Waltham Forest schools face a funding meltdown – parents need to organise in response

'Parents will start to see staff being let go this year. They will see bigger class sizes, fewer subjects on offer. They will see the person looking after special education needs go, and all those other additional services disappear'.  Russell Hobby, General Secretary, National Association of Headteachers

Parents need to have their voice heard

Welcome to state education in 2017 - a system on the brink as schools face a growing financial crisis which threatens the education of children across England. It seems barely a day goes by lately without new stories of schools taking increasingly drastic action to balance books in the face of the worst funding cuts in a generation.

The Fair Funding for All Schools campaign is bringing together a coalition of parents across all parts of the country to stop the cuts and make the case for investment in our schools, our children and our future.

Parents in Waltham Forest, with their proud legacy of fighting for progressive and inclusive state education, are urged to join the fight.

Why is there a growing funding crisis in our schools?

Despite the Department for Education’s claim that the government has “protected the national schools budget in real terms for the duration of the Parliament”, evidence shows that per pupil funding is set to decrease over this period. The National Audit Office say that the government’s spending plans do not provide for funding per pupil to increase in line with inflation. With over 450k growth in pupil numbers, funding per pupil is only rising by 1.3 per cent between 2015/16 and 2019/20.

At the same time, schools are facing increasing cost pressures. Pay rises, the introduction of the National Living Wage, higher contributions to National Insurance and the teacher pension scheme, non-pay inflation and the Apprenticeship Levy mean significant additional costs for schools. The NAO says that these cost pressures will force schools to find £3bn in savings  – equating to an 8 per cent real terms reduction per year in pupil funding by 2020. Schools have not experienced this level of reduction in spending power since the mid-1990s.

These figures don’t take into account other cost pressures created by the government, for example by reducing the Education Services Grant which provides funding to local authorities and academies for education services, e.g. school improvement and Special Educational Needs, schools will now need to pay more for those services.

Emma Knights, Chief Executive of the National Governors Association puts it starkly “the organisations who speak for school leaders, including business leaders, are saying the same thing as we are: there simply is no longer enough money in the total pot to sustain adequately all schools in England”

What will be the impact on our schools?

This is going to have a massive impact on your schools. It is clear that every state school in the country is already facing a worsening financial situation. The number of Secondary schools spending more than their income doubled to over 60 per cent in the last five years.

The government expects schools to find two thirds of the £3bn savings through cutting staff costs. The NAO reports that spending on teaching staff fell from 56 per cent to 51 per cent from 2010 to 2015 in maintained schools and from 55 per cent to 52 per cent in academies over the same period. 

The latest schools census shows that last year there were 17,780 state secondary pupils taught in classes with 36 or more pupils – the highest number for a decade. The days of large classes are returning.

Schools facing increasingly difficult financial positions have turned to asking parents for termly cash payments to supplement core school budgets, three schools in my part of London have written to parents asking for termly donations of £30 - £50 per family to supplement school budgets.

Things in Waltham Forest are set to get even worse

For schools in Waltham Forest things are set to get even worse. In April 2018 the government will be introducing a new National Funding Formula (NFF) – the aim of which is to ensure more transparent and equal funding for pupils across all schools in England, addressing historical imbalances.

However, the government will achieve this by redistributing money between schools from a total pot that is shrinking in real terms. And therefore, according to the government’s own figures, 49 per cent of schools in England will lose even more funding with over 2 million children in the worst affected schools.

The impact of the NFF will be felt most obviously in large cities such as London and Manchester – London Councils report that 70 per cent of schools across Greater London will face budget cuts in a climate when school finances are already struggling.

According to analysis by the NUT, the total estimated reduction across all schools in Waltham Forest in real terms by 2020 will be over £20m. That works out at around a £538 reduction for every pupil in the Borough, the equivalent of the salaries of 541 teachers.

But this is not just an issue for London. The Times Education Supplement notes that the majority of those who are set to gain out of the NFF changes will still stand to lose out as increases will insufficient to meet funding shortfalls highlighted by the NAO.

