If I were a parent there, I would be absolutely aghast at what appears to be happening to a group of primary schools in Haringey, north London.
Parents I have spoken to this week, whose children attend a Haringey primary which in November was placed in special measures by inspectors and which now seems to be being compelled into academy status, are enraged
What leaves those I spoke to almost speechless is the extent to which they say they have been bystanders in the whole process, with the DfE not bothering to explain to them why a change in the school’s constitution is needed, the detail of how it will improve matters or even what an academy is.
The whole process, from parents first finding out that the school was being lined up to become a sponsored academy whether they liked it or not to the Government finalising that decision, would take only two months including the Christmas holiday, an absurdly short time for a decision which would change the school seemingly permanently.
This, at least, is the view of parents fighting the forced move to academy status at Noel Park primary, a 580-pupil serving an economically disadvantaged, racially mixed community in Wood Green.
I would guess there have been similar goings-on in the nine other English local authorities which the Department for Education has targeted for its first wave of “forced academy” conversions and which may be the model for many more across the country.
I am continuing to write about this situation at length because I believe that, whatever you think about the academies policy, this process is shockingly undemocratic and disrespectful to views other than those within the Department for Education. It seems in these cases, that parents are only allowed a choice if it coincides with that of the Secretary of State.
Although the campaign at Noel Park has been less high-profile than that at nearby Downhills school (which I wrote about here http://bit.ly/voANSD and here http://bit.ly/uUvwcN), feelings seem to be running just as high.
In results collated this week, despite that seemingly damning inspection judgement, 208 parents – in an electorate of 400 – voted against Noel Park becoming an academy, with only 14 in favour and 16 undecided. It seems, though, that these views will count for nothing, with governors being given until the end of this week by the DfE to agree to academy status, or face the governing body being sacked and replaced by one appointed by the department itself to implement the academy move.
The move towards academy status at Noel Park started, for parents, barely seven weeks ago, on December 16th, as they learned how ministers had reacted to Ofsted’s verdict on the school.
Following an inspection visit in November, the school had been placed in special measures. Yet this was greeted with shock – and disbelief in some quarters, of which more below – as only three years earlier, under the same head and with seemingly lower English and maths test results, Noel Park had been found to be good with outstanding features.
Nevertheless, on December 16th parents were informed that the school had received a letter from Lord Hill, the schools minister, saying it would have to become an academy, and giving governors until only January 20th to agree. Governors have since won a stay of execution until today (Friday February 3rd), but the position remains the same.
As at Downhills, what seems particularly to be enraging parents is the top-down nature of the whole process, with their views seemingly counting for nothing with the DfE, and no-one from the department even taking the time to explain the policy, or the detail of the school’s likely future under a sponsor, to them. Noel Park’s future is, then, simply being decided centrally from Whitehall.
Edel Brosnan, an office IT manager with a daughter in year two at the school told me: “No-one at the DfE has had any contact with the parents, apart from when we have contacted them ourselves for information. The parents’ body have just not been taken into the process at all. It’s very, very hard to understand why that has been happening.
“People are bewildered: they are feeling like: ‘where did this come from’? Everyone is trying to keep an open mind about it, but there is no information, and there’s no explanation.
“It’s just: ‘this decision has been taken, and we’ll keep you posted’.
She added: “It’s bewildering to me that DfE officials have not met parents, and that a minister has not been to the school, talked to parents and seen the children to learn about how it develops them, and the progress that they make.”
Francois Joubert, another Noel Park parent, who also works in IT, who grew up in South Africa and has children in reception and year three at the school, said: “There is so little information…parents are wandering around saying: we are going to become an academy, but what’s an academy?”
The business of who might become a sponsor at the school seems, to this observer, particularly bizarre. Parents say two academy sponsors have visited Noel Park in recent weeks: the Kemnal Academies Trust – a chain of eight secondary and four primary academies – and the Academies Enterprise Trust, which is one of the largest academy chains, with 19 schools. Contact with neither seems to have been instigated by Noel Park, with Kemnal reportedly simply asked to sponsor it by the DfE.
