Richmond Borough Schools Chat 7

[muminlondon2]

Lots and lots of discussions on local schools and education issues preceded this thread, including Richmond Borough Schools Chat 6.

Anyone who wants to carry on that discussion, and offer information and opinions (without being moderated by any particular individual or interest group, bearing in mind all the usual mumsnet guidelines about respect and not getting personal, etc.) - feel free.

On the earlier chat about Orleans Park, I wonder if it might join up with RUTS?
Their outstanding grade is quite old now and was with another Head so maybe they still need to prove themselves a bit too.My friend with a kid there reckons they'll be inspected soon.

If the Ofsted for Orleans Park is old, Waldegrave's is even older. No re-Ofsted yet for Nelson. But their sixth forms will have to be inspected soon in any case. Orleans Park has no involvement in the RuT school but Waldegrave is one of the co-sponsors.

The new trust - or Orleans Park - could be joined by Kingston schools in the future, maybe - Grey Court and Hollyfield share a head. That would be a good partnership for other schools to learn from because their Ofsted experience is recent and they are part of Achievent for Children. Unless the Wandsworth linkup changes all that because their children services seem to need need the same overhaul as Kingston's - which was the reason Richmond took them over as part of AfC.

Teddington is not rated Outstanding and as others have pointed out has a number of problems of it own to sort out, so it is indeed a worry that resources may be diverted to helping out the other schools. I gather they had no option as the academy financial benefits they received may have been withdrawn otherwise, but with students still reporting big staff turnover and low morale I am apprehensive.

I'm sure you are right Twix. I can't see how Waldegrave can manage supporting Nelson, being one of the sponsors of a new school opening in 2017 and giving extensive support to HA and TA. This suggests that quite a burden will fall on Teddington senior management which still has some issues of its own to resolve. Parents are annoyed as many of them said when Academy status was pushed upon Teddington 3-4 years ago "What will happen when the money runs out" and now we know. I'm afraid I do think the administration of LB Richmond is partly to blame as they were desperate to withdraw support for all their schools in line with Government policy and their desire to be a "commissioning only" Council and they failed to sort out HA and TA when they have known for several years that they weren't doing too well under Kunskapsskolan. Instead they made their top priority spending millions on a site to give to a school that 90% of children can't go to.

I don't think they could have done anything about Kunskaposkolan before now. There was some sort of break clause after 5 years in the funding agreement about an inadequate rating but that has not applied to HA/TA, therefore it is entirely up to Kunskappskolan to withdraw from that contract. And the contract was between Secretary of State and KS, not the LA. The sequence of events was:

HA - July 2013 Requires improvement
June 2015 Requires Improvement

TA - Nov 2013 Requires Improvement
December 2015 second monitoring report - 'now taking effective action' with new principal.

So insufficient grounds for the DfE to break that contract.

The clincher was Ipswich Academy getting an Inadequate judgement in January 2015. The follow-up monitoring report says 'a decision was made to replace the current sponsor' and that happened pretty damn quick. The DfE was able to terminate the contract.

Now there is probably no financial incentive for KS to stick with its U.K. venture. They only did this in the first place on the expectation of growth (e.g expanding to 30 schools), using the UK as a shop window for for global development. But the UK has a tougher inspection regime than Sweden and a ban on profit making. It's a business decision - neither the LA not the DfE have any legal grounds to force them out of these two schools. They are withdrawing voluntarily.

If the Conservatives are to be blamed, the LibDems deserve a big slice of that for approving these sponsors in the first place.

The funding agreement for Twickenham Academy is here. Hampton Academy's is here. It says specifically:

'The Secretary of State may give not less than seven Academy Financial Years' written notice to terminate this agreement ... The Company may give no less than fifteen Academy Financial Years' (or any shorter period which the parties may agree in writing from time to time) written notice ... '

Break clauses that enable the SoS to terminate immediately relate to a 'Special Measures Termination Event'. The contracts are signed by the Learning Schools Trust and the Secretary of State.

Incidentally, it says here you can see other funding agreements from the performance tables page by clicking on the entry for a particular school and going to the downloads section to the right. But Turing House doesn't have an individual funding agreement. It's been suggested by David Wolfe (the education barrister who I think also represented the BHA in the legal challenge against StRR) that schools with this umbrella agreement don't actually legally exist in their own right, so they could be closed down or merged, etc. by the sponsoring trust, but it seems that HA and TA had individual funding agreements (can't actually find that link but can search again if anyone is interested) so maybe they have more legal protections to carry on as individual schools.