Analysis by teaching unions indicates that around 98 per cent of schools in England will be net losers as a result of the combination of real-terms reductions, additional costs, growing pupil numbers and the impact of the NFF.

And, of course, the NFF will be directing money directly from Whitehall to individual schools – making it much more difficult for allocations to be informed by the kind of local knowledge available to schools forums – and cutting Local Authorities further out of the loop, thereby furnishing the way for further academisation.

Fair Funding for All Schools

Fair Funding for All Schools is a network of parents from all parts of England, that want the government to listen to our concerns about the funding situation facing state schools across the country.

We have two key asks of the government:

• Increase investment in all schools by protecting per-pupil funding in real terms for the life of this Parliament
• Provide the additional funding needed to implement the National Funding Formula that increases funding for maintained schools and academies in comparatively poorly funded areas of England without cutting funding per pupil for schools in any other part of the country, so that no school loses out.

Taking our inspiration from the brilliant work of campaign groups like Our Community – Our Schools we have been bringing together parent campaigners new and old, including many existing groups that have been active in the fight against free schools and academies in their area, in a national coalition to make the case for proper investment in state education.

We are staging public meetings at schools, meeting with MPs, representing parent voice in Westminster, holding days of action and generally getting our voice heard. We need the voice of Waltham Forest parents to be heard too.

Our website www.fairfundingforallschools.org has a range of materials that parents can use, you can sign and share our petition, use our guide and model answers to respond to the DFE consultation on the NFF and download model letters to MPs, councillors and the press.

Please join the fight.

 

 

 

What you need to know about Academy Schools

Under immense public pressure, the government has rowed back from its threat to force all schools to become academies, but it has made it clear that it will still force many other to do so and it still wants all schools to be academies by 2020.  

It can seem like a dry and difficult issue, but it really matters if your school becomes an academy. In this blog we try to explain why.  

There is no evidence that Academy Schools are better schools 

 As various studies have shown and a committee of MPs reviewing the evidence concluded, there is no proof that becoming an academy does anything to improve a school. In fact there is evidence that academies that are part of chains may well deteriorate and perform worse than state schools. ecent studies have indicated that state schools overall are outperforming academies. One things you can definitely say about the drive to force schools to become academies is that it’s not based on evidence. 

Academy schools are more likely to undermine teachers working conditions and try to employ less qualifies staff. 

Teachers matter. You want the best teachers, respected and supported to teach our children. Academies run themselves like businesses, because they have to make a surplus every year and they often have to pay big senior staff salaries. The only way they can do this is by cutting staff costs. This can mean trying to squeeze more teaching out of hard-working staff or cutting access to other conditions of service. In an NUT survey, 43% of teachers at academies reported coming under pressure to move onto worse contracts with rising workloads.  

Academy Schools tend to exclude children they think may damage their results 

All schools are under pressure to deliver results in tests. But community schools have strict rules that say they have to provide education to everyone, equally. Academies have more freedom to change their admissions policies and when combined with the obsession with results, this can have terrible consequences. Studies have found that academies are manipulating their admissions criteria to skew their intake away from children they think will damage their Ofsted results. Academies are also resorting to permanently excluding children they see as a ‘poor quality’. How can you be sure that your child will not fall victim to academies attempting to ‘game’ their admissions or disciplinary policies in pursuit of results? And what would you do if you thought that was happening? Which leads us to… 

Academy schools are less accountable to parents 

If you have a problem with your school, as things stand, you have several ways of getting something done about it. You can raise it with the Local Authority or its elected representatives, who have a responsibility to ensure that the schools are delivering on their core mission for the borough. There are also parent governors who are currently elected to school governing bodies. Academies on the other hand are essentially private companies who have a legal contract with the government in Whitehall to provide education in your area. They have no other responsibility except to remain solvent. Who will you complain to if you have a problem? The government?

