Oasis in the news for establishing churches in their schools

For the last 12 months, people in Waltham Forest have been debating whether or not Walthamstow needs more schools. They have not been debating whether it needs another church. And they certainly weren’t aware that in the case of Oasis, if they got one, they might very well get the other too.

Tuesday’s Guardian carried a story about Oasis Community Learning that raised serious questions about whether the group, which now runs more than 40 academy schools and which wanted to set up a Free School in Walthamstow, was in fact using these schools as a base to set up churches.

This story has its origin in research and a Freedom of Information request undertaken by Our Community Our Schools toward the end of last year. Wanting to know more about Oasis we delved into their activities in other academy schools and looked in more detail at the way they run their academies.

Oasis is structured as a series of charitable companies, including Oasis Community Learning, which runs the academies, underneath Oasis Charitable Trust. The Trust’s aims are: the advancement of Christianity, the advancement of education; the advancement of health and the preservation and protection of public health generally'.

They aim to achieve this by building Oasis ‘hubs’, which include their schools. As far as the Trust is concerned, the Hub is as important as ‘Community Learning’, even though the latter is the source of the vast majority of the funds and assets controlled by Oasis as a whole and the hubs are completely dependent on the Academies for sites, resources and focuses of activities.

So, what do the hubs do? The 2012Financial Statements for the Oasis Charitable Trust, the ultimate body at the top of Oasis’s group of companies, describe the Hub as: ‘A Christ-centred place of activity that provides integrated, high quality and diverse services to benefit the whole person and the whole community’. More intriguingly, the statement goes on ‘...the aim of OCT and the national teams of OUK, OCL (Community Learning), Oasis College and STOP THE TRAFFIK is to support and serve the Oasis Hubs.’ It would seem fairly clear then that in the views of Oasis’s highest body, the schools are supposed to serve the hubs, not the other way around.

A key player in building the ‘hubs’ is the chaplain. The Charitable Trust works to recruit and appoint chaplains to serve each hub, sometimes more than one. According to Oasis Charitable Trust’s 2012 financial statement, ‘Chaplains build chaplaincy teams in our Academies to support staff and students. They are also responsible for building churches in order to engage the wider community in the Hub.’ The job description we’ve seen for an Oasis chaplain confirms that part of their role is to ‘Develop and grow an Oasis Church within the Hub setting’.

We wanted to know more about these churches, so we asked Oasis. In their FOI response, Oasis explained “Oasis churches are not what would be understood as traditional church groups. They are small groups of local people who are keen to serve the Academy students, their families and the wider community as an expression of their faith. They are made up of parents, teachers and members of the local community who are committed to the Oasis ethos and the process of community transformation.” Stripped of its language about keenness and community transformation, that’s pretty much a description of any evangelical church. But more importantly, as we’ve seen above, as far as Oasis are concerned Oasis Community Learning - and its academies - are there to support and serve the hubs.

Our initial research indicated that many of these churches were meeting on academy school premises (take for example, the Oasis Academy in Enfield). So we asked Oasis to confirm this and confirmed that ‘some of our churches do meet in academies at various points in the week but on days and times when the academies are not functioning as schools;. So we asked do they pay any rent? To which the answer was ‘No. The church groups are treated like other local groups who use our academies who either pay a reduced rent or no rent at all, depending on the conditions set by the local lettings arrangements.’

We also asked more about the chaplains who are tasked with building the churches. In their response, Oasis were very clear, they are not paid for by the academies but are funded out of private donations. Yet there is some very worrying ambiguity about their role. We asked which chaplains had responsibility for any pastoral, pedagogical or curricular input into academies? Oasis’s answer was:

“None have overall responsibility for any of these areas. However, they all contribute to the curriculum and pedagogy through RE lessons (which reflect the SACRE (the standing advisory council on RE) standards, PSHE (personal, social, health and economic ) education and SMSC (social, moral, spiritual and cultural) education and all have a pastoral function for staff and students.”

