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.

There's been times I haven't voted in parent gov elections because I haven't known the candidates and found it hard to choose based on a few línes and no steer from the school as to the job spec or what they were looking for. In a friend's school there was only one candidate so they got the job without a vote. If they're meant to be real governors not token gestures they should be properly appointed. Parents could still be on the appointment panel and briefed on the skills the school is looking for so they are better able to make a good decision.

Why should we vote for police commissioners or mayors - most of whom are self-interested politicians rather than ex-police officers or someone with experience of running transport, housing, social services or businesses - and not school governors, who actually have a stake in the school? Agee with Frustrated that unelected governors who are are appointed to serve a particular agenda or the interests of a trust (which could be a religious organisation) can be much more useless, biased, unquestioning or cronyist than parents who have at stake in the school as a user of the system.

Who has the title deeds for all of our schools?

The churches will have them for their schools, often subject to a condition that if the site is no longer needed for a school it should be returned to the donor's heirs.

The Independent reports on two referendums to force a debate over the government's announcement to force the admission of all primary and remaining secondary schools. They're very near to the 100,000 target.

Hold a public inquiry and a referendum over turning all schools into academies

Scrap plans to force state schools to become academies.

David Blunkett in the Guardian suggests the key to getting the government to back down will be opposition from Conservative council leaders whose job of managing school supply will be completely unworkable.

The Architects Journal has Government sets aside £200m to build new free schools:

. . The White Paper also proposes several new measures to speed up conversions by improving academy developers’ access to public land. Under one proposal, the secretary of state will seize school land held by local authorities once the school has officially gained academy status. This land will then be leased by Whitehall to an academy trust.

Another measure will allow ministers to direct councils to make public land available for free schools. This would ‘ensure sufficient new schools can be established where they are needed . . ‘The academy system is now sufficiently mature to move to the next phase, with every school an academy . . Local authorities will have a new duty to facilitate the process of all maintained schools becoming academies. . . Where schools are not academies or have not started the process by 2020, we will take steps to direct them to become academies so that by 2022 we will have brought a definitive end to the role of local authorities in maintaining schools.’

The Guardian has Nicky Morgan under fire over Mumsnet post on academisation - Reaction from parents to education secretary’s guest post is uniformly hostile, her plans condemned as ‘horrifying’:
The education secretary, Nicky Morgan, has come under fire from furious parents on Mumsnet following a guest post in which she defended government plans to force all schools to become academies. Hundreds of parents (nearly 700 at Monday 6pm) responded to the post which went up on Friday after the publication of the education white paper and continued to attract comments over the weekend and into Monday . .

.........
Bring back Michael Gove!

A long but illuminating blog in the implications of forcing all schools to become academies:

The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Schools. Or “Of Course It’s Bloody Privatisation”

Thanks, muminlondon2 Here’s the essence of it:

. . Our schools are going to be stripped from the public sector . . and handed over to private companies . . who need have no connection at all to . . your community. Your school . . is to become a local franchise of an edubusiness. Noting the charitable status of the edubusiness is a red herring: charities are not public sector bodies; Eton is, after all, a charity . .

disidealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/the-mysterious-case-of-the-disappearing-schools-how-state-schools-will-be-privatised-without-anyone-noticing/

I hadn't realised the ceasing of the elected parent governor posts removed an obstacle to the MATs running their schools centrally. . I know that many local primaries, parents, governors and staff are vehemently opposed to becoming part of MATs. It seems that reflects a considerable national groundswell of opinion. At least the MAT now taking over TA and HA is local and not another chain that has no connection to the area and it's own agenda to promote, although from the Head of Teddington's words he clearly felt that with no alternative but that there was no alternative.

Whittonmum in relation to the link to the article on title deeds there has been a long debate elsewhere on mumsnet, it seems to be a hobby horse for some. However the terms of ownership, or lease, are in each school's funding agreement. There is a model here, though that can be varied www.gov.uk/government/publications/academy-and-free-school-funding-agreements-single-academy-trust . Schools have responsibility for the buildings whilst the funding agreement lasts and can't dispose of them without the permission of the Secretary of State, but if it ends they must hand the buildings back. So the DofE has a similar level of control to that the LA had, not dissimilar to the lease granted to the Catholic Church for St Richard Reynolds at a peppercorn rent, except that is for 99 years........