  

Academy schools become more like businesses   

Once a school becomes an academy, the people running it may remain the same for a while but the evidence shows that governors and staff can quickly turn over in academy schools. Academies typically look to make their governing bodies smaller and increase the power of ‘super-heads’ so that they become more like the directors of multi-company enterprises. And power is concentrated in fewer hands, the evidence suggests that academies are more vulnerable to financial mismanagement, cronyism and nepotism. Academies have been plagued by a succession of stories based on investigations by the Education Funding Agency, such as the Perry Beeches scandal. A school’s ethos simply won’t survive the changes that academy status brings.  

This is not about education – but turning our schools into sources of profit 

In summary, there’s little evidence that academisation is about standards and while the government has shied away from forcing all schools to become academies, it’s now clear that it was never really about giving parents more choice. In reality, this is part of a longer term project to break up state schools and turn them into private companies. This will make it easier to ultimately turn them into schools that can be run for profit, as in parts of the USA, Sweden and Latin America. It also provides huge opportunities for companies to sell education technology to companies to reduce their ‘costs’ (teachers) and for private equity funds to exploit schools’ land assets. A small number of people stand to make a lot of money out of our schools and our children’s education. That’s what is driving the government’s push to force schools to become academies. It brings their dream a little closer. Unfortunately the record of for-profit schools in the US and Sweden shows that while shareholders turn nice profits, it is children and communities that suffer.   

What can we do? 

The government’s recent actions show that it knows that the tide is turning against academies and free schools and they may be running out of time to force their vision on us. We need to build support for a more positive vision and more positive policies for our schools. That's one reason why  OCOS developed our Charter. But in the meantime, it is possible to stop some schools becoming academies and it’s possible to mitigate some of the worst effects of academisation. But this requires parents and teachers to unite to campaign and show that they are not prepared to sit back and watch their schools being taken away from them.  

• Talk to other parents – set yourself a target to talk to three other parents and direct them to this blogsite where they can get more information. 
• Let us know if you’re happy to be a local contact for your school – we need people to tell us what’s happening in our local schools and to give information out to other parents.  
• Write to your local MP – Use the points in this post to write to your MP setting out your concerns about academisation and asking them to support our local schools. 
• Write to your local Councillor – we need the Local Authority to hear the same message… 

• Share this blog widely on social media. 

Help us turn this build an active community that unites parents and teachers alike in campaigning for better schools for all our children. 

 

Waltham Forest needs a new secondary school… but not this one.

Readers of the Waltham Forest Guardian will have seen the news that the borough is to have a new secondary school. Thanks to the Tory led Coalition’s legislation, it has to be a Free School. And thanks to the Department for Education it will be sponsored by the Lion Academy Trust, which already runs three primary academies in the borough.

Wrong school, wrong time, wrong place

There is no doubt that Waltham Forest needs a new secondary school. Figures produced by the local authority indicate that the bulge in primary places will work its way through to create a need for one new secondary school by September 2017 and another by 2019. But with funding following pupils, timing and positioning are important. It matters a lot to other schools in the borough where the new school is built and when it opens. If it opens too early and in the wrong place it will harm other schools. Yet the government’s insane legislation and its ideological fixation with Free Schools means that the Lion Academy Trust have been given preapproval to open a new school in September 2016. If it ever opens, it is likely to be built at taxpayer expense, wherever the Education Funding Agency can find some land it can buy.

And then there’s the question of the approved sponsor. The Lion Academy Trust currently run three primary schools in the borough, including Thomas Gamuel, which they took over in the face of massive local opposition. But they don’t run any secondary schools. We’ll be looking at the Lion Academy Trust in more detail in later posts, but for now, the summary is that this school is likely to be built at the wrong time, in the wrong place by the wrong people. Perhaps that’s why the indications are that this proposal is not being welcomed by the local authority, other headteachers or teaching unions.

Alternative plan?

But what’s the alternative? With an objective need for a new secondary school by September 2017 something needs to be done now. Interestingly, even the executive head of the Lion Academy Trust recognises that the election may upset his plans. It’s possible that a Labour led government will simply stop proposals that don’t fulfil its criteria of need and may start to relax the constraints on local authorities. But the Local Authority can’t sit back and hope. We hear talk of a possible alternative plan being worked out that combines further expansion of existing secondaries with a new school involving the Co-operative as a sponsor. This would be a Free School, because current legislation means it has to be, but as a Co-Op school it would at least have a democratic governance structure that could involve the community, the local authority and other schools. It would also have a better relationship with teaching unions. It would also enjoy the active support of Walthamstow’s MP who is already on record as actively supporting any proposals from the Co-Op.