To us, that’s quite a wide remit which bleeds at crucial points into contributing toward curriculum and pedagogy. It’s particularly worrying as they are not required to be qualified to teach.

To summarise. Oasis Charitable Trust aims to establish ‘Christ-centred’ hubs, which all the arms of Oasis, including its academies under Oasis Community Learning, are supposed to serve. The Trust is recruiting (out of private money), chaplains, who are supposed to establish churches as part of the ‘hub’. These churches meet, at a reduced rent, or entirely rent free, using academy premises, and the chaplains, who are not qualified teachers, have a role in some areas of pedagogy and curriculum development.

This raised serious questions about what people in Waltham Forest were signing their children up to supporting. Were they aware that the school would most probably be acting to provide premises for a church and to support evangelically inspired social activism?

And what about the role of the chaplains? From the results of the FOI request and the job descriptions we’d seen it is clear that they had some role in advising on at least religious aspects of the curriculum. This takes us back to the old issue of where the church ends and the schools begin.

And finally, is it appropriate that public funds be used to support the establishment of churches? It’s quite clear that public assets in the form of school estate, are being used to support churches in the Oasis academies. It is also clear that the EFA purchased a site in Waltham Forest that would have been used by Oasis to establish a church.

As the British Humanists Association commented when this story broke,

“we are deeply alarmed to have discovered that the state-funded Academy system is enabling this organisation to establish a parallel network of churches, often rent-free. This raises questions as to whether proselytising is taking place thanks to public funds. We are also alarmed by the employment of chaplains to work at the schools. We are not aware of any other schools that are not designated as religious behaving in this manner and we believe that it is extremely bizarre and a misuse of public property.”

They further commented,

“the establishment of the chain of Academies has allowed Oasis’s network of churches to grow considerably from the one church Oasis ran a few years ago. More people are attending Oasis churches than would be if it were not for the wholly state-funded Academies that the organisation now runs. These churches are promoted through the schools’ websites which variously describe them as ‘inspired by the life, teachings and ministry of Jesus Christ’ and say ‘We are spiritual people, which means that we believe that spirituality is real – and behave accordingly, looking for God in unexpected places, and shaping our lives to listen.’  This does not seem to us to be appropriate given that the churches have only been able to come into existence thanks to state funds for the Academies.”

We would tend to agree. How many of the parents who were encouraged to add their names to the list of supporters of this school, whose names were used to evidence local demand and led to this school getting to the point of opening its admissions, really knew what they were signing up for?

In the end, the real culprit in this story is the government, whose destructive legislation and practices have created this situation and which is now resulting in almost daily press stories concerning the disastrous consequences of the Free Schools policy. About which more soon...

Academies and Free Schools in the national press - the policy continues to unravel

The government's shock therapy attack on the schools system has continued to feature in the national press. A succession of stories have highlighted the nakedly ideological nature of the government’s programme and the risks involved in creating supposedly autonomous schools. Firstly, the New Statesman carried a story about the fate of the Sulivan primary school in Hammersmith and Fulham within the top 2% of schools in the country, which faces closure to make way for a Church of England Free School with close connections in the local Tory-run council.

Hot on the heels of the police getting involved in the King’s Science Academy investigation in Bradford, comes the news that an Academy school in County Durham is under investigation in connection with the disappearance of £162,000 of academy resources. As the ever excellent Janet Downs at the Local Schools Network points out, this sort of thing is more likely to happen in academies and Free Schools because they are less publicly accountable for the money they spend than community schools.

Last week also saw news that United Learning Trust who want to open a primary Free School in Waltham Forest, are trying to cut 30 jobs at their Salford City Academy. The suspicion is that this is part of moves by academy chains to use their freedoms to alter the pay rates and terms and conditions of their staff to cut costs.

