Man in the spotlight: Dr Matthew Laban

The resignation of Mark Allchorn, headteacher of the forced academy Barclay School in Stevenage, was provoking a lot of controversy overnight, with parents expressing concern and in some cases fury that he was announced as leaving just a month after its takeover by Future Academies.

This case seems particularly sad, and noteworthy as an exemplar of – to its many local critics – problems with the system of Whitehall-imposed school projects on communities who may not want them.

In January, I attended a packed two-hour community meeting at which support for Allchorn and his turnaround efforts at the school since arriving after its “inadequate” Ofsted report in 2016 – later endorsed by inspectors - rang out loudly, clearly and passionately. To put it mildly, the meeting overwhelmingly backed stability, not change.

This seemed to be irrelevant to the government, however, which pressed on and academised the school under Future, which is sponsored by the former academies minister Lord Nash, at the start of last month.  

Last night, the local Labour county councillor, Joshua Bennett Lovell, issued a press release stating that he was organising a public demonstration outside the school gates this morning, and even calling for a public inquiry into the school’s academisation.

But controversy was also attaching itself to Future’s choice of successor to Allchorn. Matthew Laban has been involved with a few institutions that have featured in education news coverage over recent years, almost exclusively in the academies sector.

His experience of mainly leading primary schools, and also his position as a reasonably prominent Conservative, assuming leadership of a school at which it is fair to say the party’s education policies are not universally popular, are being hotly debated.

Laban’s cv

Laban’s LinkedIn profile charts quite a varied leadership career in recent years. From 2012 to 2015, he served as headteacher of Kingfisher Hall primary academy in Enfield, north London, which was part of the Cuckoo Hall trust once lavishly praised by Michael Gove.

That profile flags up its “outstanding” Ofsted report from June 2014, the school’s only report to date, which also rates its leadership under Laban as also “outstanding”, stating that “the headteacher and deputy headteacher work tirelessly to ensure that all pupils are given every possible opportunity to succeed”.

A feature in the Independent from September 2013 had Laban and a colleague advocating the Cuckoo Hall trust’s “core knowledge” approach to teaching the primary curriculum. Whatever the debate around that elsewhere, this trust’s methods have struggled to see success in recent years.

LinkedIn also has Laban leading a secondary school – Heron Hall, in the same chain - for eight months from January 2015, while continuing to lead Kingfisher Hall. Heron Hall got a “good” from Ofsted during this period, in June 2015.

Laban, however, was one of a host of directors to stand down from the Cuckoo Hall academies trust in February 2015, as a scandal broke around that trust – there is no suggestion he was directly involved – with his departure at the end of the academic year as headteacher of Kingfisher Hall seemingly announced by the March.

He then moved to be “executive headteacher” of Brook House primary school not far away in Tottenham and Thomas Gamuel primary school, in Walthamstow, under the Lion Academy Trust.

That organisation had been brought in to run what became Brook House after its serious failure under the E-ACT chain under its previous incarnation as Hartsbrook. I wrote a story in 2015 about how taxpayers were paying a bill of nearly £500,000 a year to rent the premises of this free school from a private investment company.

Nevertheless, the ship was steadied – Hartsbrook had had a shockingly bad Ofsted report in 2014 – and Brook House was rated “good” by the inspectorate following a visit in November 2016.

That could be seen as another endorsement of Laban’s leadership, as it came only four months after his departure, this time to work as a “consultant headteacher” at George Tomlinson primary school, in Leytonstone, Waltham Forest.

That seems, from a local blog, to have been another school which had had recent troubles, but signs of them continuing after Laban arrived were absent following a quick search just now.

But Laban only stayed in that role for seven months, according to LinkedIn, before arriving at his present employer, the central London-based Future, headed by the Conservative former academies minister Lord (John) Nash and his wife Caroline – in April 2017.

