Richmond Borough Schools Chat 8

[muminlondon2]

This thread follows on from Richmond Borough Schools Chat 7.

News and opinions on all the changes to schools in Richmond borough.

More chaos around the SATs. Nicky Morgan's DfE must surely be the most dysfunctional department in government.

Definitely the most dysfunctional department. It makes one think about the decisions they make when they give money to Academy/Free School Trusts for new schools. There appears to be absolutely no due diligence and checking on the people who are receiving this money

I see Collis has started a school fund. They're common place in secondary schools (where it’s more difficult to get parents to turn up to cake sales) but the funding situation is so dire they're now filtering down to primary level.

The Guardian reports: Academy trust lauded by Cameron falls apart as executive head quits:

The Birmingham multi-academy trust . . has collapsed, leaving the five schools it runs with mounting debts and an uncertain future . . Liam Nolan, the trust’s guiding force, has resigned from the organisation as executive head . . The trust’s governing board is also to step down, leaving the management of the trust’s five schools in the hands of the DfE until new academy sponsors can be found.

The trust’s financial difficulties, including debts estimated by one member of staff as reaching £1.8m and rising by tens of thousands of pounds each month, have deterred potential sponsors, meaning that the trust will probably be divided up and individual schools taken over by different sponsors . .

bluestars according to the Charities Commission a school fund was set up in 1993 with the constitution amended in 2009. Charitable school funds are not new, but expansions to three and four-form entry without the capital funding to stretch to chairs is quite new.

Giving six new schools to a trust governed by a ''superhead', who then siphons off £1.8 million for himself unchecked by governors or the DfE is quite new too.

The trust may be old but I believe the act of asking primary parents for a regular monthly donation is new, I don't know of any other state primary school around here that does so. Maybe Colis will start a trend.

I have been seen a similar request before as a Richmond primary parent, going back a few years. But a request for a specific annual amount tends to irritate parents and is counterproductive. What does work is if parents or parent governors are involved in a fundraising initiative, and there's a specific aim.

However, there's no way I would give fundraising time or any of my own money to an academy trust headed by an overpaid chief executive, or sponsored by a profit-making company.

This is now the norm for all the primary school is Richmond.
Collis were actually the last in Teddington to implement this.Most other primary have had this for at least the past 3 years.
it is a yearly donation which is not mandatory .

Really? Well I stand corrected. We've never been asked at Stanley (or maybe I missed the letter ).

The May 6 print RTT has a letter (p 17) re the Udney Park development, from Name and Address Supplied.

When I was a Collis parent it always seemed that the CSA actually had to raise money for essentials and things like the cost of school trips for children whose parents couldn't afford them, but the public focus was always on raising money for nice but not completely essential equipment and experiences. So maybe this new fund is more of a desire to go public on what has been a reality for years now - and the funding situation is getting worse of course. Perhaps it will extract some money from those parents who never get involved in anything!

The story about the collapse of the Perry Bar MAT has reminded me to send a follow up letter to Tania Mathias about the perils of academies as it neatly illustrates many of the illusions she seems to have absorbed about them. I have suggested that she looks a bit more closely into those behind Bellevue Education and GEMS Learning Trust and sent her a couple of links about the former!

I'm a Collis parent and I was one of those people suggesting to the school that they should introduce a voluntary contribution, given the funding struggles.

CSA - the Collis parents association - does a good job at fundraising but I'm more than happy to support the school directly.

The suggested contribution is £5 per month, I was actually surprised they set it so low at £60 per year - I was expecting £100 a year or so.

PS. Sacred Heart's yearly voluntary donation is £100, and has been for a number of years. It's a donation to the diocese for the school building, but I'd be happier to fund the school directly, not the church, if I were a SH parent...

Faith VA schools have to contribute 10% of the building and maintenance budget and this is usually raised directly from parents in this way. The highest suggested amount I can find is Tiffin (an anomaly I know) who suggest £520 per year per child!

RuTS has announced the headteacher, Kelly Dooley, currently deputy head at Cardinal Pole in Hackney.

I don't think requesting a contribution is the norm in all Richmond schools. Chase Bridge doesn't do it, for one.

Chase Bridge requests about £35 a year to cover school trips.

School trips is a bit different from a contribution towards the actual running costs of the school, though. Our Richmond primary doesn't ask for a yearly contribution either. And school trips generally come to much less than thirty quid a year (lots seem to be free) apart from residential things.

Every school in the country asks for payments to cover the cost of school trips, and that's been going on for decades. It really isn't the same as asking for a commitment to regular payments to run the school.

Two interesting reports for the Cabinet meeting on the Richmond West MAT and REEC to support the case for a loan of £400k with reserved rights to increase that to £1m for the former and £1.5m to the latter.

The report on the MAT specifies the issues that the Teddington and Waldegrave leadership teams focused on including interestingly the capital costs of adapting the school buildings for traditional pedagogy. So building work will be undertaken, as well as developing new curriculum materials, to move away from the LST educational model and funding is now forthcoming. An expensive experiment?

Richmond College is clearly facing funding issues in the interim period before the REEC is delivered. Hopefully the risk factors are not likely to materialise if this funding is put in place, especially the one that has the Council seeking a fallback site for RUTS

Sorry, the link cabnet.richmond.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=163&MID=3710

I see that also mentions a rationalisation of the sixth form provision. Does this mean closing one or both?

I thought Twickenham Academy sixth form had been suspended already. Find it quite depressing that schools are already having to borrow money from local authority to refurbish schools against the hope that more pupils will go there so local authority will give them the money to pay itself back with interest.

It is a mess.