Parents are concerned that all of Kemnal’s four primary schools are in rural or suburban settings with small numbers of pupils speaking English as a second language – compared to multi-ethnic, multi-lingual Noel Park, with its 50 per cent free school meals stats – and that Kemnal had not instigated interest in Noel Park itself. Opinions of the AET were more positive, but again, both Ms Brosnan and Mr Joubert were highly unhappy with the process.
Kemnal took over the first of its primary academies in April last year, while the AET did so only last September, so both are still in their first year of running primary schools.
Ms Brosnan said: “No-one has said to us: these are a range of possible sponsors, so would you like to pick the sponsor that you think would be best for the school, before the governing body votes.
“I used to run a small business. This is not how you run a small business. It seems completely lacking in transparency and fairness: we have no information and the DfE obviously has loads of information.”
It is fair to say that Tuesday’s appearance by Michael Gove in front of MPs on the Education Select Committee, when he reportedly referred to opponents of the plan to force academy status on Downhills school as “Trots”, has not further endeared him to parents at Noel Park.
Ms Brosnan added: “The people who have the information [in the DfE] seem under no obligation to share it with us, yet the minister in the Select Committee can crack jokes about the integrity and motivation of people who disagree with him.
“That’s really unprofessional. I would be up before human resources if that was the way I behaved at work.”
Mr Joubert said, of the “Trots” claim: “It’s just name-calling. I think he has got an absolute cheek. He’s not bothered to even contact or speak to us or even send a representative to explain the situation to us. He’s a coward. He is not going to come and face the music here in Haringey about what he is doing.”
Then there is the timetable. Ms Brosnan said the December 16th starting point for the process meant that there was no time to carry out a detailed consultation with parents necessitated by such a big change at the school, with Christmas holidays virtually started. In the end, the snap poll of parents was conducted by the governing body after many families reportedly said one had to be conducted. The whole process of converting the school would have to be in place by the start of the coming academic year.
“Which leaving aside the arguments about whether academy status is a good thing or not, September just seems an absurdly bad timetable. We are in special measures at the moment. My feeling is that we should be focusing on getting out of special measures, and not on a change of governance,” said Ms Brosnan.
Finally, there is the issue of choice. Mr Joubert said he and his wife wanted a school which worked with the local community, not one which was imposed against its wishes. He said: “We chose to live here because we wanted to be part of a community, and we chose the school as part of that: to contribute to our community and feel part of it. Then someone comes along and wants to rip the heart out of that. We are not going to go quietly.”
He added that while an emphasis on maths and English was important – improving the proportion of children achieving Government expectations in both subjects at key stage 2 is the reason given by ministers for the policy – he worried they would be over-emphasised in an academy.
A new organisation might feel it had to focus too much on these two subjects, to get it through Ofsted’s “narrow” inspection process, he said. “I want my children growing up with a broad education, to expose them to a wide range of possibilities. If I go back to my own upbringing, in South Africa, I did not have half the confidence that my children have, I did not have half the emotional and social skills that my children have. They’re getting it largely from the school community and the confidence of the teachers.
“I cannot state how angry I am about what is going on.”
This chimes very much with the experience I had talking to parents at Downhills school, in Tottenham, before Christmas. The feeling then was that this was not a democratic process. Parents who had chosen to send their child to the school because of its ethos were particularly angry at the prospect of this potentially being taken away from them without them even being asked.
I have heard that parents at another high profile “forced academy” primary – Montgomery, in Birmingham, where teachers have been on strike over the move – have also been feeling disenfranchised.
The level of explicit compulsion in the coalition’s forced academies policy is certainly greater than what went before. But it strikes me there was always been a large element of arm-twisting and centralisation in the opening of academies under Labour.