Another example of this can be seen in the recent decision of the AET academies chain to privatise its entire support staff across its chain of 79 schools. As education expert Laura McInerny noted in last week’s Guardian, this exercise, undertaken in the name of ‘efficiency’ also enables them to create bigger surpluses (they can’t legally create profits or pay dividends at the moment) which can be used to pay obscene executive salaries, and, presumably certain other management charges. 

But perhaps the biggest news of the week and the most damning for the government’s programme to smash up the comprehensive community school sector, was the revelation that a major academy chain was to be stripped of 10 of its schools. E-Act is one of the biggest academy chains in the country and until today ran 34 academies. Last year it ran into trouble when it was accused of paying lavish expenses to its board and the Education Funding Agency raised concerns about its financial management. Now, following a number of problematic Ofsted reviews, E-Act is to hand 10 schools back to the government. The Department for Education will presumably try to find another academy sponsor, but this decision shows how chaotic a marketised education system dominated by chains like Oasis and Tauheedul will be. Chains are currently being inadequately monitored, as the Labour Party has argued. But even if problems are exposed in chains, rather than schools working collaboratively in their communities to raise standards, the chains and the DfE will simply look to ‘re-tender’ the management of the schools. The chains won’t want their overall results dragged down by difficult schools and the government will want to hand them to someone else to fix as soon as possible. All of which spells chaos for children, parents and teachers.

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.

 

Oasis withdraw their application to set up a Free School

Local MP Stella Creasy has today passed us a copy of a letter from the Schools Minister, Lord Nash, stating that Oasis Community Learning have withdrawn their application to set up a new school in Walthamstow.

There are very few details in Lord Nash's letter but he does mention that the DfE has looked at the admissions data for the borough and judged that a new secondary school will not be needed until 2018. In view of this, the letter says, Oasis have agreed to withdraw their application to set up a new school in the borough. 

Coming barely more than a week after the news that Oasis were deferring their opening until 2015, this news begs many questions. We will be trying to get more details over the coming weeks. 

In the meantime, Our Community, Our Schools unequivocally welcomes this development. This news is a massive boost to everyone who has championed and supported Waltham Forests's community schools and everyone who has supported our campaign right from its earliest days.

As far as we know, Tauheedul's proposal is still on the table. However, today, we want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has helped us to campaign on this issue. Today has been a big blow to the people who have been pushing Free Schools on communities across the country. Thank you to everyone for your invaluable support.

Oasis and the disappearing GCSE pupils

Oasis Community Learning featured in an article by investigative journalist and education expert Warwick Mansell in the Guardian last week. Mansell was following up allegations and concerns that some supposedly 'high performing' schools had seen high numbers of GCSE pupils 'removed' from their rolls and sent to other schools or educational facilities. The concern expressed in the article was that these schools, many of them part of high-profile academy chains like Harris and Oasis, might be massaging the number of pupils who actually sit their GCSEs and filtering out pupils on academic grounds in order to artificially raise their results. Mansell's investigation found that Oasis had three schools among the 50 schools with the largest reduction in the number of pupils sitting their GCSEs over a year.

Are Oasis filtering out pupils who might drag their results down? Is that the sort of practice parents in Waltham Forest want to see in their local schools? Or would we be better off without Oasis altogether?

Waltham Forest NCT covers the Free School debate

Awareness of the issues around Free Schools in Waltham Forest is clearly growing. The Waltham Forest NCT newsletter in December featured a debate between Jen Powell, chair of Walthamstow Secondary School Initiative, the group that invited Oasis into the borough, and Our Community, Our Schools supporter and stalwart Alison Emmett. You can read their debate here.

We're grateful to Waltham Forest NCT for giving this important issue some valuable coverage.

