The schools watchdog, Ofsted, is responsible for overseeing an education system in which a clear majority of the workforce is female, and in which more than a quarter of school pupils are from ethnic minorities.
But the watchdog’s board is now virtually all male and entirely white. And, for the first time in its eight-year history, it also has no headteacher experience among its non-executive directors.
This is the upshot of the final appointments made to Ofsted’s board under the coalition government, announced this month by the education secretary, Nicky Morgan.
Ofsted’s two new recruits are white males, John Hughes and James Kempton, who have some experience as teachers but whose more recent jobs away from the classroom were flagged up in the Department for Education’s press release. Hughes is retiring this month as global political adviser to energy giant BP, while Kempton works at the Centre Forum thinktank.
The Ofsted board had at least one serving or recent headteacher among its non-execs from its inception in 2007 to the end of Sir Alan Steer’s term at Christmas. It was chaired by a woman, Sally Morgan, until ministers failed to renew her contract and management consultant David Hoare took over last September. Now only one of the seven members, accountant Linda Farrant, is female.
Nicky Morgan, who is also minister for women and equalities, gave a speech last Wednesday on “increasing opportunities for women in the top education jobs”. Maybe she should look close to home.
An Ofsted spokeswoman says the appointments are a matter for the DfE. The DfE did not comment.
Academies race to the finish line
Will next Monday be the day when the number of academies created under this government – now standing at more than 4,000 – finally stops rising?
Indications are that 30 March will be the last day on which funding agreements – the legal contract that has to be agreed before an academy can come into being – can be signed before the general election. This could mean that several controversial academy conversions yet to go through a formal local consultation cannot be implemented under this government as, legally, a consultation has to happen before a funding agreement is signed.
Examples include the Hewett school, the Norwich comprehensive that the DfE is proposing should be taken over by an academy chain sponsored by Sir Theodore Agnew, an associate of the academies minister, Lord Nash. Sewell Park, also in Norwich, is facing academy conversion but governors will not finish a consultation until well after 30 March.
Meanwhile, three schools run under the Leathersellers Federation in Lewisham, London, started a six-week consultation on academy status yesterday. Pupils and teachers at one of the schools have demonstrated against the plan and last Friday the borough’s Labour mayor reportedly said he was opposed.
With a new government pending, and Labour yet to specify its position on implementing forced academy conversions, it will be interesting to see if all these changes happen.
Be wary of who’s giving advice on new schools
A curious publication arrived last week. Establishing a New School and Getting It Right From the Start is a booklet jointly put together by SSAT – formerly known as the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust – and the private schools group and state academy sponsor Woodard.
It is billed as offering insights into setting up both state and independent schools. But a glance through the list of authors raises eyebrows. The Aldridge Foundation, whose chief executive writes about “getting the vision right”, saw the head of one of its schools leave in December after an investigation found some lower-performing pupils had been wrongly registered as “guest students”, which boosted the school’s GCSE results unfairly in the league tables.
The vice-provost of University College London, Michael Worton, writes a chapter on UCL’s experience opening an academy in Camden. It is currently rated by Ofsted as “requires improvement”. UCL does not run any other academies.
The E-Act chain also features, in a chapter written by the founding head of City Heights E-Act academy, in Lambeth, London. Last year E-Act was stripped of 10 academies following a string of bad Ofsted reports.
Woodard itself appears to have a patchy record in taking over schools: of the four academies it runs that have been inspected, two are in special measures, one is rated requiring improvement, and only one classified as good.
Woodard and the SSAT say in a statement that, among the 17 schools discussed in detail in the publication, 16 are Ofsted-rated good or outstanding. “There is value in telling a story which includes the challenges and difficulties faced when establishing a new school,” they add.
Some might argue that hindsight offers these organisations insights into what not to do in future.
One rule for governors, another for the boss
Finally, academies minister Nash featured on these pages in November after we learned that his own chain, Future Academies, seemed not to conform to government guidelines setting out how elected parents should feature on school governing bodies.
Now we have seen a letter this month from Nash to an MP, in which he emphasises the guidelines in relation to another school, but which still seem not to be being applied in all academies in his own backyard. Nash writes: “There is a clear requirement for academy trusts to have two elected parent governors. In multi-academy trusts, two elected parents are required either at trust board level or in each of the trust’s local governing bodies/advisory bodies.”
But, as we pointed out last year, the governing body of Future’s flagship school, Pimlico academy in Westminster, London, has only one parent member, while the trust itself has no parents. Pimlico’s position seemed unchanged as of last week.
In November, Future argued that, while the government guidelines did exist, Pimlico was following the letter of the legal documents under which it was founded. Again, we wonder why this organisation is not setting an example in terms of democratic engagement with its community.
