Academies minister ignoring guidelines
Is the chain run by the academies minister, Lord Nash, in breach of government guidelines stating how trusts should involve parents in their governance? It would appear so.
The rules state that academy trusts should either have at least two parent members on the governing bodies of their individual schools, or two parent trustees on the overarching board running the trust as a whole.
That rule was explained by Peter Lauener, chief executive of the government’s Education Funding Agency, in a letter to local government expert John Fowler, who was a governor of a school taken over by Nash’s chain last year. Fowler wrote to Lauener and, as we reported in September, to Nash, asking about the governance of Nash’s Future Academies Trust.
Nash, who chairs Future Academies and with his wife, Caroline, is its lead sponsor, declined to answer any of Fowler’s detailed questions. However, Future’s latest published accounts include only three trustees, including Lord and Lady Nash, while Pimlico academy, Future’s flagship school, lists only one parent governor for this academic year.
Fowler says: “You would think that the minister responsible for overseeing the entire academies policy would make sure that his organisation follows Department for Education guidance.”
A Future Academies spokesman says the trust “complies fully with its articles [official rulebook] and funding agreements. Accordingly we have two parent governors at each of our schools, except at Pimlico academy which is only required to have one, under its articles set by the DfE under the previous government.”
It is following the letter of the law, then, but not the DfE guidance, which presumably is best practice. In September, Nash wrote to all governing body chairs urging them to “lead by example” on governance. Is he doing so himself?
Pressure grows for literature GCSE rethink
What’s that you say, a decision by Michael Gove proving unpopular with many teachers? And moves afoot to try to get his successor, Nicky Morgan, to reverse it? Who’d have guessed?
More than 82,000 people have now signed a petition calling on Morgan to reverse Gove’s changes to the GCSE English literature syllabus. These have seen popular American novels such as Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird disappearing from the syllabuses pupils will start following in September.
Gove, who as education secretary oversaw changes to the rules which exam boards use to design their specifications, insisted in May that he was not banning any books.
But Mary Stevens, an English teacher at Larkmead school in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, who launched the petition on the campaigning website change.org, said that Gove’s stipulations that all pupils should be taught the Romantic poets, a 19th-century novel, a Shakespeare play and a modern British text left little space for anything else.
Stevens says the new fare unlikely to appeal to many lower achieving teenagers and if the government wanted to address the issue of raising expectations of students, it needed first to build the foundations during pupils’ early years.
Stevens had a meeting at the Department for Education during half-term and is awaiting a response from Morgan.
NUT strikes in Haringey in support of official
Members of the National Union of Teachers in Haringey, north London, have been striking in a dispute centring on the position of their elected representative, Julie Davies.
Davies has been suspended since July after Haringey council took issue with an email she sent, and some heads in the borough wrote to the local authority, citing a “climate of mistrust” in school relations with the union.
The NUT action led to the partial closure of two secondary schools last Wednesday and is likely to be followed by further walk-outs on Wednesday and Thursday. It focuses on a June letter from secondary heads to the local authority saying the schools would refuse to pay into a joint fund that pays for her work while Davies remains in post.
Bob Stapley, the union’s London regional secretary, says the union will not allow school leaders to dictate who teachers choose to represent them and warns that further strike action in other schools could follow.
Helen Anthony, head of one of the two schools affected, Fortismere in Muswell Hill, says: “This is not an attempt to veto anything. We fully recognise that who the NUT elect is up to them.”
Happy days in north London.
TKAT schools suffer Ofsted downgrades
It sounded like a sad enough story the last time we wrote about Weyfield primary school, in Guildford, Surrey, but things there seem to have taken a turn for the worse. The school, whose popular headteacher, Simon Wood, disappeared last Christmas, has been placed in special measures in another unwelcome verdict for its sponsors, the TKAT academies chain.
Weyfield was celebrating a “good” verdict from Ofsted just at the point when it was forced by the DfE into the arms of TKAT 22 months ago. Ofsted has now rated it inadequate in all areas. Parent Maja Pawinska Sims, who has called on ministers to take the school out of TKAT’s hands, says in her blog that the verdict was worse than even she had expected.
Meanwhile, another TKAT school featured here before, Thomas Bennett in Crawley, West Sussex, has received a “requires improvement” judgment from Ofsted. Prior to joining TKAT, one of England’s largest academy chains, in 2012, the school was judged to be “good”.
TKAT says in a statement: “Whilst we are disappointed with the Ofsted reports for both of the schools, action plans were fully in place before the visits and this was recognised in both the resulting reports. There is already evidence that the measures that have been put in place to raise standards are proving to be effective.”
Drop 5-year-olds’ tests, urge maths teachers
Finally, members of the two main teachers’ subject associations for maths have written to Morgan asking her to reverse another controversial plan: the introduction of baseline assessments for four- and five-year-olds.
The tests, to be fully launched in 2016 in a bid to hold schools to account, will be meaningless, say the associations, partly because the performance of children at this age varies from day to day and partly because schools can use different types of assessments.
Teachers would have a perverse incentive to give pupils low scores in the assessment, in order to show progress later, says the letter, while children would be labelled as failing on first entering school, “creating a self-fulfilling prophecy”.
The criticism of the tests follows a similar critique by early years professionals last week.