No Oasis Free School until at least 2015

Oasis have announced that their secondary Free School will NOT be opening in 2014 as had been planned. This news comes just weeks after United Learning Trust announced that their primary Free School would also be delayed a year. It’s not clear why Oasis have decided to put back their opening – they still haven’t conducted their statutory consultation, one of the few things the legislation around Free Schools actually requires them to do. Oasis’s press release claims that they are about to announce a site for their school and it may be that they have decided to delay until the process of acquiring and developing the site is further advanced. It may also be that the DfE is less keen than it used to be on schools opening in temporary accommodation due to the extra costs it imposes, something that was criticised in the recent National Audit Office report.

It says a lot about the chaotic process for setting up a Free School that both United Learning Trust and Oasis were allowed to begin an admissions process for schools which will now not exist for at least a year. Oasis were also running their own admissions process, outside of the pan-London Local Authority system.  It would be disastrous if parents encouraged to put Oasis as their first choice had not also put other schools. This is entirely possible. We have to hope that parents putting down Oasis as their first choice were actively encouraged to participate in the local authority admissions process too, and did so.  This is something we’ll be checking with Oasis.

While we are deeply concerned about the possible impact on local children whose names had been put down for the school, Our Community, Our Schools welcomes this delay. It’s clear that Oasis and presumably the leading parental promoters of their school, remain determined to press ahead with their plans. In the meantime, we think the delay gives us an opportunity to keep raising the issue of Free Schools in general and the Oasis, Tauheedul, ULT and DV8 proposals in particular with local parents and residents. We think parents entering the admissions process this year and next deserve to know about the people who will own and run these schools. Watch this space for more soon.

Our Community, Our Schools – campaigning for OUR schools (and against Michael Gove’s)

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for Our Community, Our Schools supporters. We’ve been raising the profile of the issue of Free Schools and countering the misconceptions about our community schools in both the local and national press – and now we’re taking our case to Parliament.

Kiri Tunks, local parent and Tower Hamlets teacher was recorded as part of the Waltham Forest Guardian’s ‘Speak Out’ series of 2 minute videos, making a powerful plea for people to turn away from backing Free Schools. You can watch Kiri’s short film here. Kiri spoke about her experience of improving schools in Tower Hamlets without any Free Schools or Academies – a theme that was picked up by Jonathan White in this week’s Waltham Forest Guardian.

The Guardian featured revealing figures showing that the vast majority of primary schools in Waltham Forest have met a tougher new government literacy and numeracy target. 75% of pupils in all but two schools are reaching the required levels and as Jonathan pointed out, this flies in the face of the government’s disaster narrative which insists that Free Schools and Academies are necessary to drive up standards.

Meanwhile, in the national press, OCOS supporter Scarlet Harris featured in Zoe Williams’ latest piece for the Guardian. Scarlet was quoted discussing the farcical process of local consultation used by sponsors and the DfE to set up a Free School and highlighting the dangers of allowing groups like Oasis and Tauheedul to essentially design their own consultations.

Zoe’s article, which details the growing local opposition to Free Schools, also quotes education expert Laura McInerny highlighting the plight of the children suffering under Gove’s experiment: ‘these kids have one shot at education. I’m not minded to sacrifice 400 children in al-Madinah so that a minister can learn a hard lesson’.

OCOS supporters are taking the campaign into Westminster this week as we have written a submission to the Education Select Committee’s call for evidence as part of a new inquiry on Academies and the processes for setting up Free Schools. We have always maintained that the process of setting up a Free School is fatally flawed, perverse and profoundly undemocratic and that’s what we’re telling the Select Committee. We'll publish our evidence or refer you to it, as soon as we're able to.

More than 800 people have now signed our petition and we have ambitious plans for a new phase of campaigning, including a new letter writing campaign, more leafleting in the New Year campaign and more public meetings, so watch this space for more details soon.

Free Schools - the wheels are coming off

There is a paradox at work at the moment. The Department for Education is driving forward its Free Schools policy as hard as possible, while every day the evidence is mounting that these schools are structurally flawed and a represent a dangerous gamble with our childrens’ futures.