It’s not an ideal solution and we believe that it would suffer from weaknesses relative to local authority community schools. Neither should anyone underestimate the difficulties that would be faced in bringing this plan to fruition. However, given the current range of options faced by the local authority and by the local community, we think that any such alternative plan would merit support over the DfE’s choice, the Lion Academy Trust.

More details as soon as we have them…  

 

An open letter to the governors of St Mary’s and St Saviour’s schools

Our Community, Our Schools is taking the step of publishing an open letter to you for two reasons. 

Firstly, we have been contacted by a number of concerned parents from St Mary’s school asking for our advice on the ramifications of Academy Conversion. We have now published this advice here.
 

Secondly, we are publishing this advice because we believe that the proposal to convert these schools to being part of a Multi-Academy Trust is one that affects all of us in Waltham Forest.

 

As you are well aware, the issue of the freedoms of Free Schools and Academy schools is very rarely out of the news at the moment. Their academic performance is being questioned, academy chains are coming under tremendous fire and academy and free school governing bodies are being scrutinised for mismanagement, high senior staff salaries and allegations of cronyism.

 

Our research leads us to believe that one of the most important reasons for this is the structural weaknesses of both Academies and Free Schools - legally the same thing.

 

If St Mary’s and St Saviour’s schools do decide to become academies we believe they will be taking a major gamble and the effects of failure will be felt not only by the school’s children, but by all the whole community and all our schools.

 

For these reasons, at the very least, we believe it is absolutely vital that the school governors consult widely and meaningfully with the whole range of stakeholders in the community and to reflect in an open transparent way on the responses they receive.

 

Please feel free to contact us if you want more information.

Our Community, Our Schools

Download our briefing here.

 

The collapse of Oasis’s Free School proposal – what does it mean for Waltham Forest?

There is still very little information about what led to Oasis‘agreeing’ with the DfE to withdraw its application. Our Community, Our Schools is trying to find out more at the time of writing as there are many unanswered questions and we believe that people in Waltham Forest deserve to know the truth.

One key question regards the DfE’s statement that they looked at the admissions figures and decided that there is no need for a new secondary school until 2018. We – and the Local Authority – could have told them that months ago. The figures have been in circulation since late spring last year. The idea that the DfE has just discovered this stretches credibility.

It could be that the government is on the defensive nationally over Free Schools in the wake of a damaging National AuditOffice report that accused them of pushing to open schools more or less regardless of public value for money. Perhaps they have decided to pay more attention to local need.

It’s also possible that the proposed Oasis school was in trouble with its admissions. At the moment, we can only be speculate. The Oasis chain is struggling with the results in its academies, which are significantly below the national average. Perhaps their astronomical growth and high profile was becoming a source of internal concern?

Whatever happened, this sorry story speaks volumes about the craziness of the Free Schools programme. This school opened its admissions process, attempted to recruit a headteacher, announced it was on the verge of signing a deal for a site only to then announce that it was delaying and then its sponsors withdraw their application completely, supposedly because the DfE suddenly realised there was no need for it!

What does this mean for Waltham Forest? For the parents who put months of work into their Free School only for Oasis and the DfE to pull the plug, all this will of course be pretty devastating.

For OCOS it is very welcome. We always argued that this school was neither necessary nor desirable. Waltham Forest’s community-school led secondary expansion can now take place with one fewer Free School to worry about. According to the local authority’s projections, the borough does still need a new school by 2016/17 and their options for addressing this issue are tightly constrained by the ridiculous and spiteful legislation put in place by the Coalition government. We will have to monitor how the council propose to deal with this very closely.

