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.

Do you mean Surbiton High taken into the state sector from the private sector? Well, there have been quite a few private schools taken over in this way - though mostly the struggling ones. Or that GDST would act as a sponsor of other academies? It co-sponsors a school in Liverpool but that seems to be it.

The school attended by the PM and Michael Gove is Grey Coat Hospital School, an academy converter. Its governors include a representative from the London Diocesan Board for Schools, the Dean of the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster and the Chair of the Council of Queen Anne’s School, Caversham, which is an independent boarding school that is part of The Grey Coat Hospital Foundation.

So it always was part of a private school charitable foundation, which sets it apart from most LA schools. It's also a standalone academy and not part of an MAT, and we've seen in Richmond that's considered increasingly less economically viable even for a secondary school, let alone a primary school. Primary schools will need to belong to an MAT, but CoE, Catholic and non-denominational schools will all need separate arrangements and the teachers will be employed by different organisations. Which puts an end to the effective collaboration we have had in this borough while they've all been under the local authority.

A worrying trend is the takeover of non-denominational schools by religious trust academy chains, against the wishes of parents:

• the evangelical Christian Oasis chain (which took over the Turing headteacher's old comprehensive - although this is outstanding under the latest head, the chain's management has been criticised by Ofsted)

• Chapel Street, also evangelical Christian, which is financially troubled (its plans for a new secondary school were bounced out of Merton and now seem to have been quashed in Kingston)
• Tauheedul Islam Trust, which is taking over schools even where less than 2% of the pupils are muslim, much to the anxiety of parents who are not being consulted at all.

attended by the daughters of the PM and Michael Gove

No, it was just an observation regarding Nicky Morgan and Surbiton High. I don't believe it is struggling or wishes to convert to an academy.

Another interesting thing about both Grey Coat and Surbiton High is that it is that they are split site schools with Lower and Upper students separated in different buildings. I think this was suggested previously as an option for Turing House. Livingstone house could accommodate 7-9s and another site close by could be found for GCSE and sixth form students perhaps.

Yes, the academy chains could take over non-faith schools and convert them. This is just as likely to happen in Richmond Borough as any other I suppose.

Anyone know roughly how many waiting list places tend to be given out for Orleans Park from now to just before the new Autumn term starts, either from previous years (what number it's got to & extra distance) or maybe what might be expected this year?
The distance offers for Orleans seem to have dropped quite a lot this year - is it expected to continue dropping next year?

I only remember it was about 50 three years ago. Maybe less the year after when TH didn't open as planned. Next year RTS opens - perhaps like Kingston Academy and Grey Court, patterns will take time to get established.

Jodah the problem is that LBRUT no longer hand out details of the numbers of offers they have made for each school. A couple of years ago they made more offers over and above the admissions numbers to ensure they did not have any parents not offered a school place at all but that meant that the waiting lists moved more slowly. Last year they did not provide parents with that information and even refused FOI requests which indicates a level of defensiveness, but the lists moved more quickly because the admissions numbers were increased. Next year that temporary increase will revert to the old admissions numbers. This year we know that there are parents who made on time applications with no offer of a school place as well as those who had no preferences met. The Council have actually removed the sentence in the press release which claimed all on time applicants have been offered a place, but not before that claim made it into the local press annoying a lot of parents in the schools affected. www.richmond.gov.uk/home/council/news/press_office/older_news/march_2016/offer_day_secondary_school_places_announced.htm

In fact the Council has itself been warning parents for at least three years that the Orleans catchment was likely to shrink to the extent it would not reach the Heath Road railway bridge, part of the impetus for Turing parents. The best source of advice is the Council admissions team who are generally more frank in private than the spin that makes it into press releases.

Jodah - last year i know of children who were 50th on the waiting list for OP and got in. the initial offers stopped just at heath rd bridge but there were people getting in eventually from quite far down meadway. i guess you can expect people beyond twick green to maybe get in this year but again this will shrink even further especially if there are extra classes at both OP primary, st mary's and vineyard. i expect that the catchment will soon be confined to st margarets only v soon.

It has only reached just past Radnor Road on first allocations this year.

No extra class at Vineyard this year.

Now the government wants to scrap the role of parent governor. Instead we get a portal.

QTS also to go.

www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/17/parent-governor-role-scrapped-schools-teacher-qualifications

Scrapping QTS gives heads the chance to fast track trainee teachers into shortage subject posts. This is important given current the teacher recruitment crisis. It is made to sound as though standards will be improving with the new system.

