The academy project with the amazing sliding opening date

A school featured extensively by Education Uncovered last year is now on its ninth proposed opening date as an academy, as a project which has been on the stocks for two years grinds on.

Ormskirk School, in Lancashire, has faced serial delays under the forced academisation project, which was triggered after it was controversially failed by Ofsted following a visit in May 2019, less than three weeks after its then-new headteacher had taken over.

The DfE did not waste time in approving the school’s academisation: Ormskirk’s “sponsored academy” conversion is listed in official data as having been approved in July 2019 – the same month its Ofsted report was published.

When it first featured in the Department for Education’s “sponsored academy pipeline” dataset, which is updated every month, as of August 2019 it was listed as due to open in February 2020.

But by December 2019, the DfE was no longer listing a proposed opening date for the project.

A new proposed opening date for the academy then popped up in June last year, when it was listed as opening in October 2020. As of September 2020, the proposed opening date had slipped to November 2020. But by the time that month arrived, the school had still not academised, and DfE officials were again not listing a date for the opening.

Then, in December last year, a new date was listed: February 2021. By January this year, however, the academy was listed as opening in March. In February, a new opening date was set for April. In March, it was proposed to open as an academy in May. By April, this had slipped to July, which was the same proposed date listed in the last-published DfE data, which is accurate as at May 2021.

However, here we are in July 2021 and the school has still not become an academy.

Now, there is a DfE page on the proposed new school, to be called simply Ormskirk Academy. But this lists its opening date not, of course given the current date, as July 2021, but as September 2021.

So that is five different proposed open dates in the past six months, and nine over the past two years.

So what has been going on? I am unsure of the reasons behind these repeated delays, but it seems likely that difficulties have arisen because of the legal complexities of this case. The school, which is voluntary controlled, sits on land which is owned by an independent foundation.

As of last year, the foundation was in dispute with both the DfE for the way the proposed academisation had been handled, and with the trust which is poised to take it over: the Endeavour Learning Trust, which currently has four schools.

The foundation has argued that it is not against academisation in itself, but instead was opposed to the way that what it deemed a “hostile” MAT – Endeavour – had been imposed on it by the Department for Education.

Arguing for a “local, non-hostile” MAT, and extremely unhappy about not having been involved in the academisation process despite owning the school’s land and buildings, the foundation was at one stage refusing to grant Endeavour access to the site as no lease had been signed. Then, in spite of no lease yet being in place, Endeavour were in the end given permission to enter the buildings in the autumn term.

By November 2020, Endeavour’s chief executive, Lesley Gwinnett, had taken over as “interim executive headteacher” at Ormskirk, despite it not having academised yet. The school’s governing body was sacked, to be replaced by an “interim executive board”, and other Endeavour staff started working there. This followed the departures of Ormskirk’s former headteacher, Martin Witter*, who had been portrayed as an effective leader by the local campaign against academisation, and his deputy.

Yet still the school remains in legal limbo – effectively managed by Endeavour, but not yet an academy. It seems likely that the legal issues surrounding the ownership of Ormskirk’s land lay behind this and there must be some doubt, with only days, now, to the end of term, whether it will move to legal control by Endeavour, as planned, for the new term.

This saga may underline questions over whether what are always relatively complex – and in this case extra-complex - changes in schools’ legal control under the academies policy – which happen in few other countries than England - are the best mechanism for improving schools.

Ormskirk has a long way to go, however, until it could match the record amount of time a school has been in limbo – with an academy project having been approved by the DfE, but the institution not having academised.

Hanson School, in Bradford, West Yorkshire, had an academy order more than 10 years ago, in April 2011, but remains a local authority institution, reportedly as a school for which no trust can be found.

Meanwhile, parents at Ormskirk appear to be fuming after it decided – with as mentioned above management decisions seemingly already controlled by Endeavour – to change the uniform for the coming academic year. This is despite, I was told, the trust having promised not to make such a move.

The new uniform features a change of the colours of shirts, trousers and skirt, plus the introduction of a new training top for PE, parents were told in a letter from the headteacher, John Burnham, earlier this month.

Although pupils for whom uniform in the old style has already been bought for them will be allowed to wear it for another year, the move has aroused controversy on social media – not least with a single company set out in the letter as Ormskirk’s “new supplier of our uniform”, offered from a shop 10 miles away in Crosby, as well as online. But it was pointed out on Facebook that another shop, in the town, which has long stocked uniform for the school also sold parts of the new version, with parents questioning why the school was flagging up such an exclusive arrangement.

