Academy chief executive, who oversaw primary school with the highest number of permanent exclusions on record in England, put forward by government to be the next Children’s Commissioner

Contacts have responded with disbelief after leading multi-academy trust chief executive Rachel de Souza was announced as the government’s preferred choice to be the new children’s commissioner for England.

De Souza is a very controversial pick given the record of the trust she leads on pupils leaving its schools, with her multiple links to influential figures in and around the Department for Education and the Conservative Party likely to intensify scrutiny as to the detail of her qualifications for the high-profile role.

De Souza has been chief executive of the Norwich-based Inspiration Trust since its foundation under Lord Agnew, the former academies minister who is a Conservative peer and donor, in 2012.

Attention is likely to focus on the trust’s recent record on children leaving its schools, especially given that current and previous holders of the children’s commissioner post have sought to shine a light on this issue.

As Schools Week, which broke the story, reported, the current commissioner Anne Longfield has “called for a compulsory register for ‘off the grid’ children, stronger measures to tackle off-rolling and that schools should be held to account for excluded pupils. She also pledged to publish home education figures for every school.

Longfield’s predecessor, Maggie Atkinson, had also prioritised the issue, publishing a couple of influential reports which I referred to frequently in investigations.

Yet de Souza’s trust, though recently talking about the importance of inclusion, was for years the subject of developments which would seem to put her at risk of being on the other side of this argument, with official data; in at least two schools the findings of Ofsted inspectors; undisputed accounts of controversial behaviour policies in two schools; and multiple local sources clearly raising questions.

Permanent exclusion rates at two Inspiration Trust primaries

Only in September, Education Uncovered revealed how an Inspiration Trust school, Great Yarmouth Primary Academy, permanently excluded more children in a single year than any primary school on record.

This happened in 2018-19. The school’s figure of eight children permanently excluded then was the highest for any of England’s 19,000 primaries, in any single year covered by the database, which goes back to 2006-7.

It had permanently excluded 19 pupils since it joined the trust in 2012, with no permanent exclusions in any of the six years before that which are covered by the database, when it was a local authority school. Since 2012, this school had been under the oversight of de Souza.

Another Inspiration Trust primary, Norwich Primary Academy, was in the top 10 nationally in 2018-19 for the number of pupils permanently excluded, at four.

It is important to point out, here, how rare permanent exclusion is in primary education: these two Inspiration Trust schools between them had more permanent exclusions in 2018-19 than was the case for three quarters of England’s entire local authority areas that year.

Great Yarmouth Primary Academy was inspected and put in special measures in February 2019, on the publication of a report which highlighted fixed-term exclusions, which were described as “high and not reducing”, although not mentioning permanent exclusions. A follow-up inspection a year ago reported that “for a core of pupils, the rate of fixed-term exclusions remains too high”.

More recently, the trust has been making more positive noises about inclusion. And in November 2019 Colin Diamond, an Inspiration Trust director who said he had been appointed to improve its track record on inclusion, wrote that de Souza had admitted that the fixed-term exclusion rate for the trust had been too high, though there was no mention of permanent exclusions.

Readers, I guess, though, are likely to believe that de Souza should at least be questioned in detail about these figures by MPs, who will scrutinise her appointment.

Developments in other Inspiration Trust schools

However, the questions about the Inspiration Trust and pupil departures do not stop here.

The trust admitted that the number of pupils moving to home education from another of its schools – East Point Academy in Lowestoft, Suffolk – was too high, after an Ofsted inspection published 13 months ago reported that the IT had offered only “flimsy” reasons as to why they had done so.

I’ve also followed the case of the Hewett Academy, in Norwich, where pupil numbers have continued a longer-term decline after the school was handed, very controversially, by the government to the IT in 2015. Some of this shrinkage has come because of pupils leaving the school before the usual departure times at age 16 and 18.

In June 2018, this website reported how Ofsted inspectors seemed not to have noticed that the school’s 2017 GCSE cohort had shrunk by 13 pupils or 13 per cent compared to the number of pupils who were in year 10 the previous year.

