a lot of juggling, and stress on families deterred to find other options) who have devoted considerable effort to realising their vision of providing their community with the sort of school parents want, and a school that even LBRUT acknowledge is needed too. When Councillor Hodgins talked of the vision of the parents it wasn't for a change spin. Their choice of RET was guided by it having similar values in terms of the vision. The fact that they had to make use of an imperfect Free School system that is indeed open to attracting sponsors whose motives are less idealistic, and who don't bother to even defend them on forums like this, was just a means to that end.

It is strange that with the furore over TH's possible siting in Whitton suddenly people are weighing in to try and undermine that group of parents and force them into repeatedly defend their motives. There has been no such development in terms of Twickenham Primary or Old Deer Park School, though nobody would be arguing if the accusation were levelled there. I am not involved with Turing though I support what they are doing because I wish I had had the offer of a place at a Turing for my own children, and so have long followed their progress and I find this sudden development somewhat unedifying.

DeborahTripp1 -
Achieving for Children is a company created by Kingston and Richmond Councils to provide their children's services. They have nothing to do with Turing House, although it is likely/possible that TH will buy in some of their services, just as the other local schools do.

If you follow your own link to the RET Twickenham trust company you will see that this is stuck-off. IE It's no longer in existence. I presume RET has taken on this role but BayJay will be able to answer that.

From the Turing House website ...

100% of the school's money will go to the Trust, which then uses it to run the school, in accordance with the Funding Agreement that it will sign with the DfE. The money is not used for any other purpose. Again, this is exactly the same set up as our other local academies. (e.g. Waldegrave's funding is paid to the Waldegrave Trust, which then uses it to run the school). RET uses approximately 5% of the money for high level management functions such as HR, financial management, procurement etc. (The comparative figure for the average Local Authority school is approx 11%).

Education London has no formal role in relation to the school. However, the RET schools benefit from access to Education London services, which are provided strictly on an at-cost or pro-bono basis. They are not obliged to use those services if they don't want to. Education London makes no profit out of any services it provides to RET schools.

There is no "creaming off" as far as I can see.

Re "Deer Park" School - it is not going to be near Old Deer Park but on the totally unsuitable site of London House on the very busy A316 right by Manor Circus roundabout. This is a waste of money which could have been used to support other local primary schools rather than line the pockets of private enterprise. There is a petition on Change.org asking Richmond Council, the Dept of Education and Bellevue Trust to find a better site in an area where primary school places are really needed - i.e East Twickenham.
Suggest you look at this petition and sign it if you agree

DeborahTripp1, I've just replied to the same post on the RTT website, so I'll repeat it here too.

Achieving for Children is a Social Enterprise, wholly owned by Richmond and Kingston Local Authorities, and its director was formerly the director of Richmond's Education and Children's Services, where he also earned a salary. You might not like the structural model, and you might think the salary is too high, but if there wasn't a director to run the show I imagine the deficit would be a lot higher.

Russell Education Trust is a non-profit academy trust. As it has a funding agreement with the DfE, it's directors are not allowed to draw a salary. Check out the model funding agreement for multi-academy trusts on the DfE website.

Education London is a private company, that, if required, provides its extremely highly regarded educational services free or at-cost to RET schools. That's a good deal for those schools.

RET Twickenham Trust was also a non-profit academy trust, but it no longer exists. None of the directors received any salary. It was set up as a single academy trust the first time the TH proposal was submitted to the DfE in 2012, and was a formal partnership between RET and the local steering group. If you look at the RET wikipedia page you'll see its earlier schools used the same model. The RET Twickenham Trust was disbanded when the DfE brought in its new multi-academy trust model, because RET adopted that model (which was preferred by the DfE). Under the MAT model the local partnership is formalised via a Scheme of Delegation instead.

As I explained to you on an earlier thread the 800k referred to in the Brentwood article you linked to is money used to run the schools, not pay directors a salary, which would be illegal. There is more information on this page of the TH website, with lots of links out to official sources of information: www.turinghouseschool.org.uk/questions2.php.

Not passing any judgements and keen for accuracy here, but would it be correct to say that Karen and David Lynch are paid as the two directors of Education London, providing 'at-cost' services to RET, of whom they are also directors? And has Colin Mackinlay been paid as an employee of Education London for consultancy regarding RET schools or on his own account? Or since he was interim head in Hove, was he a salaried employee on a fixed-term contract there as he will be at Turing House?

