Riddle of academy chain’s acquisition of free school site for �1- and the answer

How did a well-connected academy chain come to be handed the site for a free school –once owned by England’s largest local authority –for the princely sum of �1?

The question arose after a local blog disclosed last month the seemingly extraordinary tale, whereby the government had sold the site for the new Turner free school, in Folkestone in Kent, to Turner Schools, a chain which had been set up only 18 months before, for this amount.

The blog was headlined “What can you buy for a £1”, with large coins as the illustration.

And yes, the story is backed up by documentation.

Turner Schools was established in March 2016 and currently runs three schools in and around Folkestone: Martello and Morehall primaries, and the Folkestone Academy, about which this website has carried several stories.

Last year, Kent county council closed another school serving the town, Pent Valley Technology College, reportedly on the basis of “falling attendance, rising debts and low exam results”.

Before Pent Valley actually closed, the government announced in April 2017 that Turner Schools – which had only started running its first academies three months previously - had been given the go-ahead to open what the local press described as “the first new secondary school in Folkestone for 10 years”.

But Land Registry documents show that the school’s large site was then transferred, in September, to Turner Schools, not by Kent county council, but by the Department for Education, in the guise of its Secretary of State at the time: Justine Greening.

The blog sets out the three Land Registry documents showing this, with the DfE selling what seems a large site to Turner Schools, with £1 the fee paid in each case. (The blog says it was £1 for the whole site; I wonder if it was £3. But this is not a significant difference…)

Turner’s 2016-17 accounts, signed off in December last year, suggest the Pent Valley site is to be rebuilt, though they also state that “funding and the build have not yet been agreed with the DfE and the Trust will bring this into its financial statements in the financial year 2017/18 when it has taken full control of the site and facilities”.

So, how did a school operating within the local authority sector come to be owned by the government, and then passed on in this way?

Foundation school, or grant-maintained status seems to be the key

I asked Kent County Council how this had come to pass. The answer was revealing.

A spokesman said: “Pent Valley Technology College was a foundation school, meaning under legislation the freehold of the site transferred from KCC to the [school’s] governing body when foundation schools were created. 

“On closure of the school, legislation requires the Secretary of State to determine to whom the land should transfer.  She [Greening] decided it would be Turner Schools.  KCC received no payment for the site, as it was not the freeholder.”

I understand, from local government and education law expert John Fowler, a former Labour councillor, that school site ownership legal changes date back to before the advent of foundation school status, which came in under the Labour government in 1998.

This had been offered as an alternative to grant maintained status, which New Labour abolished but which itself had been introduced under Margaret Thatcher’s Education Reform Act in 1988. Grant maintained status had allowed schools to be owned and managed by their own boards of governors, rather than by the local authority. So the land transferred at this time from the local authority to the trust running the school.

The result, says Fowler, was that, if a school closed, the land might be transferred to the Secretary of State, rather than reverting to the local authority.

In this way, a school site once owned and developed by a local council has found its way to central government, and from then on to this very recently-founded academy trust.

The £1 – or £3 – sale price may sound outrageous. But other recent transfers of what was once local authority land may have happened without any sale costs at all.

For example, the Hewett Academy, which stands on an extremely large site in Norwich, was handed to the Inspiration Trust academy chain in 2015 – despite vocal local protests – because, as a former foundation school, its land went with the trust which owned it. When the trust changed, the land went, too.

Foundation to academy status and what the rules now say

I know of at least one other school which converted to foundation school status before becoming an academy, seemingly because this would give greater control over its estate. For, under current rules, when a foundation school becomes an academy, the resulting academy trust then owns the land outright.

If it is, though, a community school – the most common category for schools still in the local authority sector - the resulting academy will hold the land on a 125-year lease from the local authority.

Back in 2016, in its “Education Excellence Everywhere” white paper, the government proposed closing the loophole of a school being able to convert to foundation status, and then academise, by simply stopping any school taking on foundation status anew.

This was alongside a proposal which, seemingly audaciously, would have seen academies in future leasing their school sites not from the local authority, but from the Department for Education. (If all schools were to academise, this would have seen the freehold ownership of school sites across England transfer from councils to central government.)

However, of course this white paper ended up in the bin following a revolt against its central idea of forced academisation for all. The foundation school loophole still exists, then, and it also seems likely that former foundation schools, if they or their sites are academised, will continue to see their sites reverting not back to local authorities, but to academy trusts.

A very brief recent history of Turner Schools, and of the Pent Valley/Turner Free School site

-March 2016: Turner Schools is legally established. Its Certificate of Incorporation includes as directors Jo Saxton, who before this had served as chief executive of Future Academies, the London-based chain founded and overseen by the former academies minister, Lord Nash; Carl Lygo the founding vice-chancellor of the private BPP University; Dame Sue John, a leading former headteacher and former Department for Education director; and Sarah Collins, a former mayor of Westminster who is the wife of Damian Collins, the Conservative MP for Folkestone and Hythe.

-January 2017: Turner Schools takes on its first two schools, Morehall and Martello primaries, which both had been run by the collapsed chain Lilac Sky.

-April 2017: Turner is announced by the government as a successful bidder for a new secondary free school for the town, to be run on the site of the soon-to-close Pent Valley Technology College.

-July 2017: Pent Valley Technology College closes.

-August/September 2017: The government sells the school’s site to Turner Schools. (Land Registry documents are dated September 2017, though Turner’s 2016-17 accounts state the trust took hold of the freehold of the site on 31^st August, 2017)

-September 2018: The new Turner free school to open.