Clear-out of governors at school recently taken over by Lord Nash’s Future Academies, as headteacher announces he’s leaving, too

The headteacher and, I understand, most if not all of the governing body of an academy which was taken over by a high-profile chain earlier this year are standing down.

Jon Hebblethwaite, principal of Bushey Academy in Hertfordshire, told staff earlier this month that he was leaving after three years at the helm. He gave no indication of future plans, saying only that he was departing to “explore other opportunities”. Parents are understood to have been told last week.

The move comes with local governors appearing to have fallen out with the chain running it: London-based Future Academies, which of course is overseen by the former academies minister and Tory peer and donor, Lord Nash and his wife Caroline.

I understand that at least four people on the governing body, including the chair, Mark Harmon, who DfE records say had served as a governor since 2009, stood down in the months April to June. The remaining members were expected to be leaving last week. The 10 governors appear to have had a combined 46 years of service on this local body.

It is not clear why Hebblethwaite has left, and I am not aware of any announcement from Future as to who his replacement is to be. Future has said that the principal had told it “earlier this term” of his intention to leave and that it “thank[ed] him for his hard work and dedication” in improving the school.

The position of governors appears to have been that they were not valued, within a multi-academy trust which all the available evidence suggests runs its schools more or less directly from its headquarters in Pimlico, central London, with seemingly little scope for local governance (see below for detail).

Governors are also understood to have grown frustrated with repeated postponements of governing body meetings by Future, especially as they sought to support Bushey during the pandemic.

A feeling that this multi-academy trust is run in a top-down manner was underlined by controversy last month, as reported on this website, over the decision that 11 long-term supply staff were to leave Bushey. 

Those who had returned overseas had their contracts terminated immediately, while those remaining the UK were no longer able to continue working at the school, though are being paid at 80 per cent of their wages until the end of this term.

The decision – which was less controversial than other supply contract moves during the crisis - had been announced to staff by Hebblethwaite in May. However, it was clear that the decision affected other schools within the nine-academy Future empire, suggesting a key role for head office.

The Bushey governors, who DfE records suggest had each served nearly five years on average on this board, are understood to have been demoralised, being of the view that Future operated a top-down governance structure, with minimal local input and amid questions about whether decisions made centrally would even be shared with local governors.

As Education Uncovered has reported in the past, the tightness of this control is clear from the membership of individual governing bodies at Future: each of the seven schools for which information is available on the trust’s website remarkably show “local” governing bodies being chaired either by Lord Nash himself, by Lord and Lady Nash jointly, or by the chain’s chief executive, Paul Smith.

Back in October, after I found out that it was still not clear who was on the local governing board of another Hertfordshire secondary transferred to Future, the Barclay school in Stevenage, nine months after that school’s super-controversial takeover, the trust then revealed that its previously independent local governing body was now being chaired by Smith, with a grand total of two other governors also serving.

The developments come despite Education Uncovered having heard some more positive opinions about the traditionalist curriculum Future – and also the trust of Lord Nash’s fellow former academies minister, and friend, Lord Agnew’s Inspiration – have developed, and specifically how they might offer an antidote to results cramming in schools.*

However, other background aspects of this story seem to return us to more straightforwardly questionable aspects of education policymaking, as tracked endlessly by this website.

For Bushey Academy was handed to Future by the government’s Regional Schools Commissioner having previously been run by another chain which had been “sponsored” by a prominent Tory donor businessman, who like Lords Nash and Agnew had served as a non-executive director at the Department for Education: David Meller. Meller stood down from his role at the Meller Education Trust, which had been running Bushey, in the wake of the Presidents Club scandal in 2018.

Bushey was transferred to Future in February 2020.

More departures at Wellsway

Meanwhile, change continues apace at another trust to have been featured extensively by Education Uncovered in recent years.

Back in March this website featured senior leadership changes at Wellsway, the 13-academy organisation based between Bath and Bristol. Stefan Madzarevic, head of a special school in Bath called Aspire which is run by the chain, had stood down in February. The previous July, Wellsway’s long-serving chair, Professor Kate Reynolds of Bath Spa University, had also left the organisation.

Since March, there have been two other prominent departures. Matthew Cottrell, who had been deputy chief executive and director of primary, left in April, a local report the following month saying he had departed to “work as a school improvement consultant and in school inspection”. He had reportedly been headteacher of St John’s CofE primary school, in Keynsham, Bristol, which later joined the trust from 2006, before moving to work for Wellsway head office five years ago.

Also in April, Tim Dunning, head of another Wellsway school in Keynsham, Chandag junior, was announced as standing down. A message in the school newsletter flagged up an announcement by Andrea Arlidge, Wellsway’s chief executive, stating that Dunning had “taken the difficult decision, [sic] to leave his post as headteacher of Chandag Junior School to pursue new opportunities,” after nearly six years as head.

After Reynolds’ departure, the chair of Wellsway is now Malcolm Broad, an experienced governor who since January has also been chairing the board at Sexey’s School, an academy 30 miles away in Somerset. As Education Uncovered reported in October, that school had been facing a hostile takeover from another chain, called SAST (Sherborne Area Schools Trust), which subsequently pulled out; it is unclear whether that was the end of the matter in terms of this school joining a MAT, however.

As Education Uncovered has been observing since investigating a complicated tale of Wellsway’s alternative provision back in 2018, this remains an organisation to watch.

*This may be a controversial point, I know. I have written a sceptical piece on Future’s curriculum work, here. But also, having written a book called “Education by Numbers…” I am open to arguments that an approach focused more on the content of what is taught than simply the results at the end may have more positive aspects.