It’s been a hectic few weeks with one Free School closing, another in chaos and yet another the subject of a fraud investigation. The National Audit Office has uncovered the real costs of the Free Schools project while exposing the fact that these are not delivering places where they’re needed most, and in Westminster there is a growing political backlash against Michael Gove’s out of control ideological experiment.

Free to gamble with taxpayers’ money:

On 11 December, the National  Audit Office published a report into the cost-effectiveness of the Free Schools programme. The thrust of the National Audit Office report can be interpreted as a criticism of the Department for Education for being fixated on driving forward its policy of opening new Free Schools at the expense of considerations of value for money or local need. As the NAO put it, ‘The primary factor in decision-making has been opening schools at pace, rather than maximizing value for money.’

The NAO report showed that:

1. 30% of Free School places were being provided in areas with no local need for them, meaning that £241 million in capital funding is being used to fund schools that are not being built where they are most needed.

2. The DfE has been so desperate to drive its new schools forward that it has incurred extra costs. 60% of its Free Schools have opened in temporary premises to secure an early opening time, at a cost of £27 million, while it has seriously underestimated the start up costs of the schools overall.

3. Each Free School has cost, on average £6.6 million to set up, double what the DfE forecast. 

4. On average, 1 in 4 places at the these Free Schools remains unfilled.

As the NAO and the press recognized, this raises huge questions about whether the programme is good value for taxpayers’ money.

In their attempts to drive down the costs of new schools, the DfE has made it easier for sponsors to use a huge range of existing buildings including office buildings, council buildings, surplus hospital buildings, fire stations, warehouses, a garden centre and a builder’s yard!

It’s also worth recalling that the funds for Building Schools for the Future, earmarked for the development of new capacity in our existing excellent community schools, were cut so that the Department could pump taxpayers money into this nonsensical ideological project to smash up local authority-led community schooling.

Perhaps all this would be forgiveable if the schools that emerged at the other end of the process were robust and of high quality. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that there is a real problem with Free Schools.

Free to gamble with your child’s education:

The NAO found that ‘on the whole these Free Schools’ pupils are less likely to be entitled to free school meals than pupils in neighbouring schools’, are less likely to have English as an additional language and are likely to travel twice as far to reach their schools as those in neighbouring schools. (NAO report, p. 42) The evidence seems to indicate that free schools are creating greater social segregation and skewing their intakes toward the ‘middle classes’. 

Some people might see this as a good thing  (we don’t agree ) but socially skewed intakes are symptoms of the government’s peculiar fetish for giving schools ‘freedoms’ and this also produces a whole range of other problems.

On 13 December, it was reported that the Discovery Free School in Crawley, Sussex, would be the first Free School to close its doors, instructed so to do by Lord Nash (the Private Equity fund ‘entrepreneur’ ennobled so that Michael Gove could make him a minister) on the basis that it was ‘unable to deliver even the most basic level of teaching and learning’. The job of training the teaching staff was so great, Lord Nash admitted, that it was impossible to imagine that they could run a school at the same time.

The Al-Madinah Free School in Derby is now ‘safe’ according to Ofsted’, but it’s still officially in ‘chaos’ with ‘no signs of improvement’ and a failure to address the real problems in leadership and teaching.

Three men have been questioned in relation to a police investigation into suspected fraud at the King’s Science Academy, a free school set up in Bradford. Whistleblowers alleged ‘sustained financial mismanagement’, while there have been calls for the DfE to explain why it failed to pass allegations in connection with suspected fraud on to the police for five months.

These are not accidents, or statistical anomalies. They are the logical results of allowing untrained and inexperienced people and organizations to set up Free Schools outside of the Local Authority, directly managing them from the Department for Education (alongside thousands of academies) and allowing them to recruit untrained teachers.

Political backlash:

That’s one reason why political momentum gaining for an end to Michael Gove’s policy. As we reported recently, leading figures in Labour and the Liberal Democrats are calling for new ‘restraints’ over these schools.