The idea of sponsors not being arranged for a school by parents, the head or the governors but being put forward by officials within the education department in Whitehall certainly seemed to happen under the last administration. And it was often the case that central government bullied councils into academies, telling them they would not get their schools rebuilt under Building Schools for the Future if they did not let some of them close and re-open as sponsored academies. Although a different case can be made for academies whose governing bodies have chosen to convert under the coalition, in general the history of the policy has been that it has been a centralised initiative driven by a perceived need by politicians to be bringing about dramatic structural changes to English schools, for which they can then claim credit.
The latest experiences in Haringey and Birmingham strike me as different from decisions on schools’ futures, including school closures, over which local authorities have presided. As a local newspaper reporter in the late 1990s, I sat in on council meetings at which school re-organisations were discussed and argued at length by local politicians. Councillors pushing a closure plan would appear at a school to defend their decision, in contrast to the stance of ministers and their officials now. (Although DfE officials have visited schools to talk to governing bodies, this has been along the lines of “this is what the Secretary of State wants”, with no public explanation or defence of the policy on evidence-based grounds to the local community). In local government, the whole process would be far more drawn-out than two months, I think.
Of course, school closures or re-organisations under local government were far from perfect. There were always complaints, for example, about council consultations being skewed to come to the outcome the council wanted. But at least there was a process.
It is easy to spot the Government’s response to all of this: process and consultation are for wimps. We just need to improve schools, and to improve them fast. This was the justification for the Government pushing through its Academies Act 2010, which opened the way for this element of compulsion, in double-quick time under emergency legislation.
The astonishing thing about this latest development is the contempt for any sense of localism, or context: if a school’s results are not good enough, that would seem to be justification enough for the Government’s chosen reform route, and ministers’ favourite policy - academy status -and there seems little that anyone can do about it.
That last bit may not be completely accurate. Some 1,000 people reportedly took to the streets of Haringey on Saturday to protest against the forced academies policy in relation to primaries there, where another two schools seem also to be facing compulsory constitution changes. Mr Joubert said he would investigate legal challenges, possibly even under human rights legislation. At the time of writing 17 Labour MPs had signed a Commons Early Day Motion against the forced academies policy. So we will see; suffice to say these campaigns may not be universally welcomed at the DfE, despite the confidence of Mr Gove’s appearance before MPs.
Just finally, there is the question of Noel Park’s Ofsted inspections. I should say here that I do not have enough detail to reach any kind of judgement on the reality of the school’s quality, only having conducted interviews on the phone with parents and looked at the last two inspection reports, including the most recent, which said it required special measures.
It is fair to say, also, that there are dark mutterings circulating in Haringey about the large number of primary schools which recently have been subject to negative Ofsted inspection judgements in the run-up to the Government’s forced academies move in the borough. Any claims of political influence on the inspection process would be damning for Ofsted, although there is no hard evidence as yet, as far as I can see.
What I do know is that it is a school with key stage 2 results which are below the Government’s floor targets but which serves a highly disadvantaged community, with half its pupils eligible for free school meals, three quarters speaking English as a second language and with high pupil turnover, only half of its children having been with the school since year one.
In 2011, “only” 56 per cent of its year six pupils achieved level four in English and maths Sats, which is below the Government’s floor target of 60 per cent. (I say “only” in quotes because it is quite a thing to say that a school with this pupil clientele is performing poorly when one considers, of course, that level 4 was originally set as the performance of the average pupil.)
But the interesting thing is how the latest Ofsted report on Noel Park contrasts not just with parents’ views of the school – as measured by Ofsted’s own statistics – but with the previous inspection judgement.
So, of 105 parents who answered the question at Noel Park’s last Ofsted inspection in November 2011, 101 said they agreed with the statement “I am happy with my child’s experience at this school”. Four parents disagreed, two of them strongly.
