Long wait for Ofsted report on flagship school of one of England’s largest academy chains

Why does the remuneration of education's firefighter appear not to have been disclosed?

Close observers of one of England’s largest academy chains are on tenterhooks as its flagship school awaits the seemingly long-delayed verdict of an Ofsted inspection which took place back nearly four months ago.

The website of Kemnal Technology College, in Sidcup, in the borough of Bromley in Kent, states that it was to be inspected on May 16^th.

But Ofsted has yet to publish a report on the school, which was last rated “requires improvement,” back in March 2017, having achieved an “outstanding” rating before it took on academy status.

The school was one of the very first to open as an academy via the “converter” route, which saw Michael Gove allowing previously successful institutions to take on academy status.

It did so on September 1^st 2010, alongside 29 others on the first day the converter academy policy went live. It was one of the first two schools set up within The Kemnal Academies Trust (TKAT) chain, which is based at the school.

Comparative look at report publication delays

The non-publication of this Ofsted report after this length of time makes this case highly unusual.

I looked at all the schools which had been inspected a year before Kemnal had, in May 2018, to see how long it took each of their inspection reports to appear.

In only one case out of these 264 May 2018* inspections was the gap between the inspection and the publication of the report longer than the 119 days that have already elapsed since Kemnal was inspected. In fact, all but one had been published by the end of July that year.

Indeed, looking at Ofsted’s inspection database as a whole, only 190 of the 21,791 state schools in those records which have been inspected have seen a gap of more than 117 days between inspection and report publication. That is less than one per cent.

Education Uncovered understands that the school has had repeated changes of leadership since 2016. If it were to be rated “inadequate,” this would be the only school within the TKAT empire currently to be in that position, based on Ofsted statistics accurate to the end of July (see below).

TKAT, which runs 45 schools, is England’s eighth-largest academy trust, with 22,821 pupils on roll as of the January 2019 school census. Karen Roberts, its chief executive, came in at number 76 in our list last week of top-paid trust leaders for 2017-18, on £170-£175k, plus £25-£30k in employer’s pensions contributions.

It did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, another quite high-profile school within the TKAT chain has been rated “requires improvement”.

Weyfield academy in Guildford in Surrey, has fallen back from a “good” rating received after its last inspection, in November 2015, with inspectors describing teaching quality as variable although pupils were said to be happy and safe, and the new headteacher to have taken “swift action to address the legacy of underperformance in some aspects of the school’s provision”.

I reported on this school several times back in 2014, mainly prompted by the mysterious departure of the popular headteacher at the time, Simon Wood.

Weyfield has had three full inspections since its takeover by TKAT back in February 2013, and they now read: inadequate, good, requires improvement.

Overall, my analysis of Ofsted inspection figures for TKAT schools accurate to July 31^st shows the chain had one school rated outstanding, 33 rated good and six “requires improvement” among 40 schools with inspection judgements.

In terms of the proportion of good or outstanding academies, this is roughly in line with the national average for state-funded schools. Still, this looks quite a challenging time for this chain.

No details of pay disclosed for “firefighter in chief”

Over the summer, Education Uncovered was keenly looking out for the publication of long-delayed accounts of one England’s more spectacular academy trust collapses of recent years: SchoolsCompany Trust.

The accounts document had supposed to have been released to the public by the end of January, on the trust’s own website. Its accounts were then supposed to appear on Companies House by May 31^st.

But, as the summer holidays broke, there was still no sign. Then, on August 7^th, nearly a year after the end of the academy year to which they relate, the 2017-18 accounts did come out.

In June, Schools Week had obtained a leak of the accounts for the trust, which had lost all its three pupil referral units and one school by last year. That publication rightly highlighted the £3m the trust owed the Department for Education, now written off.

But I was also intrigued as to why there appeared to be no disclosure, in the accounts, of the remuneration of Angela Barry, who was interim chief executive during 2017-18 and also a trustee. Indeed, while the pay of seven trustees is listed in these accounts – including the £80-£85,000 plus £10-£15,000 of former chief executive Elias Achilleos – there is no declaration in relation to Barry.

Yet the last two sets of accounts for the trust show that Barry served as interim chief executive from 29^th January 2018, and as a trustee from 23^rd February 2018. Under academy accounting rules, trustee pay is supposed to be disclosed.

Barry – whom I described as education’s firefighter-in-chief in a piece last October because of her role at SchoolsCompany and at another stricken pair of trusts, Bright Tribe and Adventure Learning – was quizzed on her pay during an appearance before the Commons education select committee last November.