In the meantime, OCOS will be doing two things. Firstly, we will be focusing our attention on Tauheedul’s planned Free School, still forging ahead at the time of writing. More on this soon. Secondly, we will also be campaigning positively for our local community schools. 

Our community schools are improving but they also need our help. They need OCOS supporters to help combat the myths and prejudices current in the community, to help promote their strengths and to get involved. There are many ways in which you can support your local community schools and we will be featuring more on this in the coming months.
We would appeal to everyone, including those local parents who worked so hard to try to get the Oasis Free School set up, to now get behind our community schools.

 

Packed house hears devastating attack on proposed Free Schools in Waltham Forest

It surpassed all our expectations. More than 150 people packed out the Vestry House Museum meeting room on Tuesday night. The room was filled, with people sitting on the floors and standing at least two-deep outside the doors listening to the proceedings inside.

Guardian columnist and campaigner Zoe Williams kicked off by pointing to the press reports about the Free School in Derby that was closed recently. She read from an extraordinary letter that education minister Lord Nash had had to write to the school asking a series of basic questions about their procedures, their policies and practices for employing staff, ensuring their qualification, conducting CRB checks and so on. Her point was that you would never have had to do this with a community school because they are transparent and accountable. The government and the supporters of Free Schools are creating a system that will fail and we will have to reinvent community schools all over again. "There is no way for the people who use Free Schools to hold them to account” she said. The question for parents and teachers who wanted good community schools was "how to mobilise to get a system in which you are heard" and she urged parents and teachers to make links with each other's campaigns across boroughs and across the country.

Christine Blower, the General Secretary of the NUT stressed that her union regarded Michael Gove's Free Schools policy as undermining basic democratic rights by creating a chaotic system of unaccountable schools that are inefficient and expensive. She pointed out that 1 in 10 teachers in existing Free Schools are unqualified and that a third of the total government budget for new school places was being used to promote building new Free Schools, often in areas where they are not needed or where they can't answer the need for more places. She also pointed to the perversity of a situation in which Local Authorities have the responsibility to provide a place for every child but cannot build more community schools or coordinate provision. She pointed to NUT research which showed that 91% of Local Authorities thought they needed the power to establish new community schools and she praised the London Challenge initiative which showed that collaboration among schools could actually meet the need for more places. Channelling public money toward Free Schools, paid for by us but accountable to no one but themselves was "basically robbery", she said.

Councillor Clare Coghill followed this with a robust defence of Waltham Forest Schools. She argued that it was vital to break down the idea that there is a problem with community schools in the borough. “Waltham Forest schools are fantastic" she said, "and don't let anybody tell you otherwise.” Like Christine, she stressed the perversity of a system where Local Authorities are responsible for providing places but can’t build new community school. Sending a message to the Education Secretary, she said, “I’ve got the duty to provide places, now give me the right to build a new community school”.

Patrick Edwards, a school governor at Norlington school in Leyton, gave a barnstorming performance in which he talked about how active parents, involved in their community schools could have a positive impact on their schools, driving up standards by collaborating and supporting each other, not through destructive competition. He derided the future system envisaged by the government and the supporters of Free Schools in which competition would drive schools out of business and he urged people to get behind their community schools:. “They want us to feel so threatened that we only want to look after our own kids but that would be like cutting our own throats” he said.

In the discussion that followed several teachers explained why they were so angry, why they were striking on the 17^th and why they were campaigning for education, making the point that they were being attacked every day by the government and appealed for parents to support them. Several parents spoke movingly about the anxiety they experienced at the shortage of places in the borough and as a result of widespread misconceptions about Waltham Forest’s community schools. Representatives of the East London Humanist society talked about the divisiveness of faith schools, noting that the majority of Free School sponsors are religious organisations. There were lots of ideas about things that could be done in the future but there was a general agreement on the need to build the campaign against the proposed Free Schools and to make links across London and England with other local campaigns and start to build a movement for a more democratic education system that looks after all its children.

This was an absolutely inspirational meeting at which we heard voices from across our borough expressing their anger and frustration, but also their determination to fight for better schools and for community schools. Sign up to get involved here and watch this space for more soon.