New national guidance on school uniform is expected in the autumn, though reportedly it will not ban controversial sole supplier deals.

The school, again seemingly because of its effective control by Endeavour, is also asking parents to pay from £290 for Chromebooks. In an information document for families, it is stated that “Ormskirk School is now working with the schools in Endeavour Learning Trust. For six years now a Chromebook for Learning project has been running successfully across these schools…”

Parents would be able to make the payments “from £12.09 over 24 months,” and those in financial hardship are asked to email the school “to discuss this further”. However, the development may raise questions about timing, given the financial strain on many families during the pandemic, and the general notion of whether state-funded schools should be asking such sums of families, while also highlighting the decision-making grey area with an academy trust seemingly in charge, even before academisation.

I put questions to Endeavour Learning Trust about this but have yet to have a response.

When will academisation of this school come? New DfE monthly data, continuing over the summer, may yet contain new dates.

Better governance: it’s the Future!

Fancy taking on a challenge? If so, you might have been interested in a recently-advertised post working with one of Education Uncovered’s most-written-about academy trusts.

Future Academies, a magnet for controversy this academic year and not just on the pages of this website, has been seeking a new “senior governance officer”.

The post, for which interviews were held last month, comes with a £33,000 salary, with the successful applicant needing to start “as soon as possible”. They would be “able to provide outstanding administrative and advisory support to our high performing governing bodies,” breezed the advert, adding: “You will act as clerk to all of the trusts** [sic] governing bodies, arranging and taking the record at meetings as well as offering support and advice on governance issues, policy guidance and training.

“The Senior Governance Officer acts in the role of advisor to the Board and supports the Chief Executive and Development Lead in the oversight of good governance and procedural matters…”

Yet this individual really does look to have their work cut out to reshape Future into something more akin to one featuring what specialists in this field might describe as “good governance”.

Future has a history of not fully complying with government guidelines on governance – even though governance guidelines for academies across England were at one time overseen by Lord John Nash, who effectively controls this trust with his wife, Lady Caroline.

In 2014, in the Guardian I reported how Future appeared not to be complying with government guidelines, at the time overseen by Nash himself, on the involvement of parents in the trust’s governance.

There still appeared to be problems with this when I reported on it for this website in 2018, while last November, I revealed how Future’s flagship school, Pimlico Academy, appeared not to be complying with its constitution by failing to have an elected parent on its board.

The latter issue is now being addressed, but only after student and parent protests about the way the school was managed this academic year, and a teacher strike which saw the school promising to introduce elected parent and staff representation as a concession.

In October 2019, I asked why the trust was not providing official information on the identity of governors at a school it had very controversially taken over the previous winter, despite this being a government requirement-the trust then scrambling to update these details.

Questions about the centralised control of the trust has also been a recurring theme of reporting. In recent years, the government has said that it would like to see “separation” between the controlling members of a trust – who can appoint trustees – and the trustees themselves. In December 2019, I reported how all the members of Future – including Lord and Lady Nash – were also trustees. Last November, I reported how its board appeared to consist of Lord and Lady Nash, his wife and former education and business associates. Lord and Lady Nash and Paul Smith, Future’s chief executive whose appointment the Nashes would have overseen, are also heavily involved at “local governing body” level.

The advert itself seems to confirm this degree of centralisation under the Nashes, stating that “Future Academies [was] established in 2008 and sponsored by Lord and Lady Nash’s charity, Future”. And the Nashes’ overriding influence over what are still overwhelmingly publicly-funded institutions drew wider media attention during the recent teachers’ strike at Pimlico.

Does this level of what is essentially private control, via the governance system, constitute “good governance”? Well, if the ideal of governance is to fashion a system of checks and balances against the risks inherent in excessively centralised decision-making power, then I guess many experts would continue to question Future's structure.

So, could the successful applicant for this position seek to engineer a change so that Future lived by such ambitions?

Well – I guess they could always run it past the Nashes.

*Yet Witter is, strangely, listed as the headteacher of the new academy on the DfE’s official information page on the new academy. This looks like a mistake.

**Such a ‘knowledge-rich’ organisation really ought to be able to insert apostrophes where needed.