Relevant section of the model funding agreement Restrictions on Land transfer

5.1. The Academy Trust must:
a) within 28 days of the signing of this Agreement in circumstances where the Land is transferred to the Academy Trust prior to the date of this Agreement, or otherwise within 28 days of the transfer of the Land to the Academy Trust, apply to the Land Registry using Form RX1 for the following restriction (the “Restriction”) to be entered in the proprietorship register for the Land:
No disposition of the registered estate by the proprietor of the registered estate is to be registered without a written consent signed by the Secretary of State for Education, of Sanctuary Buildings, Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BT;

b) take any further steps reasonably required to ensure that the Restriction is entered on the proprietorship register;
c) promptly confirm to the Secretary of State when the Restriction has been registered;
d) if it has not registered the Restriction, permit the Secretary of State to do so in its place; and
e) not, without the Secretary of State’s consent, apply to disapply, modify, cancel or remove the Restriction, whether by itself, a holding company, a subsidiary company, or a receiver, administrator or liquidator acting in the name of the Academy Trust.
Obligations of the Academy Trust

5.2. The Academy Trust must keep the Land clean and tidy and make good any damage or deterioration to the Land. The Academy Trust must not do anything to lessen the value or marketability of the Land without the Secretary of State’s consent.
5.3. The Academy Trust must not, without the Secretary of State’s consent:
a) grant any consent or licence; or
b) create or allow any encumbrance; or
c) part with or share possession or occupation; or
d) enter into any onerous or restrictive obligations,
in respect of all or part of the Land.

Option

Except the NAO identified confusion over £20-40 million of land and assets that appear to belong to individual trusts, not the government. This was a particular problem at Durand Academy where the CEO had made money (in the region of £160k per year) out of management fees paid to his private company that ran leisure facilities on the school’s site, including a dating agency: ^'Sir
Greg said the land had been “gifted” from the academy trust to a separate organisation. '^

mum it is the job of those organisations like the NAO and OFSTED who provide the checks and balances to highlight these sorts of irregularities, after all the Trojan horse issue happened on the LA watch. The Dof E are now having to address what were actually a whole raft of accounting irregularities rather than a case of the land being in the hands of academy's to do with as they liked. schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-needs-to-spend-20m-to-resolve-academy-land-confusion/. The entrepreneurial Head was called to account by MPs and I wish I had been there to see Margaret Hodge give it from both barrels "You are being paid a lot of money as a headteacher. You take yourself a generous slug of money, which we believe to be public money,’ she said ‘You then find time – with your school having been seen as excellent but now only being rated as good by Ofsted – to set up a dating agency.
‘When I looked, somebody called Saffron, who works on the Twitter account, was semi-nude with all sorts of black underwear all over the place.
‘It seems deeply inappropriate for a head teacher to do that on premises where you are also conducting educational business'

I share your cynicism about allowing some of these private sector businesses in to run schools, and it would seem removing some of the inconvenient checks and balances like elected parent governors, and local accountability (although they had limited power to achieve real change, the RPA governing body had a history of many well meaning parents giving up hope of making a difference) that might make life a little harder. However let's be clear that The LEAs had their issues, and bad apples too.

Here's that predicted dismay and opposition from Tory councillors:

“I suppose I’m going to have to suck it up but I think they’ve gone bonkers,” [the cabinet member for education for Oxfordshire county council] said. “We made a really determined effort to keep all the academies in our family of schools in Oxfordshire. We had them come in and talk to us about what we could do to help.

“This has just blown that right out of the water. Now we will have no relationship with them. All of a sudden it’s going - after all the hard work and the years of deeply caring about it.”

I can understand the Councillors' frustration. Interestingly Oxfordshire is a Council who have a very good record of school place provision in spite of a rapidly growing school age population. They have long had a proactive policy of aiming to have sufficient spare capacity so that they can meet the need for school places without putting parents through the sort of experience they have in Richmond. If you have been able to provide parents (who are also voters) with good provision like that it must be very frustrating to have that power taken away.

"Not all unfilled school places can be considered “surplus”. The Audit Commission advises that some margin of spare school capacity is necessary to provide some flexibility for unexpected influxes of children and expressions of parental preference. The Audit Commission does not recommend a single level of spare places that would be appropriate, but has stated that 10% spare capacity is generally agreed as the level providing both good use of resources and an opportunity for parents to express a preference.

The 2004 Oxfordshire School Organisation Plan, which was adopted by the Oxfordshire School Organisation Committee acting under its statutory powers at that time contained within the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, set a target figure of 10% unfilled primary and secondary places as sensible for planning purposes in the county. For primary schools this was further refined to targets of 8% spare places in urban areas and 12% in rural areas in the Oxfordshire Primary Strategy for Change, which was first approved by OCC Cabinet in July 2006, and finally approved by DfE in 2009."