In November, Labour MP Ian Mearns was granted time for a House of Commons debate on Free Schools in which Labour MPs queued up to slam the policy. Labour MP Kevin Brennan nailed the dangers of Free Schools in a particularly sharp contribution:

“the lack of oversight is not an accident, as the hon. Member for Bradford East pointed out; it is part of the design of this ideological experiment. According to the Government, a bit of failure is fine, if there are unqualified teachers, and some financial fraud its okay: in the long run, presumably, some good schools will emerge from the carnage of the experiment. The fact that pupils’ education is disrupted along the way—as with the Al-Madinah free school, which had to close for a week—is presumably just collateral damage and a price worth paying.”

Around the same time, the Education Select Committee announced that it was holding a new inquiry into Free Schools and Academies focusing in particular on the process for setting up a Free School, a process we have previously characterized as ‘perverse’, ‘inverted’ and undemocratic.

The wheels are coming off this policy fast and it’s time for those people who have supported the planned Free Schools in Waltham Forest to rethink.

Stop this chaotic and dysfunctional experiment now

The Free Schools experiment is descending into chaos. In the space of one week, it was revealed that one Free School in Derby was being threatened with having its funding cut off having been described as ‘chaotic and dysfunctional by Ofsted, while the headteacher of another ‘pioneering’ Free School in Crawley resigned from the school she and her husband set up after Ofsted condemned the school’s performance and then described the recovery plan as ‘not fit for purpose’. The Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt wrote to Michael Gove calling for greater accountability and transparency for Free Schools, and saying that ‘a dangerous ideological experiment has been allowed to run out of control’. Then, to cap it all off at the weekend, the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said it ‘made no sense to him’ to allow Free Schools to employ unqualified teachers and be able to diverge from the national curriculum (as an aside, while we welcome Nick Clegg’s realisation that the policy he voted through is fundamentally flawed, it doesn’t say much for the Deputy Prime Minister’s judgment that it took till now for him to work this out).

So what’s going on? While the Conservative Party would like to dismiss this as a few duds, it is becoming clear that, as Laura McInerny argued recently, what’s taking place is the entirely predictable result of the ‘freedoms’ granted to Free Schools and the policy of railroading them through in defiance of any democratic process.

To understand why that’s the case, it’s worth looking at what happened with the Al-Madinah Free School in Derby in a bit more detail.

A case study in chaos

In September 2012, the Al-Madinah Free School opened in Derby and later that month the local press broke stories that non-Muslim teachers were being obliged to wear the hijab. By the end of the month, further allegations had resulted in the Department for Education conducting two separate investigations and Ofsted brought forward an inspection, on the first day of which the school was closed for ‘Health and Safety’ reasons when it was found that the school had failed to carry out adequate child protection checks on staff. In early October, Lord Nash, the minister for schools, wrote to the school threatening to terminate its funding agreement, effectively closing it, if it didn’t undertake immediate emergency measures.

The reports from the Department and Ofsted were devastating. On teaching standards, Ofsted said that the school was inadequate in every category and ‘dysfunctional’. Pupils were given the same work to do despite very different abilities, while classes were delivered by inexperienced teachers without proper training, sold to parents as ‘industry experts’. Almost all the Early Years Foundation stage teaching was found to be inadequate. The school was also unable to say how many special needs pupils it had in its intake.

The original investigations were launched as a result of allegations of that female teachers were obliged to wear the hijab and boys and girls were segregated in lessons and lunchtimes. Lord Nash’s letter to the governors made clear that staff were to be told that they did not have to cover their hair, and that the school had to cease any practices that had as their reason, cause or effect that women and girls were treated less favourably than men and boys.

Both Ofsted and The DfE identified the fact that the school was appallingly governed. Ofsted found that the school had ‘been set up by representatives of the community with limited knowledge and experience’. Inexperienced and untrained Governors had ‘failed to ensure children were safe in the school, failed to appoint properly qualified staff and as a result had been unable to monitor the school or hold it properly to account. The Governors, Ofsted said ‘had failed the parents of this community who have placed trust in them’.