Postscript: Zoe Williams mentioned our meeting in a coruscating attack in the Guardian on Michael Gove’s attempt to denigrate systematically our community school system.  You must read this article!

'Our Community, Our Schools: Education through collaboration' - Public meeting update

An update on our public meeting, being held on Tuesday 8 October at the Vestry House meeting room at 7pm.

We are really proud to be hosting Zoe Williams, writer and Guardian columnist and Christine Blower, the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers. Zoe has published on a range of social issues, but recently wrote a powerful condemnation of the myths of the educational underclass being peddled by right wing think tanks like the Centre for Social Justice. Christine Blower is the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers which has played a leading role in campaigning against academies and Free Schools and which this week launched a new campaign around London's school places crisis. The campaign identifies, rightly, that the growing crisis of school places in the capital is being seriously aggravated by the government's policy of undermining, weakening and obstructing local authorities, making it harder for them to build new schools, while it pushes its Free School dogma. So these two speakers will give a great national perspective on what's happening in Waltham Forest.

We also have two new speakers to announce including, Patrick Edwards, a local parent and Councillor Clare Coghill, the Local Authority's Lead Member for Children and Young People. Clare will be able to give valuable insight into the Council's alternative plan and why they are opposed to Oasis and Tauheedul's proposed Free Schools, while Patrick will be able to talk as a local parent in the community, facing the same issues as the rest of us.

This is going to be a fascinating meeting. Make sure that you are there.

Tuesday, 8th October, 7pm, Vestry House Museum meeting room.

Who are Oasis and why are we concerned about their proposed Free School?

Oasis Community Learning is a charitable company linked to the Oasis Charitable Trust, an evangelical Baptist organisation which delivers education, healthcare, housing, training and youth work projects to local authorities and national governments throughout the world.

The Oasis Charitable Trust (known as ‘Oasis’) was founded by Reverend Steve Chalke in 1985. Over the last 22 years Oasis Trust has developed into a family of charities now working on five continents and 11 countries around the world, to deliver housing, education, training, youth work and healthcare. Oasis provides services for, local authorities and national governments, as well as self funded initiatives aimed at providing opportunity to people across the globe.

Academy Schools and Free Schools:

Oasis Community Learning describe themselves as ‘one of the largest and fastest growing multi-Academy sponsors in England’, having taken over 28 Academy schools since 2004. ‘Our mission is to create and sustain a network of excellent learning communities where pupils can realise their full potential.’

Oasis are now interested in setting up new Free Schools, including the one they are proposing to sponsor in Waltham Forest, with WSSI (Walthamstow Secondary School Initiative), a local parents group.

Oasis’s performance: below the national average and below the borough average:

Oasis are one of a growing group of education ‘chains’ alongside ARK, E-Act and United Learning Trust.

Yet this growth seems to say more about the government’s enthusiasm for such chain companies and less about their ability to run successful schools.

Analysis of the Academies’ performance has shown that they tend to make disproportionate use of GCSE equivalent qualifications to inflate their academic performance and that when these qualifications are taken out of the equation and only GCSE performance is taken into account, academies perform far less well than community schools.

The Oasis chain was among the worst performing, with fewer than 30% of their pupils achieving 5 GCSEs.

Even when value added was measured (crudely, that’s a government measure of how a school has helped a student progress through the various stages of educational attainment), Oasis schools score below the national average.

Even more troubling, the Local Authority has identified that Oasis’s results are below the average for Waltham Forest.

The Local Authority’s plan notes that:

“We are concerned that, on average, outcomes across the existing Oasis Community Learning secondary schools have been consistently lower than those in Waltham Forest secondary schools....Wealso have significant concerns that too much of the current secondary provisionwithin the Oasis Community Learning Trust requires improvement or isinadequate.” (For the tables, click here and go to pages 23 and 24)

Problems in specific Oasis schools:

In October 2008 when it was reportedthat 150 pupils had ‘rampaged’ through the corridors of the new Oasis AcademyMayfield in Southampton. According to the Times Educational Supplement report, the pupils complained that promised improvements to the curriculum had not been delivered. The academy was created from the merger of Woolston and Grove Park schools and teachers complained that the split-site arrangements meant that contact with pupils had been lost. They also said the school’s management had been “arrogant” in refusing to listen to their views. Staff threatened to ballot for industrial action unless urgent changes were made to the way the school was organised. John Denham, the local Southampton MP and the former Communities Secretary, questioned whether the sponsor had the experience to run the school.