Page 7 www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/cms/sites/default/files/folders/documents/childreneducationandfamilies/educationandlearning/schools/ourworkwithschools/pupilplaceplan/pupilplaceplans_complete.pdf

This week’s print RTT has ‘Kids face uncertainty’(p 1) (Newhouse closure), ‘(Richmond) college set for £11.7 mn extra cash (from the Mayor)’ (p 3) and ’Schools set to apply stringent place rules’ (p 8) plus a letter ‘Tragedy of Academies’ from Cllrs Jenny Churchill and Penny Frost and Andree Frieze (p 19)

Introducing the Richmond West Schools Trust......apologies this is a bit long. NB. Teddington School has nine parent governors - not sure what Nicky Morgan would have to say about that!

24th March 2016
Dear Families
Following our previous communications, we are pleased to announce that plans and funding for the proposed new governance arrangements for Twickenham Academy and Hampton Academy have been approved by the Department for Education (DfE).
Teddington School and the Waldegrave Trust were approached by the DfE and asked to consider the feasibility of establishing a local multi academy trust (MAT), which is a group of schools working together to share best practice, economies of scale, joint systems and approaches. Following a detailed review, and further input from the DfE, Teddington School and the Waldegrave Trust have agreed to create a new MAT which will lead Hampton and Twickenham Academies. The new MAT will be called The Richmond West Schools Trust. This arrangement will result in the Learning Schools Trust withdrawing their sponsorship of the Hampton and Twickenham Academies and new governance being created.
The MAT will begin working with the Academies immediately and formal hand over will happen in September 2016. Teddington School and the Waldegrave Trust will join the MAT in 2017.
Please find attached some FAQs, which provide some further detail.
Yours sincerely
Jennifer Johnson Chair of Governors

FAQs
What is the anticipated timetable? It is anticipated that Teddington School and Waldegrave Trust will formally take on the governance of the two other schools on 1 September 2016. Both the Waldegrave Trust and Teddington School will seek to join the new Multi Academy Trust in January 2017.

Will the Learning Schools Trust be involved? No the Learning Schools Trust will no longer be involved with the two academies.

Does this mean the schools are merging? No. We are creating a new Multi Academy Trust (MAT) for Hampton and Twickenham Academies. This MAT will be governed by a new trust board which will be controlled equally by Teddington School and the Waldegrave Trust. The intention is for Teddington School and the Waldegrave Trust to become members of this MAT in January 2017. Teddington School will retain financial independence and its own governing body even after it becomes a member of the MAT

How will we ensure this doesn’t affect Teddington adversely? Understandably, the key concern from our parental consultation was the need to ensure that Teddington School continues to raise its standards and establishes itself as an outstanding school delivering excellent outcomes for all its students. This was a key priority for governors (nine of whom are parents themselves) when making their decision. With this in mind we agreed the following:
• Mr Wilkinson will focus on the new MAT for between one and two days a week only. This is possible because his work at the MAT will be largely directional. The MAT will be recruiting staff and/or consultants to carry out the required work.
• One of our current Deputies (Rebecca Poole) has been promoted to Senior Deputy and will act as Head of School when Mr Wilkinson is not on site. Mr Wilkinson will be on site at Teddington School every day.
• A new additional part-time senior leadership post of two days a week has been recruited to cover any extra workload. This post will be funded by the MAT and not Teddington School.
• There will be no need to use any other Teddington School staff.

Will standards at Waldegrave School and Teddington School be affected? There is good evidence, from other schools, that working in collaboration impacts positively on all students involved in the collaboration. This is what has been seen throughout the time that Waldegrave School have worked in a MAT with Nelson School. By working together Waldegrave School and Teddington School will have the opportunity to share systems, teaching methods and staffing expertise to ensure that standards improve across all schools.

How will it affect students at Teddington School? Students should see no difference in their day to day experience at school with teaching staff, learning and structures all remaining exactly as they are now.

How will it affect staff at Teddington School? The governors recognise that staff cannot work any harder and our priority is to make sure this is not required of them. It is anticipated that in the first year that only Mr Wilkinson will be required to work for the MAT.

Why can Teddington School and Waldegrave School succeed when other trusts have not? The reason the DfE and the LA wanted our two schools to lead this project is that we can offer a head teacher with significant local experience of leading an outstanding school and a head teacher who has significant experience of leading whole school transformation. After a seven week period of close scrutiny at both Hampton and Twickenham Academies the heads of both Teddington School and Waldegrave School believe this is a transformation they can lead and both of their governing bodies have fully supported them.