I imagine that is a similar arrangement to Tom Legge being an employee of The Place Group which is a project management company, but whose director/chief executive is also a director of Bellevue Place Education Trust. Where they benefit is awarding themselves a contract: the grey area as identified by many critics is what 'at cost' means and whether there is a conflict of interest in terms of who will get that contract.

Where their arrangement gets much more complicated than RET is that Bellevue Education is also involved as a sponsor, and its directors are involved in private equity finance and banking activities in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland.

Muminlondon, the "at cost" arrangement between RET and EL is approved by the DfE. Yes, there are debates, and there is insinuation, about what "at cost" means generally, but it is for the EFA/Audit Commission to scrutinise the arrangements of individual trusts and approve them. All academy trusts are subject to that scrutiny.

And yes, of course RET has employees, just as a Local Authority does, and just as any single Academy Trust does - it is the employer of teachers and support staff at each of its schools and at the level of the Trust itself it has education advisers (of which CMc used to be one before he became TH Head), and people to run functions such as HR, procurement etc. Those Trust level functions are the ones covered in the following quote from the TH website: "RET uses approximately 5% of the money for high level management functions such as HR, financial management, procurement etc. (The comparative figure for the average Local Authority school is approx 11%)."

Regarding the Greenwich judgement and TH - interesting that the insistence that the school - even if sited in Whitton - will have a catchment carefully designed by the limiting of non-Teddingtonites to keep out out-of-borough applicants... Whereas TA and HA have to take them. Seems like some Teddington parents are keen to keep their kids only with 'in borough' kids

MrsSalvo - you can cast judgement for that if you want, but all Local Authorities are generally keen to only cater for their own population if possible, because that is where their statutory responsibility lies. Richmond representatives have been very vocal in complaining about the Greenwich Judgement, e.g. here is just one example of many.

MrsSalvo -
Richmond "managed" the consequences of the Greenwich agreement by using a linked-school system. This was abolished a couple of years ago as the sheer numbers of kids rendered it useless. There is a lot of discussion about it on earlier threads.
As I have explained, I want my DC to go to a good local school with his friends from his local community. He goes to Stanley at the moment, Stanley's fsm% is 15% in reception this year. This is the community I live in and embrace, this is the community I want to see reflected in TH's intake. My choice of TH has NOTHING to do with excluding sections of society or keeping by DC insulated from "out-of-borough" kids. I know quite a few TH parents and I can't believe their motivations are any different to mine.

Deer Park School is highly unpopular in its new local area (which is not local to Old Deer Park). Parents and local residents that I know are not at all in favour of the plan.

As for out of borough applicants, one of the reasons Darell was expanded instead of Queens was to cut down on successful out of borough applications.

AbsintheAndChips - I agree, it looks like a crazy site for a school. I can see why locals are upset. I certainly wouldn't want to walk or drive my DC to that location.

MrsSalvo why Teddington kids? Why not be accurate and say Fullwell, Hampton, West Twickenham and some bits of Teddington kids, not to mention, should the site actually end up in Whitton, the 20% who would be Whitton kids? Or if it had been in Clifden Road, Central Twickenham kids, or if they had opted for the Amida / David Lloyd site Hanwell kids. Or is that not quite as effective from the point of view of trying to be divisive and imply that Turing are trying to be socially exclusive? In fact, and again the evidence is way back on these threads, when the admissions point was first being developed in the inevitable (because of the imperfect process, and the loss of the Clifden site, to of course a sponsor that has a rather effective method of achieving social and local exclusivity in this borough) absence of a site, one consideration was for it to enable the school to be socially inclusive.

And I strongly suspect that if the site is not in catchment then there will be negotiation on the issue of including the children of the local neighbourhood, if that is a big issue with local parents, which of course it would not be if their community was already being served effectively by a school that met their needs and so was oversubscribed.

As Bluestars says it's about communities forged in the streets, nurseries, primary schools, after school clubs etc. of a neighbourhood, the communities that get broken up when parents have to move or send their children off on long journeys to distant schools, as a result of the lack of local provision.