Anyway, he summarises funding agreements on a blog post here.

So the gist is that there are horrendous legal complications in removing a sponsor, and it's not up the LA to do it. LBRuT did well to achieve any influence over the DfE if they made any recommendations.

'But Turing House doesn't have an individual funding agreement.'

Don't want to mislead here - although there may be a master agreement with general legal requirements, governance and accounting arrangements etc. applying to all schools, there should still be a supplemental funding agreement for each individual school. Like for RET's St Andrew the Apostle or BPET's Deer Park School. Neither TH nor the GEMS Twickenham Academy seem to be on there, however.

Sometimes there are very specific clauses about number of pupils registered on opening, or dates for planning permission etc. I can't see any criteria for pupil numbers at Deer Park but there was at St Andrew the Apostle and maybe Turing House too.

The BBC reports on the Swiss investigation of a Malaysian corruption and money laundering scandal. This seems to be about a fund called 1MDB with links to a company called Petrosaudi. A director of that company is also a director of Bellevue Education sponsoring the trust which runs Deer Park School. It all seems very complicated.

sixth forms will have to be inspected soon in any case
interesting - what is the rule in that regard?
What happens if a 6th form is deemed inadequate - would that drag down the category for the whole school? Wondering if that might be germane to the departure of the RPA Head.
As a separate point, what happens if a school cannot drum up enough takers for their 6th form? Again, thinking of RPA - where numbers have been tiny to start with - what is the minimum threshold to be viable?

Yo can have a sixth form that is 'good' but still be outstanding. Here's an example. If the sixth form is 'inadequate' it would be reflected in other criteria - such as quality of teaching, leadership and outcomes. If they're not outstanding, the school can't be.

No risk in the near future of RPA being classified Outstanding

Thanks for that information about the TA and HA funding agreements muminlondon I had not previously realised that those agreements were only with the D of Ed rather than also with LB Rich so I shall stop being so critical of the latter for not sorting them out! I can't see all the criteria that apply as it refers to a "Master agreement" but I find it lamentable that D of Ed only seem to have thought it was necessary to be able to terminate the agreement fairly quickly if the schools were put in "special measures". The notice periods for other sorts of termination are very lengthy (7 years or 15 years) which are virtually unworkable. It doesn't seem that D of Ed thought that still being rated "requires improvement" after 5 years should trigger much action against Kunskapsskolan. Probably just as well that they have decided to leave of their own accord. Perhaps they will be asked to pay something to sort out alternative management.

Tory MPs and council leaders are increasingly critical of the academies presumption for being unworkable and of governance arrangements as inadequate. For example, London is split between three regional school commissioners despite the massive cross-border movement so there is a separate ones for Richmond and Hounslow. How would they sort out any school that takes from both boroughs or make planning decisions? Not only HA/TA but Chiswick, Green School, Gumley, Heathland, etc? More fragmentation. It's a mess.

LProsser I've just found the master agreement at the bottom of the Elizabeth Woodville page. And just realised how the LA might have some link - Nick Whitfield was a director, although only one of 12, but since the beginning. It's possible that the special measures at Ipswich subsequently allowed appointment of additional directors by the Secretary of State. The legal situation could be very dfferent for RPA, but I'm sure I read somewhere that the DfE has additional representatives attending AET board meetings. But no directors from Richmond - and it's a much bigger chain.

I don't think the LA can have their blushes spared just because that contract is with the DfE when it was their decision to put all the eggs in one basket with handing over the reins to that sponsor. Even if the political leaders have changed since that time the officers advising them probably haven't and they have a lot of influence over decisions (DH works in local authority and says most elected councillors don't have a clue so they're heavily reliant on the advice they get behind the scenes). If they've had people embedded on the trust board there's not much to show for it - I wonder what their attendance record was like!

Shame there wasn't a mumsnet thread when TA/HA www bring academised. But perhaps a lot of parents didn't realise how governance of those schools might affect them.

Another way of looking at the LA officer embedded in the trust is that he worked with the choice of sponsor imposed by the LA and local politicians and made the best of it. The system itself relies on individuals trying to make things work, rather than local democratic accountability. He is now also Commissioner for Children’s Services in Sunderland - not so much that Richmond has taken over Sunderland but that as an individual his expertise is valued by the government.

