I think it should be remembered that the local parents spent years protesting very vocally about the creation of Oasis Mayfield and its handing over to this Christian organisation. They attended some pretty acrimonious meetings, they wrote petitions, they were even involved in setting up a alternative bid for the management of this school, and their efforts were totally ignored by the local council. The council were determined that Oasis should have it (local rumour has it that the councillor pushing for Oasis has very strong personal ties to this particular organisation). The parents were anything but apathetic!
I was one of the parents who was desperately trying to get any information out of Oasis- in my case re disabled access and SN support- you could as well have been talking to a brick wall! They knew nothing, they were not interested, they hadn't thought about it and however much I nagged them, they did nothing to find things out.
This clueless organisation held their first Open Evening without even bothering to find out if the school building they were standing in was wheelchair adapted! And when we asked, nobody from the organisation volunteered to go and have a look. We went and looked and it wasn't. We then spent weeks in frantic correspondence before the deadline to try to find out about other SN provision: they were unable to answer any of our queries and clearly weren't bothered. But very keen to tell us that it was part of their Christian principles to support disabled pupils- they just weren't prepared to do any thinking about the actual practicalities, such as how are we going to teach a child who cannot get to the classroom.
I spoke to all the secondaries in town about these issues, and it was amazing to see how all the others were eager to engage with the questions and try to provide answers- even if they had to be negative- it was just Oasis who couldn't be bothered!
We fortunately got another school which was not our catchment school. But other parents had to continue to try to get some answers out of this clueless lot- if they have given up after years of being blanked, then I don't blame them! They were anything but apathetic to start with!
What did strike me at that first open evening was not the parents' lack of interest in education (I knew a lot of the parents present and I know how involved they are in their children's education). It was the way the management assumed that we were all negative towards education and kept trying to reassure us that there wouldn't be too much nasty academic learning at this school. The shocked faces of the parents told their own story!
And btw is not true that the intake of Mayfield is wholly "below average attainment": it is not made up of "two disaster schools before Academy status".
Oasis Mayfield also incorporated Woolston school, which specialised in modern languages and got perfectly acceptable results. I would hardly say the demography of Woolston is "low aspirational indigenous"- it seems pretty middle class to me, with a strong community spirit and a great deal of parental involvement in the local infants school. And once upon a time a great deal of parental enthusiasm for the secondary school we did have.
But I can perfectly well understand that parental enthusiasm wears thin if you are never listened to. I only help the new head can turn things round and make them feel it is worth trying to engage with the school.