In 2011, Oasis’s MediaCity Academy inSalford hit the news when pupils disrupted lessons after news broke that 14 staff members were facing redundancy. Members of the NUT and NASUWT teaching unions took a day’s strike action in protest at the staff cuts, which were announced just ahead of Christmas 2011.

Oasis: faith inspired or faith school?

Oasis insist that their schools are inclusive to those of all religion or none, citing their ‘Oasis Charter’ as justification. This is no more than a legal necessity however. The question is how they police the boundaries between being a faith inspired school and allowing their faith to intrude into the form and content of their schooling.

For example, while insisting that they never seek to impose their beliefs on staff or students, their Charter says:

“Oasis’ identity or organisational behaviours are rooted in, and flow from the Christian faith. Oasis’ work is motivated by the life, message and example of Jesus Christ. How Oasis as an organisation behaves has a direct relationship to what Oasis as an organisation believes. Oasis’ beliefs direct and shape the organisation’s behaviours.”

Given that ‘the organisation’s behaviours’ presumably includes the behaviour, teaching and attitudes of its staff while at work, this is beginning to look more like a faith school than a secular school. This impression is reinforced by Oasis's even more explicitly religious 'Ethos' document.

Sexual and Relationship Education:

This impression is heightened by Oasis' Sexual and Relationship Education Policy which states:

‘The SRE programme will teach about love and care in relationships and the possible outcomes of sex including pregnancy, HIV and other STI’s. Students will be taught about the responsibilities of parenthood and will be helped to develop a clear understanding of the arguments for delaying sexual activity, for faithfulness and for resisting pressure.’

In April this year, one of Oasis’s academy schools included a session led by Challenge Team UK as part of their SRE. Challenge Team UK are a pro-sexual abstinence group who promote sex only within marriage and argue that all forms of contraception are unreliable, that government strategies to reduce teen pregnancies have been a failure and that cohabitation is inferior to marriage.

One of the main trustees of ChallengeTeamUK is Trevor Stammers, a prominent Christian anti-abortionist.

Trevor Stammers also maintains that homosexuality contravenes God’s injunctions:

“We cannot compromise on what God says about sex. From passages such as Matthew 19:4-6 and 1 Corinthians 7:1-9 it seems clear that biblically, coitus is only permitted within the commitment of heterosexual marriage. This is a challenge for all of us, whether gay or straight. We need to ensure that those who fall short of God's standard have a compassionate and gentle reception from those 'who are spiritual' (Gal 6:1), but the aim should be restoration to holy living.”

Admissions policy:

Oasis have not yet published their admissions criteria for their planned Free School in Walthamstow but they have already said that they are not taking part in the Pan London Admissions Process for admissions for September 2014.  Instead they will conduct their own admissions. It is impossible to know why this is, but one possibility is that they are looking to use their freedom as a Free School to depart from the part of the admissions code in order to privilege access to ‘founders’ children. Founders might here be supporters of WSSI, for example, the parents’ group that called Oasis in. There is a precedent for this in the case of the Canary Wharf Free School. This is pure speculation, but Oasis could clear it up by publishing their admissions criteria.

Summary:

The bottom line is that people in Waltham Forest who may be about to end up with a Free School run by a chain which is:

• underperforming against national and borough benchmarks of standards
• which has questions to answer about the relationship between its faith and its schooling
• and which is currently not being entirely clear about its admissions policy. 

None of this has stopped them advertising for staff, including a principal at their planned new school.

We think that families and children in Waltham Forest deserve better than this. We think that every child should have a place at one of our community schools or at a school controlled by a community school. We now know that can be done.

It’s time to make the Department for Education listen.