On every count these are the consequences of the so-called freedoms of the Free School: the ‘right’ to hire unqualified teachers, the promotion of state-funded faith schools operating outside local authority regulation and most of all the flawed governance and the complete absence of democratic oversight.

How did the supporters of the Al-Madinah school ever get approval from the DfE? As we’ve pointed out repeatedly in relation to Oasis and Tauheedul’s applications, the process for getting approval to open a Free School is completely absurd and utterly opaque. There is no genuine, open local consultation, no real coordination with the Local Authority and the dealings between Free School promoters and the Department for Education are clouded in mystery. Once the promoters of the Al-Madinah school got approval from the DfE, there was no way for parents to hold their school to account. If local teachers hadn’t gone to the press, how long would children gone on being treated like this? Who was there to hold the governors to account on behalf of the children, the parents, the community and the parents?

It’s not just the Al-Madinah School either. A parent at the Discovery Free School in Crawley told the press “my children were not getting the teaching they deserved and that we were promised. On reflection I think one of the reasons was that the teachers were not trained. And you could not complain to anyone. It was all run by the same family.”

No one takes any pleasure in this. Reading through the Ofsted report on Al-Madinah, it’s impossible to feel anything but deeply sad and angry for the 400 children at this school and their parents. But the fact that the Education Secretary continues to drive forward this policy without regard for any warnings, either before or since this week’s revelations demonstrates just how dangerous he is.

What does all this mean for the people of Waltham Forest?

Education is a big issue in this borough. We know this from the fact that meetings on schools in Waltham Forest are getting bigger all the time. There are a lot of anxious parents out there.

If you are a parent and you are opposed to these schools, we would ask you to help us to build our petition in favour of a Local Authority led alternative involving our community schools. We know that they have a plan to provide a place for everyone who needs it in our community schools and to build a new school that would be accountable to our community.

If you are a parent who has actively supported one of the proposed Free Schools, we would beg you to think again. Everyone wants the best for their children but this is not necessary and it’s not the right way, either for your child or for the others who will be affected by a new Free School.

If you are a parent who is thinking about putting your child’s name down for one of the proposed Free Schools we would ask you a few questions:

· Are you confident that you really know about the people who are going to run this school?

· Are you confident that the proposed school has been subjected to proper independent oversight by the Department for Education? It certainly hasn’t been scrutinised by anyone else.

· Are you prepared to take the risk that your child will not be like the 400 children in Derby?

· Are you confident that you know how you will hold this school to account?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then sign our petition instead and join the campaign for good schools for all our children in Waltham Forest.

 

'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.

It's official - there IS an alternative

Last week, the Local Authority’s Education Service published its plan for expanding Secondary Schools in Waltham Forest and, exactly as we have always predicted, it proves that there is NO NEED for the proposed Free Schools.

It also shows that the Council have very serious concerns about the Free School proposals and want to be able to implement their plan without them.

The document is comprehensive and deserves reading in full, which you can do here. But here we will draw out the key points made in the document.

1. There’s no need for the Free Schools

Contrary to the slightly hysterical fear-mongering propaganda that was put out by Oasis in particular around the time that they were gathering support for their proposal, it is possible to address the demand for places without building their, or Tauheedul’s proposed Free Schools.

The Council’s plan is complex and detailed but in essence it proposes two phases of expansion. In the first phase, covering the projected rise in demand up to 2015/16, the plan proposes working in partnership with interested existing secondary schools to provide additional classes, initially at least, on a temporary basis. This is partly because funding for capital developments is only available on an annual basis and partly because until a final decision on the Free Schools is made, no one will know what the real demand in the next few years will be.