The following academic year, the school saw pupil numbers shrink by 16 pupils or 20 per cent between year 10 and year 11. Both times, families opting for home education was cited as one of the causes – leading to five departures in total across the two years. As I wrote at the time, any number of families opting for elective home education over what was on offer at the school would seem to invite questions as to why they were doing so.

Overall, the Inspiration Trust came third in a national league table of academy chains and local authorities I compiled ranked by comparing the number of pupils in year 10 in 2017 with those in year 11 in 2018, and looking at those with the highest percentage shrinkage in these rolls.

Statistical analyses such as these never produce definitive answers. But, again, they invite questions.

Controversial behaviour approaches at two Inspiration Trust secondaries

Many observers have also questioned developments over the past three years at two Inspiration Trust schools which have brought in what are polarising approaches to managing and shaping pupil behaviour.

Great Yarmouth Charter Academy, which the trust took over officially in 2017 – it had been influential behind the scenes before that – installed a disciplinarian novice headteacher in Barry Smith and immediately captured headlines for a set of behaviour rules which included a suggestion to pupils that they should be provided a bucket to vomit into if they felt sick.

In 2018, a parent told me that her 13-year-old daughter had been made to cry after Smith had gone up to her and shouted at her. The parent moved her to another school. This was not the only report of the headteacher shouting while close to students. Smith left the IT last year.

Smith’s approach, though, not the vomit bucket or, as far as I’m aware, the shouting, was then copied at a second IT school more recently, as Cromer Academy, on the north Norfolk coast, unveiled a rulebook reminding pupils that their teachers’ words were “gold dust” and to sit up straight and make eye contact. I was told at the time of concerns about the possible impact on children with special educational needs. The document had been headlined “Being Cromer”, which is taken by its critics to imply a degree of sublimation of the self into the idea of the school.

Again, statistics – this time on Great Yarmouth Charter Academy – also suggested reasons to pause for thought.

In July 2018, I reported how more than 10 per cent of pupils left Great Yarmouth Charter Academy in nine months, following Smith’s arrival. And the year group which took GCSEs in 2019 at the school was 22 per cent smaller than it had been in 2017, before Inspiration Trust took over.

All of this seems very worthy of scrutiny as de Souza is lined up for what is a high-profile national role. Contacts local to this trust in East Anglia, where it has always been extremely controversial, despite or perhaps fuelled by de Souza’s closeness to ministers, have also long wondered about its record on inclusion.

De Souza also seems to have fallen out with another figure who has a loyal following among traditionalist supporters of the former education secretary Michael Gove and the schools minister, Nick Gibb: Christine Counsell, who left the trust suddenly in 2018. Part of this seems to have been a disagreement about how much of a focus there should be on boosting short-term school results, again which might have been viewed sceptically by former holders of the Children’s Commissioner post, but where de Souza seemed to side against the more cramming-averse Counsell.

And I haven’t even mentioned the investigation I carried out with a colleague at the Observer back in 2014, which featured on two of the broadsheet’s front pages, about whether or not de Souza had prior warnings of Ofsted inspections.

There were two official enquiries into this ordered as a result, both of which ended up clearing de Souza, the second “on the balance of probabilities”. It was one of the most interesting investigations I’ve ever carried out, including lines about expenses claims, honours, and how it could be that your correspondent was told, by sources close to the trust, about an inspection which had yet to be officially announced as taking place. 

This seems relevant to the appointment process for the £120,000-£130,000 Children’s Commissioner role, in which the government’s preferred choice may be required to complete a questionnaire setting out their “commitment to standards in public life and how you would handle being in the public eye”.

Questions, then, as to whether de Souza is the right person for this job would seem to be numerous. As the Schools Week piece intimated, her contacts in and around the Conservative Party and the Department for Education will make for additional scrutiny. This is especially the case, of course, given the wider contention about what is now being called the “chumocracy”: people closely linked to ministers who have been winning Covid-19-related contracts and appointments to powerful positions.

It is also the case that, while de Souza was once hailed by Gove as someone he wanted to clone, her trust’s record overall is not outstanding.