HA/TA were academised under Labour’s academy scheme, different in several ways to what we have now. The LA was told that this was the only way to get the capital funds needed to rebuild the schools. Kunskaposkolan was the only sponsor offering to take them on; they wanted the opportunity to show British educationists =- and so the rest of they world - what they could do.

So the LA gave them the schools, recognising that this was a risky thing to do.

The decision was made after the council decided to fund the rebuilding of Teddington School rather than Whitton School (how much did that cost again? £36 million?). So it's appropriate that Teddington is part of the plan to take over its successor school after avademisation failed to raise standards to 'good'. Perhaps it's a moral payback thing.

A key meeting was the scrutiny meeting of September 2008 where Cllr Eady responded to criticism of handing both schools to one sponsor, saying 'some LEA Governors had asked Cllr Eady specifically for the sponsor in question'. Wonder who they were?

Meanwhile the Diirector of Children's Setvices had said 'it was impossible to move away from the Academy Programme, although we may be able to move away from having three academies.'

Later, after pressure from the Conservatives and criticism over 'sham consultations', the RPA sponsor was switched from Edutrust - which had been found to have financial irregularities - to AET. I've just noticed that the current CEO of AET was the CEO of Edutrust before. So little difference that made.

AET has been criticised heavily by Ofsted today - not good for RPA

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-35492433

The word was that the Council had to fund the rebuilding of Teddington rather than Whitton because Teddington was dangerously overcrowded and breaching health and safety legislation in all sorts of ways. That £36 million didn't even pay for all the fit out - there had to be a big fundraising effort by the community to finish it off. So no one feeling particularly guilty over here!

We have now had our official fact sheet about the new arrangements. There will be a new MAT just for HA and TA initially and the main involvement from Teddington for the first year will be the Head for 2 days per week. Teddington and Waldegrave Trust will join the new MAT by Jan 2017. We have been told that there is no intention for Teddington to lose its separate governors and independence but most people thinking hmmm...

That communities are having to chip in to supplement capital costs is still going on with our primary schools. The grants available for rebuilds were cut heavily after 2010, so those which have had to expand recently (Vineyard, Darell, East Sheen) have had smaller budgets and much more community fundraising for fit-out than, say, St Mary's and St Peters, or Lowther. But certainly HA/TA and RPA benefited from the bigger rebuild budgets despite the conditions attached since the money was committed under the Labour government.

From the minutes of the Council meeting January 19: ‘ . . 60.(e) Cllr Palmer asked the Strategic Cabinet Member for Children’s Services and Schools:

What were the value added results for our Secondary Schools last year?

Cllr Hodgins replied: “The value added scores in principle are in fact arguably more important than the GCSE results in that they tell how schools are adding value and how students are improving in those schools. Like any measure it’s an imperfect measure, it’s balanced against the rest of the country, a score of 1000 is the national average and it’s all very tightly bound against that. But last year we improved on average from 1006 to 1009. So we (are) above the national average in our results and in the value we are adding and we’re also improving relative to the rest of the country in the value that were adding. At the same time that we are putting in sixth forms and doing so much more in our schools, which our Lib Dem colleagues told us not to do. The results speak for themselves.”

Cllr Palmer posed a supplementary question in respect of outstanding performances. In response Cllr Hodgins congratulated Waldegrave, Grey Court, Orleans Park, Teddington and Christ’s schools for their performance. Cllr Frost posed a supplementary question in respect of AS results in Richmond In response Cllr Hodgins stated that Richmond schools did very well in AS results. However some schools did not do as well as the Council had hoped. Cllr Evans posed a supplementary question in respect of areas of concern. In response Cllr Hodgins stated that sponsored academies in Richmond were the lowest three performing schools across both Richmond and Kingston . . ‘

So sponsored academies were the lowest 3 performing schools across both Richmond and Kingston. It makes one think that this whole Academy/Free School situation in the Borough is a bad idea. Unfortunately this Government continues to carry on with these plans and also putting schools on unsuitable sites. Education in the Borough is going downhill and parents have no say in what is going on.

Auntie - those schools performed abysmally over many years under LA control so there is not reason to imagine they would have improved if they had remained under that control they might have worsened.

Any news yet on the annointment of the Barnes HT as new HT of RPA ?

Well it will be interesting to see if TA and HA improve more in next few years than they did under last 2 arrangements. Suspect it will take several years to persuade more local families to use them. Will it be complicated to change the teaching methods back to something more conventional?