Why did the governors support this proposal?
The proposal is well funded. This means that:
o a panel of experts, e.g. in Maths, English, Science, can be recruited to the MAT to support the work at Hampton and Twickenham Academies. Teddington and Waldegrave Schools will also have immediate access to these experts.
o The MAT is able to employ external consultants and new staff to implement the required changes at the two Academies and the work will not affect Teddington or Waldegrave Schools
o The staff at Teddington School are in support of the proposal and the governors believe it will lead to a boost in morale which can only be to our benefit
o Visioning and subsequent planning work undertaken by the governors last year identified two key challenges facing Teddington School:
o Funding is likely to fall in real terms. This proposal identifies cost savings available to Teddington School in both the short and longer term
o Recruiting and retaining the very best staff is increasingly challenging and we believe that the proposal offers significant benefits in this area
o Government policy and funding arrangements are increasingly focused on schools working in partnership. By opting for this proposal Teddington School will be able to be a leading partner in a way that will ensure our values and culture are protected
o A local solution for all four schools means we can develop a common purpose in recruiting both staff and students and work together rather than in direct competition

Not quite sure about the last point on recruiting staff for a common purpose and not being in competition with each other. How does that work when teachers are meant to work only in their own schools & only heads (now) & newly recruited experts in maths, English & science (later) spend time across other schools?

Teddington School will retain financial independence and its own governing body even after it becomes a member of the MAT

Will it, though? And Waldegrave too?
Who will be in charge - the (rather confusing) structure of trustees, directors, members?
If the headteachers, what if the current heads leave or retire - who would take over management?
Is the timing meant to coincide with the opening of RTS and is that why it is the 'Richmond West Schools Trust'?
Will Achieving for Children be involved? If so, what's the relationship between AfC and the council - all down to Nick Whitfield or does Lord True and Paul Hodgins have any formal link or influence that would enable parents to write to them if we aren't happy?
Does the name imply there will be a Richmond East Schools Trust?

Gosh, so many questions.

MumInLondon , some of these issues are addressed in The Mysterious Case of the Disappearing Schools. Or “Of Course It’s Bloody Privatisation” that you linked to on Mar 21:

. . Imagine you have a local independent coffee shop, and it’s taken over by Starbucks. That’s getting close to what we have when your school disappears into a MAT.

The MAT has control over :

Budget – all funding goes to the MAT, and it is not hypothecated to individual schools
Staffing – staff are employed by the MAT – not your ex-school
Governance – your Local Governing Body has all the freedom the MAT allows. Or doesn’t.
School policies – Ever wondered why all the Harris uniforms look so similar…?

. . unfortunately, some people are mistaking what the MAT is currently choosing to allow with what the ex-schools have the power to insist upon. It may be true that the MAT is currently allowing individual ex-schools to maintain an illusion of independence. It may not interfere in budget allocations once it has decided how much to delegate to its local branche . . But it doesn’t have to do any of these things. Indeed, it actually has several duties and interests which clash with such a hands-off position.

The MAT’s duties actually discourage them from allowing local autonomy

Take funding, for example. The MAT Board is in charge of funding – not the ex-school’s local governing body. MAT Directors have a legal duty to allocate funding in the best interests of all their students as they perceive those interests. Note : “their” students, not the “school’s” students. So if one of the other ex-schools down the road hits a financial bump, then not only can the MAT board simply remove funds from your ex-school to meet the other ex-school’s needs, but they actually have a legal duty to do so.

Written by Disapppointed Idealist - an experienced teacher at a large comprehensive school. Prior to retraining to join the front line, I worked at the Department for Education for over a decade.

There’s a more recent post: Arguments for Schools Privatisation: Is This Really The Best You Can Do?.

You could post the letter from Richmond West Schools Trust there for them to interpret.

It may well be that this is the best option for Teddington and Waldegrave - even if it is a bad one.

The Council will lose the last vestiges of any say in or responsibility for what happens.

Yes, other questions appear answered in that blog:

The Members are ... “akin to the shareholders in a company”. They can appoint Trustees and have “ultimate control” over the MAT.
The Trustees are responsible for the operation of the MAT. ... company directors, responsible for “holding headteachers to account”, “setting the direction” of the MAT, and managing the finances.

Trustees can be Members. So the guys in charge can be holding, err, themselves, to account.

