In April 2014, the Education Funding Agency published
a report into a whistleblower’s allegations of financial mismanagement at the
Silver Birches Academy Trust, which controls the Chingford Hall and
Whittingham primary academies. The
report concluded that the school had awarded a contract for ICT services to a
company which the Chair of Governors worked for, in spite of the fact that
there were two lower offers. The Agency concluded that there was insufficient
documentary evidence supporting the school’s decision. In addition,
refurbishment work was undertaken at Whittingham Primary at a value of £56,000,
for which there was no tendering process, in breach of the trust’s own
contracting policy. Of this total, £25,000 was accounted for by the purchase of
a range of items for the Executive Headteacher’s office, including 14 executive
armchairs. As the agency rather mildly put it, ‘We have not seen a business
case to support the assertion that this represented value for money’.
It would be tempting to say of course that this was an
anomaly, or a case of people making mistakes and it’s all better now, but the
truth is that the findings of the EFA report into Silver Birches mirror a
national problem with academies. That’s pretty much the conclusion of a report
commissioned by the Education Select Committee, a powerful committee of MPs
who oversee education policy. Their report, published in September highlighted
a series of areas where governors of academy trusts were acting in ways that
conflicted with the public interest. These included:
- Connected or related party transactions, in which people on Trust Boards benefited personally, or through their companies from their positions
- Sponsors providing paid services through arrangements that prevent schools using other services
- Inappropriate levels of control over school decision making
- Poor skills or capabilities on trust boards
- Inattention to or ignoring of rules on conflicts of interests, particularly among ‘young’ or fast growing trusts
- Over-powerful executives and governing bodies too small to hold them to account
- Failure to implement competitive tendering or have regard to value for money (pp. 4-6)
Much of this echoes other analysis of the problems of
academies, including our own briefing
to the governors of St Mary’s and St Saviour’s and our analysis
of Free Schools which you can read here.
The fact is that there is growing recognition that the
academies and free schools policies are broken and are in urgent need of
fixing. Yet regardless of this, groups of governors, with the connivance and
active support of the government, are continuing to remove our schools from our
communities and place them in the hands of small groups of people who are not
being properly held to account for their actions. This is a recipe for more and
more problems in our schools.
It’s time for a change. Some of this is about technical
fixes in the law or the school system to mend gaping holes that encourage bad
practice. But it’s also about more than that. We need to move the debate on and
rebuild our school system around a new mass consensus about what it is that our
schools are for and how they should be run. Competition and consumer choice
have been tried and are failing, day in, day out.
That’s one reason why we’ve launched
our Charter for Education - to start a debate that we can all get involved
in that can shape the behaviour of our schools locally now and that can play a
part in shaping the ideas of the future. Get involved in the debate!
