Academies and Free Schools in Waltham Forest – a roundup of local and national news (1)

Our Community Our Schools was set up in part to oppose moves to establish Free Schools and to convert our community maintained schools into academies. We were pleased when it became clear back in March this year that one of the proposed Free Schools was not going to happen, but the truth is that it’s very difficult for communities or even for teachers to defend their schools. The legislation has been drafted in such a way that small groups of people in Whitehall can collude with sponsors to set up Free Schools or convert schools to academy status almost at will. There continue to be great successes for communities, such as the recent campaign in Hove, but the fact is that the dice are heavily loaded against local communities and democracy.

Tauheedul Free School opens and St Mary’s/St Saviour’s convert

In Waltham Forest, we’ve seen Tauheedul Free Schools Trust open their new ‘Eden School for Girls’ at the Silver Birches site, in spite of considerable opposition and what we said was a disastrously flawed consultation process. It remains to be seen how it will fare in its current premises and how it is able to fulfil its aspiration to recruit 50% non-Muslim pupils.

In addition, St Mary’s and St Saviour’s primary schools announced in September that following consultation they were proceeding with academy conversion. The decision to convert followed meetings at which a total of 28 people were present and a consultation to which 14 people responded. Even assuming that there was no duplication among these people (not a particularly sound assumption), that’s a total response rate of around 9% of the potential parent body. Hardly a rousing episode in our democratic history and certainly it looks appalling when compared with the turnout in a parent ballot to resist the academisation of Thomas Gamuel primary for example. Yet the governors of St Mary’s and St Saviour’s appear content with their mandate and as a result, yet another community school is being removed from our community to become part of an academy trust. And of course it’s worth remembering that the rest of the community had no say in this whatsoever, in spite of the impact it will have on the rest of the borough.

Reach2

Meanwhile the academy chain that started in Walthamstow, Reach2 aims to extend its rapidly growing empire of schools by opening a new primary Free School in Leyton. Reach2 has only existed since 2012 when it was established by Steve Lancashire, the head of Hillyfield school following its conversion to academy status. The chain had two schools by the end of 2012 and 27 by 2014, including Chapel End and Woodside in Waltham Forest. Reach2 has powerful friends in the Department for Education, who have seconded a member of their staff to the academy chain and written a glowing report on their unique model (full of praise for their mission and core values embodied in the concepts of ‘touchstone’ and ‘cornerstone’, etc etc etc). Teaching unions seem less keen. The NUT and NASUWT have been convening Trust level talks to try to get acceptable pay and appraisal schemes across the trust’s schools, but so far without success. Reach2 are also currently refusing to pay into borough-wide schemes that pay for union reps to have facilities time.

OverReach2?

Reach2 appear to operate by taking over ‘struggling’ schools, often as a result of forced conversions and then grouping them within a regional Multi-Academy Trust. This is seen as a way of negotiating the problems that arise when a chain grows fast and takes over individual schools across huge geographic distances (someone really ought to invent some local borough-based way of organising schools, some sort of accountable local body….).

Even the DfE’s glowing account of the rise of Reach2 includes an admission that growing fast and covering huge distances has caused problems for the management of the chain. And this should ring alarm bells for Reach2 as the fast growth of academy chains was criticised in 2013 by the Academies Commission and earlier this year by Ofsted. Basically, it is widely recognised now that there is a real problem providing public oversight of unaccountable academy chains and it’s proving almost impossible to monitor what’s going on.


One result of this is the emergence of scandalous situations such as were seen with the chain AET which had to have schools removed because they were performing so badly.

Our Community, Our Schools, supporting our schools and our teachers

Although one Free School has been delayed and another spectacularly collapsed recently, and in spite of the national media attention on the failings of Free Schools, Tauheedul’s ‘Walthamstow Leadership Academy’ is still intending to open in September 2014. That means that our community schools need our support more than ever.

We have three main aims.

Firstly, to build support for our community schools. With competition from at least one ‘Free School’, they will need our support and our involvement more than ever. We’ll be running regular items on our blogsite on how you can get involved in supporting your local community schools.

Secondly, to raise awareness of the dangers posed by the planned Free Schools and to give a voice to everyone who wants our children to be provided for within the local authority, comprehensive community school sector.

Third, to build our own campaign and extend our reach.

As part of this campaigning, we will be out leafleting alongside the NUT on the next two Saturdays of this month. On March 26^th, the NUT, will be taking strike action against attacks on their pay, conditions of service and pensions. Ahead of this, they have also launched the ‘Stand up for Education’. This campaign draws together the various government attacks on teachers and on our schools and seeks to unite parents and teachers around basic demands and principles that should underpin a good education system. You can read more about this campaign here.