So are the head teachers trustees - holding themselves to account? That would explain the latest scandal of Perry Beeches super head Liam Nolan, who paid his own company £1.3 million without a contract or procurement contract.

But then again, where the heads aren't trustees, trusts could be controlled by businesses like Kunskapsskolan or off-shore trusts based in the Cayman Islands with no background in education. No teachers in sight, let alone parents.

Here's how I imagine it will work:

Each trust will be required to appoint a Chief Executive Officer, a Boss, to whom the head teachers and staff will report. The Boss will be accountable to the Board of Directors. The Board will be accountable to the Members at Annual or Extraordinary General Meetings, as laid down in the MAT's Articles of Association. This is the normal model for companies, including those not-for-profit and limited guarantee.

Some of the present governors will become Directors if they are suitably skilled or experienced. The rest will be thanked and told they are no longer needed but they will be very welcomes to volunteer to help out one way or another. Other directors will be recruited from the local business class as only they will be deemed to have anything to offer (e.g. know to use a spreadsheet, read a balance sheet, prepare a cashflow forecast, sack someone).

It's not clear whether they will be paid for their valuable time or how much. As these skills are generic no knowledge of the specific problems of running a school will be required.

What can possibly go wrong?

This is interesting on the front of the lib dem newsletter in Hampton Hill ...
"Turing House Scool - Why in Whitton?
A new school is going to Whitton despite concerns about shortages of secondary school places in Fulwell, Hampton Hill and North West Teddington. Your local Lib Dem councillors want to know why local parents are being ignored.
According to the Council, the provision of Secondary Schools is out of its hands, and it is now the business of Free schools, in conjunction with the Government, to provide education.
Cllr Jerry Elloy said, "This was not the case before the election when the current Conservative Administration decided to make the most convenient local site available to the Catholic Church despite the overwhelming need of children in this ward.
They had the opportunity then to create a borough school while leaving it open to the Diocese to follow the Free School route, but no doubt they felt it more important to secure the Catholic vote and win the election".
The obvious site for a new school is Udney Park Road playing fields, closer to this ward than Teddington School. With the national Conservative Government controlling the Education Department, you would think your Conservative Council would fight hard to get the best deal for its children and have the school built there.
Cllr Jonathan Cardy added "The Conservative Cabinet Member did what he does best - sat on his hands. If the Udney Park Road option was too difficult, why not the alternative site opposite Sainsbury's St Clare's store on the Uxbridge Road? That is far closer to the area of greatest need".
Cllr Elloy added "However, it is already clear that increasing secondary school numbers will exceed projected capacity and that this approach irresponsibly fails to face the reality of the situation. I and my ward colleague Jonathan Cardy are pressing the Council for a more responsible solution by bringing Turing House School to the Uxbridge Road site"."

I came across this from Hampton North conservatives too, although it's a few months old ...
hamptonnorthconservatives.yourcllr.com/category/education/

The LRB Blog has Schools Business:

. . The Education and Adoption Act 2016 (Royal Assent Mar 16):

• compels councils and school governors to co-operate in the forced academisation of eligible schools;
• removes any requirement for consultation with parents, governors or local authorities;
• and allows the education secretary to control the make-up of the ‘interim executive boards’ that oversee a school’s conversion into an academy . .

There are still a few loopholes to be closed, however. One is the recommendation, set out in the academy articles of association . . that all multi-academy trusts (MATs) should have two elected parent trustees or representatives, either on the board of the MAT or on each school’s governing body . . this prescription is to be dropped. (There will be) payment to ‘attract the very best people’: ‘as we move towards a system where every school is an academy, fully skills-based governance will become the norm’.

The minister responsible for school governance is Lord Nash, the parliamentary under secretary of state for schools. He . . set up Future Academies, which runs a small chain of schools in Westminster . . In 2013, Nash told the Independent Academies Association:

Personally, I’m not keen on big governing bodies. Lord Adonis asked me if he could cite Pimlico in his book because with seven governors we apparently had the smallest governing body in the country. This surprised me greatly as coming from the business world it would by no means be regarded as a small board of directors.

Nash says that governance has to move beyond the representation of ‘particular interest groups’ – parents and teachers – in order to draw on the ‘widest possible pool of talent’. ‘Running a school is in many ways like running a business, so we need more business people coming forward to become governors.’ . .

As Michael Needley, the leader of Sovereign’s education team, apparently told an audience of investors last year, education is a ‘tremendous sector’ for high-return investment firms. ‘Let’s all go forth,’ he said. ‘Let’s all make hay.’
…………………….
The post has a whole lot of useful links. Chilling stuff!