Now, arguments can be made about how parents might not have the “right” picture of the school: they may have low expectations of their child’s teachers, that they do not see the detail of what is going on in lessons that inspectors gain and that they lack inspectors’ professional expertise.
Nevertheless, I find it strange that inspections can reach a verdict – the worst possible – which seems so at odds with parental opinion. And no substantive reasons seem to be given for this contradiction in the latest Ofsted report.
And, for what it is worth – which I suspect is very little – all of the admittedly huge number of 12 people claiming to be Noel Park parents on Ofsted’s “Parent View” website strongly agreed that they would recommend the school to another parent.
But perhaps the most interesting contrast is with the previous inspection report on Noel Park, in September 2008. The lead inspector then, Ruth McFarlane, offered a rhapsodic view of Noel Park, saying in the report: “In the words of one pupil, ‘this is a great school, and it’s getting even better.”
The school was then adjudged good for leadership, under its head, Tunay Hussein. The report said: “The headteacher has created a strong caring ethos. She is ably supported by senior leaders who share her vision and set very clear direction to improve pupils’ progress whilst providing high levels of nurturing care.
Achievement was also rated good by the inspectors in 2008, a few months after 65 per cent of pupils had achieved level four or above in English, and 54 per cent in maths. (In 2007, the corresponding figures were 57 per cent and 62 per cent respectively).
Fast forward to November 2011, and the school’s results – or “outcomes for individuals and groups” in Ofsted language- were adjudged inadequate. The report of the latest inspection visit, led by Sheena MacDonald, found: “Most groups, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities, achieve less well than similar groups nationally, particularly in mathematics.”
It added: “Pupils’ attainment is low and their progress is inadequate. This has been the case for some years.”
Yet the results in 2011, before Noel Park’s latest Ofsted, show that 74 per cent of pupils achieved level four in English, and 66 per cent in maths, which is an improvement on 2007 and 2008.
With Ms Hussein still in post, the latest Ofsted rated the school’s leadership this time as “inadequate”, with the first comment in this section of the report being that the school’s self-evaluation was too generous.
It added: “The capacity for further improvement is inadequate since leadership and management, including the governing body, have not been effective in addressing long-standing weaknesses.”
Edel Brosnan, who has called Ofsted to complain about the latest inspection verdict, told me: “It’s very very difficult to look at the Ofsted report and not feel they are judging the school on intake rather than outcomes, because the school got good with outstanding features in its last Ofsted, in September 2008.
“The school has not materially changed since then. It’s Ofsted’s framework which has changed.”
Now, I’m sure that schools which have been good can slide, even when the leadership does not change. I don’t know the detail of what has gone on at Noel Park since the last inspection. But what does amaze me is that there is not any indication in the 2011 Ofsted report as to why this latest judgement contrasts so dramatically with the previous one.
If I were a parent with a child at Noel Park, I would like an explanation as to what has happened in the school such that the standards of education on offer to pupils have really gone backwards, as the two judgements would imply. As a reporter, I would like some explanation as to exactly what has changed in the running of the school.
Instead, it is as if Ofsted starts from a clean slate every time, with no sense in the latest report of how the school was seen the last time it visited, and the need for inspectors to explain to parents why the two judgements are different: to provide a narrative link between the two. Ofsted’s measurement system does indeed change very frequently, but the idea of acknowledging this as a factor in reports on which parents will rely, if indeed it is a factor, is a move of modesty which I am afraid I cannot really imagine from the modern inspectorate.
It strikes me, again, as a flawed reporting system, and not one that is really parent-focused. Maybe Ofsted needs a notice to improve.
-Stop press: I understand that Noel Park’s governing body has now voted to accept academy status, under the sponsorship of the Academies Enterprise Trust, despite the parental vote against any forced academy move. Mr Joubert said parental campaigning and scrutiny of the academy arrangements would continue, however.
If you have experience of the forced academy process, or observations on Ofsted, I’d be keen to hear from you at warwickmansell@gmail.com