Local teachers who are NUT members will be out leafleting in support of this campaign in Walthamstow in the market square at 11am on Saturday 15 March and Saturday 22 March and OCOS supporters will be joining them with our own new leaflet, which you can see here.

Can you help us by joining our supporters for an hour this Saturday or next Saturday?

Would you be prepared to help by leafleting your neighbourhood and making sure that everyone gets one of our leaflets through their door?

If so, please email wfdefendstateschools@gmail.com

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.

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.

Would-be Waltham Forest Free School sponsor accused of ‘undermining community cohesion’ and filtering out poorer children

Tauheedul Free Schools, one of the organisations that wants to set up a ‘Free School’ in Waltham Forest was this week accused of undermining community cohesion and taking in fewer poorer children than other schools in the community. The charge of undermining community cohesion was made by a local NUT rep who pointed to the fact that Tauheedul claim to want to attract non-Muslim girls in the face of the fact that none have applied. This is a point we made on this site a while back. It may have something to do with the fact that the schools’ code of conduct for students includes the expectation that outside of school, students will “Perform 5-times Salaah punctually at home; wear the Hijaab outside of the school and home; Recite the Qur'aan at least once a week; desist from listening to any form of music or nasheeds that are not compliant with the Deobandi Hanafi Tablighi School of Thought;desist unislamic communication and relationships.”

The charge of manipulating its admissions procedures is new however. The Mirror revealed that in its Blackburn girls school, which rightly boasts of its excellent academic results, only 8.7% of pupils are entitled to free school meals, compared with a local average of 30%. In other words, Tauheedul’s Free School appears to be more socially segregated on social class lines than surrounding community schools.

This is part of a wider issue to do with the so-called freedoms enjoyed by Free Schools. One of the most fundamental freedoms they enjoy is to control their own admissions processes, rather than fitting into the Local Authority system. They also have the power to agree variations to their admissions processes and codes with the Secretary of State as part of their contractual relationship with the government. Some Free Schools, for example, include in their agreements provisions that mean that the children of ‘founders’ get privileged access in the case of oversubscribed schools. There have also been accusations that such schools devise complex admissions procedures designed to deter those parents without the time or the skills to navigate them.

The early evidence from analysis of Free School intakes suggests that the power to control admissions is allowing them to operate covert social selecton. For example, analysis of the intake of the first wave of 24 Free Schools showed that in only two Free Schools had a proportion of pupils on Free School Meals (FSM) that matches their Local Authority. On average 11% of pupils in Free Schools were eligible for FSM compared with 23% in their Local Area. Out of 55 ‘second wave’ Free Schools opening in 2012, 29 (52%) were still recruiting lower intakes of FSM children than the local authority average. Much of this information is contained in the National Union of Teachers’ excellent new publication on Free Schools.

Free Schools share this power to control their admissions with Academies. Research into the way this has helped Academies to ‘weed out’ poorer children is more advanced and reinforces this picture of covert selection. The recent report by the Academies Commission ‘Unleashing Greatness’, (not a hostile report, it should be noted) said, ‘there is evidence that schools that control their own admissions are likely to be more socially selective than community schools’ (p. 65). The Commission also said ‘as the pace of academisation leads to a rapid rise in the number of schools that are their own admissions authorities, there is a risk that admissions ‘game playing’ may be extended further. As the Commission pointed out this would further entrench segregation between more affluent and ‘disadvantaged’ children.

Some people might consider this social segregation a price worth paying for a good school for their children. But it’s worth noting that there’s absolutely no guarantee this will happen. Leaving aside the argument that education is not just about the government’s definition of standards, the evidence suggests that being a Free School makes you no more likely to academically excel than being a community school. In fact the latest evidence suggests that Free Schools are underperforming in  relation to community schools.

So, in summary, what Tauheedul are accused of doing appears to be a common feature of Free Schools – whatever they say they are doing, these schools, which control their own admissions procedures, are taking in far fewer children who are eligible for free school meals than they should be. In doing so, they are increasing social segregation in our communities and they cannot even claim to be better academically than our community schools.

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.

A former Waltham Forest headteacher speaks out

Eve Wilson, formerly the headteacher of Willowfields Humanities College, one of our community schools in Waltham Forest, has responded to Tauheedul Free Schools' consultation and has given us permission to post a copy of her response on our blogsite. So here it is in full below. We think you'll agree that it's a powerful and compelling contribution to the public debate in Waltham Forest:

Response to Consultation – Walthamstow Leadership Academy for Girls, Tauheedul Free School:

Tauheedul sets out a compelling vision for its new school in Waltham Forest but despite that  I do not feel that it will serve the best interests of the community.  I have a number of reasons for my views on this matter. 