She told the MPs that her role at SchoolsCompany at that time was a “light-touch” role, for which “at the moment, I am doing most of the work…pro bono [posh term for unpaid], because it is literally half an hour here, half an hour there and perhaps a phone call.

“I would only charge for a quarter day, a half day or a full day. For this month [November] because the schools were brokered [transferred to other trusts] as of 31 October, so far I have done one day in total.”

All of which seems to raise questions, not least whether she was being paid for more days before the trust lost its schools – ie during the 2017-18 year to which the accounts relate – and why, again, the payment amounts were not disclosed.

Barry has proved hard to get hold of in the past, so I asked the SchoolsCompany accounts auditors, Williams Giles Limited, based in Sittingbourne, Kent, why there appeared to have been no disclosure of Barry’s pay in the 2017-18 accounts.

Answers came there none.

I’ve just checked Bright Tribe’s 2017-18 accounts, and there is no declaration within them, either, of Barry’s remuneration from that trust. Yet the accounts state that she was chief executive of Bright Tribe during that year, and a trustee from July 6^th, 2018.

Barry did tell the select committee that her day rate – presumably for any of the trusts for which she was working - was £800, plus travel expenses, and that she was on payroll.

Meanwhile, Barry has now been appointed as a director at yet another beleaguered trust: TBAP, the “alternative provision” outfit which featured in a BBC Panorama documentary in March.

It will be interesting to see what its next set of accounts say.

Ark’s political connections on show yet again

The appointment of a former principal private secretary to Michael Gove as education secretary to the role of chief executive of the Ambition Institute underlines the extraordinary number of connections this outfit and the charity from which it sprang, Ark, have to government.

Hilary Spencer, reportedly a “long-serving Department for Education staffer”, joins Ambition whose chair has been Baroness Sally Morgan, former close aide to Tony Blair who went on also to chair Ofsted.

Morgan herself is to be replaced as chair of Ambition by another once-reasonably-prominent DfE civil servant: Rebecca Boomer-Clark, a former regional schools commissioner.

Sir David Carter, the former National Schools Commissioner, joined Ambition last year. And its “academic advisory board” is chaired by the government’s favourite education academic, Professor Sam Twiselton of Sheffield Hallam University.

Ambition, which controversially describes itself as running a “graduate school for teachers”, originated in the charity Absolute Return for Kids (Ark): its two constituent parts, Ambition School Leadership and the “Institute for Teaching”(IfT) were said to have been “incubated” within Ark.

But Ark itself, set up in the early 2000s by hedge funders, appears to be the best-connected of any education charity to England’s current education reform establishment.

Ark’s male-only, four-person board features Sir Paul Marshall, a former lead non-executive director at the DfE, who also chairs its academy chain, Ark Schools. Also on the board is Sir Paul’s fellow hedgie Lord Fink, a former Conservative Party treasurer.

Also working for Ark are Sam Freedman, a former political adviser to Gove. And…Boomer-Clark herself, who now appears to be combining her chairmanship role at Ambition with being director of secondary education at Ark Schools.

It does not appear much travelling will be involved in fulfilling the two roles. For both Ark and Ambition are based in the same offices, in Holborn in central London.

With Ambition seemingly the government’s favoured provider of in-service training for teachers – as Education Uncovered revealed in July, more than half of DfE cash for its Teaching and Learning Innovation Fund went to Ambition School Leadership and the IfT – many will wonder if all of this does not start to feel a little claustrophobic.

 

*I looked at inspections in May 2018 rather than in May 2019 because Ofsted’s database only records an inspection as having happened when its report has been published. So, as I wasn’t sure how many schools were in Kemnal’s position of having had an inspection visit in May 2019, but no report published, I decided to look further back, when we could be more confident that the vast majority of schools would already have had reports published, to get a more-or-less complete picture of how long it took.

UPDATE: TKAT has now responded my request for comment. This came following the publication of the Ofsted report, in which it graded “inadequate” on Kemnal Technology College.

The trust said: “We were disappointed to receive a Grade 4 judgement from our last Ofsted inspection and have challenged aspects of the report. However, we understand that Ofsted’s quality assurance process alongside the summer holidays has caused a delay in the report’s publication.

“While we have had some disruption in regards to senior leadership with three headteachers since 2016, we are pleased to now have an experienced and stable leadership team in place.

“This team has already made substantial improvements including significant investment in the infrastructure of the school, [and] a new year 7 hub as well as introducing a new behaviour strategy to reduce classroom disruption.

“Providing a high quality education and a safe and secure environment for our students remains our top priority and we will consider to work together as a trust to ensure we are doing so.”