Academy defends huge transport bill
An academy spent £15,000 from its pupil premium money on ferrying students by taxi to school last academic year, Education Guardian has learned.
The same school, the Oldham Academy North spent a further £85,000 on free bus travel for pupils living around a mile away, also coming from its pupil premium money, which is designed to raise the test results of disadvantaged pupils. It plans to spend a further £75,000 on bus transport and £13,500 on taxis this academic year. The figures are revealed in documents on the school’s website.
The school is part of the troubled E-Act chain, which this year was stripped of 10 of its schools following government concerns about standards.
The document shows that in the 2012-13 academic year the school spent £20,750, or 8% of its £261,202 pupil premium funding, on transporting pupils by bus, and a further £8,682 on funding for students with “individual transport issues” getting to school, “coach costs for tours of the new academy to ensure smooth transition” and transport costs for a sports day held at Manchester’s Sportcity stadium.
The transport funding is a legacy of the academy moving a mile from the site of its predecessor secondary, Grange school, in April 2013.
A source close to the school, where 71% of pupils are eligible for pupil premium funding, says the cash should have been spent supporting children directly in the classroom.
We do wonder whether the Education Funding Agency, which distributes academy funding, might take a view on whether this is an effective use of the pupil premium.
In a statement, E-Act says: “The academy chose to provide daily transport for the most vulnerable students to ensure that punctuality and attendance would remain at a high level. Using pupil premium funding to support that is entirely appropriate.” E-Act also highlights a high recent pupil attendance rate and Ofsted stating that its free schools meals pupils performed well relative to their peers.
Anger over council leak of inspection report
Parents at a primary school in the Thames Valley are furious after a senior council officer publicly released its “special measures” judgment from an Ofsted inspection before the report had been published.
Alison Alexander, director of children’s services for the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, sent a message detailing the verdict in a “reply to all” response to parents, many of whom have been campaigning to save the school from being forced into academy status. The parents have been copying in journalists and politicians on their emails to Alexander.
At the time of Alexander’s email concerning Bisham Church of England primary school, near Marlowe in Buckinghamshire, parents had not been informed of the Ofsted report results. Her email came nearly a week before the official publication. The Bucks Free Press ran a story on the verdict the following day.
Parent campaigners are now fearful that the school could lose its headteacher of 28 years, Jim Cooke, despite a string of previous good Ofsted reports.
Alexander tells us: “The moment the Ofsted report is sent to the school as well as the local authority … it is no longer confidential.” The local authority is now using formal intervention powers to improve standards, she adds, somewhat ominously for the campaigners.
Haringey NUT call off strike action
The National Union of Teachers has called off strike action in Haringey, north London, which arose after the suspension of union rep Julie Davies.
To the fury of the Daily Mail, which put the story on its front page two weeks ago, two secondary schools were partially closed for three days this month. NUT members had walked out in support of Davies in a dispute over letters sent by groups of secondary and primary headteachers about her work.
The secondary heads had suggested their schools would no longer pay for Davies’s working time while she was in post. The union said it would not be told by heads who its representative could be, although the heads denied they were trying to veto NUT members’ choice.
Now the NUT says headteachers have agreed to back a proposal that the local schools forum, on which they are represented, would pay into a fund which will continue to support the work of all local union reps, whoever they are. It sounds like relief all round, though we will keep a watching brief on this story.
Ofsted plays down website row with DfE
An impending move to close down Ofsted’s dedicated website provoked a little-noticed row between the inspectorate and the Department for Education, we have discovered.
Ofsted is to have all of its online content – including inspection reports on schools across England – transferred to the government’s overarching website, “gov.uk”, by the end of the year.
An Ofsted spokesman seemed enthusiastic this month about the move, saying: “The gov.uk portal brings more than 300 public services together under a single web address, making it simpler, clearer and easier for users to find the information they need.”
However, minutes of an Ofsted board paper from last December paint a different picture. They say: “Ofsted is currently formally contesting the earlier decision by the Government Digital Service (GDS) not to grant the organisation an exemption from the transition of government digital content to the single gov.uk platform in 2014.”
An Ofsted spokeswoman confirmed last week that “initial concerns [from Ofsted] related to the control over content published to the site” but added that the issue had been resolved.
She said: “Having sought assurances that Ofsted would retain control over the content published on the site, including all our published reports, we were satisfied that a move to gov.uk would in no way compromise our independence.”
Fair enough, but this does look like another behind-the-scenes contretemps between the DfE and the schools watchdog over the latter’s independence, with the two sides at odds a few times this year.