Firstly, I believe that opening a girls’ school will have a negative impact on the education offered to girls and boys in the borough.  There are already two popular girls’ schools in Waltham Forest, between them admitting 1,500 girls.  I recognise that more parents would like their daughters to attend a girls’ school but unfortunately they would also like their sons to attend a mixed school.  Originally the borough planned to offer exactly the same number of places to boys as to girls but the 6fe boys’ school first became a 4fe school because of lack of demand and then closed altogether leaving only a 4fe boys’ school which has been very undersubscribed for many years despite being academically successful in recent years. 

Until 2011, I was the headteacher of Willowfield Humanities College.  Willowfield is a popular and respected school but nevertheless, because of its proximity to Walthamstow Girls’ School, it had a gender imbalance in favour of boys which was rarely less than 60:40 and occasionally as imbalanced as 70:30.  This resulted in a number of challenges for us in both pedagogical and practical terms, both inside the classroom and in social areas in order to ensure all our students made excellent progress academically and were happy, confident members of our community.  For example, our teachers became proficient at planning to ensure that girls and boys received equal attention inside the classroom but it was more difficult to manage the pressure on boys’ changing room space during PE lessons because of the excess numbers of boys.  This situation would be greatly exacerbated were there to be additional school places for girls that were fully subscribed and it seems very unfair on the many families wishing to choose mixed education for their sons and daughters that genuine mixed education would effectively disappear from Waltham Forest.  Your proposal would, I believe, increase choice for a minority of parents while reducing choice for the majority.

My second concern is the impact on community cohesion.  I recognise that it is Tauheedul’s ambition to attract students of all faiths or none and welcome this.  In practice, however, it has failed to achieve this aim in its schools in Blackburn despite their undoubted academic success.  Currently the quality of social cohesion is an exceptional strength of schools in Walthamstow and indeed in Waltham Forest generally.  There is ample evidence of this in OfSTED reports.  You will, I am sure, agree that there has never been a time when this was more important.  I have no doubt that this is a result of the very diverse communities in schools (currently there is only one faith school in Waltham Forest) and if you speak to young people at school in the borough you will find that this is one of the things they most value about their schools.  They describe how much they value being able to learn from each other about their different cultures and religions.  We often said that at Willowfield we could have taught the people of the world how to live together – the atmosphere of mutual respect and tolerance and rejection of any form of stereotyping was something that could, I am certain, be achieved only through students learning and playing together.

Finally, I should like to point out that the Walthamstow schools have a long established partnership which brings significant benefits for students and for staff development through collaboration rather than competition.  They operate with openness and trust and understand they have a responsibility for all the children in Waltham Forest schools as well as the particular one they have for the students enrolled at their own schools.  It is disappointing that Tauheedul, despite its stated wish to work in partnership with other local schools, has made no effort as far as I am aware to discuss its proposals with existing schools.  Indeed, in the consultation document, the only indication of how this partnership might work is where Tauheedul suggests that it will look to other schools and colleges to provide the curriculum for students unsuited to the one it offers.  This is worrying since it does not resemble the way in which the existing partnership operates.

In short then, because of local circumstances, I believe that despite its track record as an excellent provider of education in other parts of the country, if the Tauheedul free school opens in Waltham Forest, it will disrupt and undermine educational provision across the borough.  I have no doubt that as an organisation of integrity and repute this is not its intention and hope that achieving a greater understanding of the needs of Waltham Forest will cause it to reconsider its proposal.

Eve Wilson

July 2013

 

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. 

So, who are Tauheedul and why are we worried about their Free School?

Who are Tauheedul Free Schools?

Tauheedul Free Schools is one of a number of related organisations under the Tauheedul Islam Faith, Education and Community Trust (TIFECT) umbrella.

TIFECT set up the Tauheedul Islam Girls' High School in Blackburn as an independent secondary school in 1984. It was financially supported by the Tauheedul Islam Mosque. It became a voluntary aided school within Blackburn with Darwen in 2005. Its current admissions policy gives preference to children with a connection to the Tauheedul Islam Mosque and three other named Mosques. These share Deobandi Hanafi values, one of the most common denominations of Mosque in the UK, with establishments in Walthamstow, Leyton and Leytonstone.

The much newer Tauheedul Islam Boys School in Blackburn opened last September, and is a faith-based Free School operated by the Tauheedul Free Schools Trust. This proposal was not supported by the Local Authority.

The boys and girls schools are over-subscribed. According to an article in the Guardian from earlier this year, there is only one non Muslim pupil at the boys school. 

The Tauheedul Free Schools Trust also plans to open two faith-based primary schools in September 2013: The Olive School Blackburn and the Olive School Hackney.

These have been given approval by the Department for Education.

There is also an organisation called TS Academies or TSA. Although it has the same address and visual branding, TSA has dropped the name Tauheedul. TSA plans to run non-selective, non-denominational academies. Their governing council includes a set of people who work as education consultants and a set of names associated with the existing Tauheedul schools.