Nicky Morgan doesn't much value the current system for teacher training if she says that QTS is : “...being an almost automatic award to staff who complete initial teacher training and a year in the classroom...". I think a lot of teaching staff would disagree that QTS after the initial teacher training and a year in the classroom was 'an automatic award'. Sounds as if she thinks they just turn up and get QTS at the end of it.

To obtain QTS teachers must provide suitable evidence for each of the teachers' standards. There are also professional skills tests to complete. The drop-out rates are always high as obtaining QTS is not easy.

She says: "it will be for the teaching profession itself to decide when a teacher is ready to be accredited. This will ensure that the decision is made by those who know best what makes a great teacher: outstanding schools and heads.” Outstanding schools have always been involved in teacher training and senior teachers have been already been observing and assessing those teachers. This isn't anything new.

So when she says: "the new accreditation will be awarded when teachers have demonstrated deep subject knowledge and the ability to teach well". I'm not sure what she feels teachers who gained QTS were doing to gain that qualification previously. The QTS standards after all were government standards.

This is not a statement from Nicky Morgan which is going to go to help the teacher recruitment and retention crisis.

As for scrapping parent governors she says: "The new emphasis will be on the skills – for example in business or finance – that an individual brings to a governing body". This sort of implies that those parent governors weren't bringing any other skills to those governing bodies apart from being a parent. I'm sure we can all agree that that isn't really fair on those who are currently parent-governors. But it is rather telling of the way this is heading when business and finance expertise in particular are mentioned.

All the parents I have seen on ballot papers to be governors, or know personally, have impressive professional skills in law, accountancy, management, communications, etc. But the fact is, they've also been able to represent the experience of parents who are a major stakeholder (if we have to use business jargon) in the success of the school. Schools are a community partnership. I think this sends out the strangest message - anti-democratic, anti-parent, anti-community. This is not the Big Society that was promised.

If the individuals with those skills that are to be elected governors instead of parent-governors are also parents then I don't really see what changes.

Unless if they are also parents of children at the school then they are no longer eligible to be elected. I doubt they would do that.

Seems to me like she is trying to reinvent the wheel.

Scrapping QTS however means that the numbers of teachers with QTS at a school will become an irrelevant and meaningless statistic.

BBC question time last night had the following:

Nick Morgan: we believe the best people to run schools are headteachers and teachers.

Dimbleby: And what if they don’t want to become an academy?

Nicky Morgan: WE want all schools to become academies

Schools Week suggests that the costs of academy conversion - e.g. pension liabilities and legal costs - may need to be borne by schools, cash-strapped though they already are.

'There are also extra costs for converting specific schools – such as those with private finance initiative (PFI) contracts or church schools.'

That covers nearly 20 primary schools in the borough. And I'm assuming only Marshgate and Kew Riverside are PFI - it might also cover the new buildings of others. Double whammy for schools like St Mary's and St Peter's, then?

A separate Schools Week investigation has found that £8 million has been spent to make staff redundant despite the teacher shortage. That includes £5 million spent by AET.

The CEO of AET was paid £220,000 in 2014. The director of Harris is on £370,000. In comparison the CEO of Achieving for Children, Nick Whitfield, is very cheap at £148,263, being responsible not only for a hundred or more primary schools within Richmond and Kingston, but also social services. The taxpayer has had very good value for money from LAs, certainly this borough.

Going back to Orleans shrinking catchment. I think one problem is housing costs. Lots of people in 1 or 2 bed flats and small 2 bed houses who historically would have moved on to bigger house as their children grew older are still having to live their with older children/teens meaning these flats aren't just couples and couples with first baby anymore . And if you look at the number of extra classes at St Mary's and StStephens/Orleans primary its not surprising.

Round here many of the parents who stand for parent-governor do have the qualifications and professions that the Government would probably feel are appropriate but I think it's shockingly undemocratic to get rid of parent governors altogether. It may make it very hard to get enough governors in rural or less well off areas - I'm thinking of a small school that I know of in Cumbria where the Chair of Governors is a parent and farmer - I expect he would be sacked!

Trafalgar is a PFI school. The running costs are high and I think LB Richmond has a long (perhaps 25 year contract). Not sure that PFI contractors will allow contracts to be transferred to small new academy trusts for individual schools. I don't think the primaries round here will want to become stand-alone academies judging by how they reacted last time. Time for the Waldegrave MAT to be vastly expanded!