In the second phase, from 2016/17, the Council plan proposes building a new secondary school. The Council’s appears to propose that this will be a new academy, with the preferred bidder for a sponsor being an existing Waltham Forest secondary school. The criteria for the bidders to meet emphasise things like demonstrating their familiarity with the community, ability to work in partnership with the Local Authority, a demonstrable record in carrying out meaningful consultations and a range of other objectives that sponsors like Oasis and Tauheedul will, frankly, find it hard to meet.

The Council plan is quite clear, this is the most cost effective and rational way of planning expansion to meet the demand for places as it grows. While an academy school will not be welcome for many, this represents a better option than the Free Schools and if it is indeed sponsored by a local secondary school and required to match the criteria for partnership working and high standards as laid out in the document, that arguably makes it as close to being a new community school as the Coalition government’s legislation allows.

2. The proposed Free Schools will actually make things worse:

It is clear from the plan that the Council views the Free Schools as causing more problems than they promise to solve. Here’s why:

The proposals are not worked out in partnership with the Council. They don’t cater for the demand for places as it really emerges on the projections in the document. In fact, if they open when they propose to open, the Free Schools will create a temporary surplus of places. As evidence from around the country shows, and we always insisted, this will lead them to compete directly with our local community schools, damaging them in the process by taking pupils and resources away.

Secondly, even when demand for places grows, the Free Schools don’t provide enough. Worse still, they are making it harder for the Council to plan to meet that demand. Until the final decision is taken about whether the Free Schools will be part of the mix, no one knows what will be needed and the Council can’t plan to meet it. Not that Michael Gove and the mandarins at the Department for Education care about that, of course, because it’s all part of the glorious rationality of destructive markets, before which our communities must bow, but let’s remember that the Free Schools were sold to local parents as a solution to growing demand. It’s clear now that they aren’t.

The Council has concerns about the quality of the educational provision offered by the Free Schools and their impact on our community:

Interestingly, the Council contrasts the improving Ofsted results in Waltham Forest’s secondary schools and contrasts them with the results of the Oasis chain of schools. Oasis’s schools perform consistently below the national secondary school average and they underperform against Waltham Forest’s schools. As for Tauheedul, the document echoes our own concerns about the impact of another single-sex school, especially another girl’s school, on the gender mix in the borough’s other schools. Something that is supposed to be about choice will in fact reduce choice for those parents who want their children to attend co-educational schools.

3. Democracy and accountability:

It is interesting to note throughout how the open and democratic this process has been and will be, in contrast to the proposed Free Schools. The whole plan is transparent and based on consultation and partnership. It will be open to questioning and scrutiny. The appendices detail how community consultation has taken place in previously approved school expansions.

This all contrasts sharply with the obscure processes of pseudo-consultation used to evidence local demand for the Free Schools. The consultations held by Oasis and Tauheedul to date and the farcical consultation being held by Tauheedul now, are a disgrace and should offend anyone who like to think that we live in a democratic society.
 

4. And finally…The Secretary of State reserves the right to ignore the Local Authority and the people of Waltham Forest:

The final key point, made in the plan, is that the Council’s position is not an easy one. No matter how sensible its plan, how rationally it caters to real demand projections and no matter what its reservations about the Free Schools, the Secretary of State can simply ignore it.

If we let him.

The plan notes that the Local Authority will make an assessment of its preferred bidder for the new secondary school, but that the Secretary of State ‘will reserve the right to put in place a proposer of his own choice’.

So there we have it. Michael Gove knows who should run a school in Waltham Forest better than the Local Authority, better than the other schools and better than any of us.

5. What we can do:

We now know that there is a viable alternative, as indeed, we always argued there was.

But, as we noted recently, this is a system designed not to listen to the concerns of lcol communities. There is only one way to make sure that the Secretary of State knows that if he imposes his own choice, there will be an outcry in Waltham Forest.

Sign our petition and help make it impossible to ignore.

If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to make your voice heard. Sign online here: http://tiny.cc/supportwfschools

Say no to Michael Gove’s experimental religious schools and yes to a planned, democratic alternative based on partnership and our own community schools.