Witton Park High School in Blackburn will be the first academy sponsored by TSA – their governors voted for this in March.

TSA is already a partner in the National Challenge Trust that operates Blackburn Central High School (formerly Blakewater College). Mufti Hamid Patel, the principal of the girls’ school, is Chair of Governors at Blackburn Central.

Tauheedul now propose to open a Muslim secondary school for girls in central Walthamstow. This will be called Waltham Forest Leadership Academy for Girls.

Waltham Forest Leadership Academy for Girls: A lack of transparency and
meaningful consultation:

From the start, Tauheedul’s proposed Free School has been characterised by a lack of transparency.

Details of their proposals are still not on their website.

Our Community, Our Schools wrote to Tauheedul asking them what consultation they had undertaken to date and what plans they had for consulting in the future.

Their reply said:

“we have been actively working with members of the local community for over 18 months.   During this time, we have engaged in a regular dialogue and consultation with a whole range of individual and community stakeholders, including the Local Authority and local residents. We have taken on board their comments, aspirations and concerns in developing our proposal for the 'Waltham Forest Leadership Academy for Girls' that is currently being considered by the Department for Education.”

No details of any meetings, discussions or of any way in which the comments, aspirations and concerns had been registered or addressed have been given. 

The Tauheedul consultation document says that: The Tauheedul Free Schools’ Trust has consulted widely with the local community to arrive at a curriculum that reflects the aspirations of young people and their parents’ They have as yet provided no evidence of any specific activities that formed this consultation.

Tauheedul’s consultation states that they want to work with local schools to deliver vocational training.

Yet they have not been in contact with any of the local schools to even see if this is possible.

The consultation period for the Hackney school was just 6 weeks from press release to close, and had a single public meeting 4 days after the press release:
http://www.tauheedulschools.com/press-releases-consultation-the-olive-school-hackney.html

The consultation period for Waltham Forest’s proposed Free School is 10 June – 19 July, yet there was no public announcement. As of 5th July, well over half way through the consultation, it’s not even on their website.http://www.tauheedulschools.com/press-releases.html This does not constitute a genuine consultation.


Impact on other schools:

In addition to concerns about the impact of competitive Free Schools on our local community, we have concerns that are particular to Tauheedul’s proposed Muslim Girl’s school.

We are concerned at the possible impact on the gender balance of other community schools.
Tauheedul’s consultation states there is parental demand for a girls' school. Yet Walthamstow already has one girl’s school (the borough of Waltham Forest has two).

Another girl’s school in Walthamstow will further skew the gender mix of the surrounding co-educational schools in favour of boys and they risk becoming de facto boys’ schools.

Boys' schools are rarely popular. The danger is that those who can afford to move away will do so at an even greater rate than they do now, and those left behind, and that includes Muslim boys, will find themselves in more challenging schools.

We are also concerned that a Muslim faith school will produce division and segregation.

While Tauheedul’s consultation document says that they intend to take in a proportion of non-Muslim pupils, there are indications that their schools in Blackburn have failed in this aim.

The  Girl’s school Principal Mufti Hamid Patel was quoted in 2010 saying: “Come back in five years and I guarantee [we] will have white families”. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/muslim-school-helps-out-secular-neighbour-2129777.html

A year later he said: “Come back here in 10 years and ask me if we have non-Muslim pupils - the answer will be yes."http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6081589

There is also some indication that Tauheedul schools in Blackburn have generated concerns about their inclusiveness within the Blackburn Muslim Community, favouring a particular religious and ethnic also ethnic group:
http://www.asianimage.co.uk/news/education/8631904.print/

We think that if Tauheedul genuinely want to contribute to the Big Society as an aim, it would be better to open a mixed secular school, where everyone is genuinely welcome.If we and our children are going to learn to respect, appreciate and understand one another, we need to educate our children together.

Waltham Forest already has many faith schools and single sex schools. We believe that more single sex faith schools will be extremely divisive in Waltham Forest.

Make your voice heard by responding to Tauheedul’s consultation document by 19th July here: http://www.walthamforestlag.co.uk/downloads.html

More challenges to the proposed Free Schools – How about a bit of information?

Following on from our earlier democratic challenge to Tauheedul and Oasis, we haven’t given up on the idea that the people proposing the new Free Schools might feel that they should have to tell the people of Waltham Forest something about their new schools.

That’s why we have submitted a raft of questions to them and to the Department for Education (under the Freedom of Information Act) asking for details on a wide range of issues, including their admissions policies, their policies on special educational needs, their employment of teachers and their plans to, you know… consult.

You can read the questions we’ve submitted to each sponsor here and obviously, we’ll let you know if anyone tells us anything.

Oasis's response to our first request for information is here

And here is our response in the form of a new FOI

And here is our FOI to Tauheedul