Since then, Laban has been head of Millbank academy, in Westminster. This is one of three primary schools in the Future chain. This school, having been inspected in 2013, less than a year after it opened as an academy, and rated “outstanding”, has not been inspected since. So there was no inspection under Laban’s watch.

He is now due to plunge into the apparent maelstrom of the Barclay, to replace Allchorn, at Easter, although he is to be assisted by a current member of Barclay’s leadership team, Lauren Phillips, as head of interim head of school for next term.

Laban holds a history degree, followed by a master’s and then a doctorate, from Queen Mary, London; a PGCE from the University of Middlesex; and the National Professional Qualification for Headship (taken after his first two years as a head at Kingfisher Hall).

Future’s letter to anxious Barclay parents yesterday stated blandly, and seemingly correctly, that Laban “is a very successful principal across a range of schools in London and the South East”.

Indeed, there is nothing in the record above to suggest any association with failure, other than having been a director of the Cuckoo Hall trust whose last few years have not been successful. Indeed, at first glance they may point to his being a calming presence in the face of controversies.

Yet Laban’s cv has nevertheless been exciting controversy since news of Allchorn’s departure broke, for two reasons.

Mainly primary experience

First, as not highlighted in that quote from Future above, is the relative paucity of secondary experience. Bennett Lovell’s press release states, seemingly correctly given the cv above, that he has less than nine months’ experience as a secondary head teacher, with this time seemingly spent also leading a primary school, in what seemed to be crisis conditions given goings-on at the Cuckoo Hall trust at the time.

Bennett Lovell’s press release also states that that secondary, Heron Hall, was a free school in its initial years at the time, with only two year groups. This is correct: DfE data show it had only year seven and eight pupils – 172 of them – as of January 2015. This seems quite a contrast to leading the Barclay, a medium-size comprehensive with a sixth form, with 1,181 pupils.

Politics

Second is Laban’s political career. Again a quick search shows he stood as a Conservative candidate for the Greater London Assembly in the Enfield Haringey seat back in 2008, narrowly missing out to Labour’s Joanne McCartney.

He currently appears to be deputy chairman (political) of the Hertford and Stortford Conservative Association. 

It is important to recognise that political affiliations should be acknowledged on either side – Bennett Lovell is, after all, a Labour councillor, and Barclay teacher Jill Borcherds, who has been a National Education Union rep at the school, is Stevenage’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Labour.

But Laban’s Conservative profile would always have been likely to add fuel to the flames of this debate, especially with Future having been created and seemingly still controlled by Lord and Lady Nash, and with the community having had the chain imposed on their school against the backdrop of interventions from the town’s Conservative MP, Stephen McPartland, who was nowhere to be seen at the community meeting.

As one local tweeter, seemingly connected to the Barclay, put it yesterday afternoon: “And now we learn that we are losing our brilliant, beloved head and will have yet another headteacher at Barclay, and guess what, he’s only the deputy chair of Hertford and Stortford Conservative Association.”

Bennett Lovell’s press release adds that, as if to make matters worse in terms of doing little to calm down this controversy, that Laban’s appointment had been announced, as permanent, “without any scrutiny from parents or staff”. Again, to its critics this is further evidence of this policy undermining any sense of the need to work with, and respect, those affected by decisions.

Final thoughts

Will Laban be a success, given his record and the circumstances of his arrival? Of course, the coming period will decide the answer.

One final point from his cv: Laban is also the author of what seems a well-reviewed post-war history of the office of Speaker of the House of Commons. So does this keen student of politics really believe the academies policy has been set up with enough weight given to the views of school communities? It would be interesting to ask him.

His appointment begs further questions: does the academies policy, detached as it is from local accountability and with decision-making power so remote, give trusts the ability to impose - without cost to them - particular solutions on communities, no matter how controversial they might be?

Or are such situations an ongoing public relations disaster for those in charge, giving them headaches that more sensitively-designed and managed policies might at least mitigate? This, and other case studies, will help to provide further answers.