Those connections

De Souza’s links to Agnew in that he founded the Inspiration Trust are obvious. Agnew is no longer associated with the trust through its governance, I think, although its board is still chaired by his friend and long-time business associate David Tibble.

De Souza has been close, too, to Jo Saxton, who is a former chief executive at the academy chain presided over by Lord Agnew’s friend and predecessor as academies minister, Lord Nash. Saxton, who until recently was running a controversial academy chain of her own, was reported in March this year as due to take up a post as education adviser to Gavin Williamson. It was the Education Secretary, of course, who has provisionally appointed de Souza to this new role. As far as I know, Saxton is still in that post.

De Souza also sits on the board of the Ambition Institute, the charity – closely linked to the academy chain and wider edu-philanthropy operation Absolute Return for Kids (Ark) – which in itself is deeply enmeshed in DfE policy networking and has been the recipient of large government grants.   

But perhaps her involvement with another organisation best illustrates how well-connected she is. In 2016, just before the Brexit referendum, de Souza and a very successful Brexit-supporting businessman, Jon Moynihan, jointly established the pressure group “Parents and Teachers for Excellence”.

This faux-grassroots organisation included as supporters number of people who have been very closely linked to Boris Johnson and his government, including remarkably, both the co-authors of last year’s Conservative election manifesto.

One of those, Rachael Wolf, worked for Johnson when the Tories were in opposition, before going on to run the New Schools Network, the free school lobby and support group. The other, Munira Mirza, is currently head of Johnson’s Number 10 policy unit. James Frayne, Wolf’s husband who is former head of communications for Michael Gove during his time as Education Secretary and who is a former colleague of Dominic Cummings and reportedly a “Brexit ally” of the latter, has also been credited with helping set up Parents and Teachers for Excellence. Wolf and Frayne also established Public First, a lobbying and research firm which has been at the centre of controversy over its reported award of contracts from the government.

De Souza was also close to the merchant banker Lord Rodney Leach, I understand, before he died in 2016. Leach reportedly founded Business for Sterling, the lobby group which campaigned against Britain joining the euro and which was where Cummings – and Frayne – cut their campaigning teeth. He was described in Peter Geoghegan’s recent book “Democracy for Sale” as having hosted a meeting between two leading architects of Brexit – Matthew Elliott and Daniel Hannan – in 2012.

Given that one of the priorities of the Children’s Commissioner, as set out by the DfE in its job spec, is to “champion social mobility”, the endless links behind the scenes which this piece discusses may seem ironic. For how are those without access to such soft power and personal connections ever to thrive?

What is Parents and Teachers for Excellence’s policy on inclusion

But I digress. Again, it seems worth dragging this analysis back to the detail on inclusion policy, and specifically the stance of Parents and Teachers for Excellence (PTE) on the issue.

PTE’s website seems less active than it once was; its last news update was in 2017, and only two opinion pieces have been published this academic year. So it is hard to find any statement of policy on inclusion or exclusions.

However, de Souza was one of the signatories to a letter in September 2018 organised by the lobby group which gives a firm steer on its position on the issue.

The letter was signed by other influential figures including Mirza, the DfE’s perma-adviser Ian Bauckham, Tony Sewell who now heads a government investigation into racial inequality, the head of Oak National Academy Matt Hood and the now-deceased conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton.

The letter said it condemned illegal exclusions but that its signatories “support in the strongest possible terms the right of heads to exclude pupils within the law”. It said that “some recent coverage” of the issue had been “misinformed, misguided and unhelpful”, though no specific articles were listed.

It appears to have been published in reaction to a string of investigations, including by the Guardian but from memory also by the education press.

One of these, two weeks earlier, had been headlined “dozens of secondary schools exclude at least 20 per cent of pupils”, based on the number of fixed-term exclusions they had. A follow-up had been headlined “use of isolation booths in schools criticised as ‘barbaric’ punishment”.

What is de Souza’s position on these issues now? And does her past record, and that of the trust for which she has had responsibility since 2012, mean she is really the right person for this job?

The job spec for the role says the pre-appointment hearing for the role, in which the chosen post-holder was likely to face questions from members of the Education Select Committee, “is likely to be held in early December.

The questions above surely now need asking.