On the subject of Turing House admissions affecting Teddington which you were discussing a few days ago I noticed from the dots on the map showing 2015 year 7 Turing entry that there were only about 4 children from the classic central and south Teddington Teddington School catchment area last year. As someone else pointed out with St John the Baptist and SMSP both going to 3 forms of entry and Collis now having bulge classes so 4 forms of entry in several years starting with current year 5, I think parents in North Teddington/Fulwell will definitely still struggle to get their children into Teddington in future years so Turing House will be badly needed especially for boys. The number of children going private in Teddington does vary a bit from year to year however and some of the allure of the shiny new Teddington School building may be wearing off by now!

Most Councils already have a scheme to recruit governors with business /legal skills, and a lot of large businesses have schemes to encourage and train employees to become school governors as part of their corporate social responsibility strategy. There is already the opportunity for anyone with relevant business or legal skills who is minded to to become a school governor so where they think there is some huge reservoir to replace those parents governors who are motivated by their investment in the school community I don't know. Frankly it is a lot easier to recruit the latter who will be more likely to be motivated to learn the relevant skills if they do not have them already than the former. It is just the same dogma that is dictating health service reform, that organisations work better if run on business lines and with maximum private sector involvement to achieve that end, without the pragmatism that is the most important business skill of all. Then the politicians have no more knowledge of business than they do education or healthcare and their ears are wide open to self interested lobbying.

And how are they going to legislate for those parents who actually did sacrifice their lives to go through all the tedious politics and bureaucracy of the Free School process to deliver to their community the sort of school parents want and need, gaining or developing all sorts of skills and knowledge on the way? Will they have to go through a selection process where some bureaucrat decides whether they have the skills the government has decided are needed according to some expensive Consultants template which doubtless will not value the commitment and vision they have already manifested. Lots of expensive Consultants make a fortune out of exploiting the yearning of big business to cultivate that level of motivation in their employees.

I'd have thought the skills needed by a governing body are a general mix of education, business, leadership and finance experience as well as local community knowledge so there will be plenty of parents round here still eligible to apply even if they can't be elected. I wouldn't be surprised If the whole election thing leads to some dodgy appointments in some schools round the country though so I'm guessing that's why its being scrapped (or is it being made optional rather than scrapped altogether? I haven't figured that bit out).

It's a White Paper not legislation yet, and the reaction to this has been overwhelmingly critical. I suppose nothing is going to get done in government until the EU referendum is over so they had to put a few dead cats on the table, so to speak.

Good article in the Guardian on what parent governors bring to schools.

Seems like Nicky Morgan is reacting to the Ofsted Chief Inspector's recommendations with regard to parent governance.

I have heard from other governors of parent governors who were not constructive or useful but shamelessly followed an agenda related to the interests of a clique of parents and in particular of their own child, it is true perspective can be an issue for some parent governors, but that has been from parent governors who were committed to doing the job well and motivated to use their skills in a constructive way, and they were working with a majority that meant the impact of one governor could be minimised.

When it comes to governors following a political /ideological agenda or just the well meaning incompetents I don't see why those appointed from the business community are going to be any less likely to do / be so. Presumably in the Trojan horse schools the majority of governors, most of whom were appointed, were subverting the educational strategies. Doing away with elected governors creates the opportunity for cronyism and recruiting only yes men.

Twick13: The St Margaret’s Community Website has a piece about social change, gentrification and over-developmment, then and now, The Triumph of the 'Tripods':

They loom over the rooftops and chimney pots like the Martian ‘Tripods’ in “War of the Worlds”, these soaring builder’s towers of scaffold and sheeting. Once there were none. Now our streets are full of them – with more to come. They are the changing face of our community. They are the future . . By the early 1990’s the Victorian two-up, two-down terraces of St Margarets, once on sale for £350 were going for over £120,000. The milkman and the railway worker, the lodging house keeper and the plumber, the clerk in the candle factory and the woman who boiled beetroots have all gone, replaced as the ‘Rich and Twick’ predicted in 1919 by “good class would-be tenants”… the banker and the IT expert, the television producer and the financial advisor, the actor in the weekly soap and the script writer who created it.

Now, in the same terraced streets, from beneath the plastic skirts of the ‘Martian Tripods’, the first £1 million pound houses are beginning to appear …