The elusive Sue Baldwin, Regional Schools Commissioner, to appear in front of councillors, for live-streamed debate likely to focus on exclusions

No longer the invisible woman? Sue Baldwin to appear in front of councillors next week

Sue Baldwin, the often-elusive Regional Schools Commissioner for the East of England, is finally to appear before councillors in Norfolk, where the high rate of exclusions in the county is likely to be on the agenda, Education Uncovered understands.

Members, across all parties, of the Conservative-controlled council have been speaking of the need for an appearance by Baldwin to answer questions on exclusions since 2018, this website understands. Finally, the DfE civil servant, who oversees academies across 15 local authority areas, will appear before the committee next Tuesday (March 17^th).

Norfolk has been drawing headlines for its rate of exclusions in recent years. In 2018, the-then MP for North Norfolk, Norman Lamb, told Parliament that the number in the county was “shockingly high”.

The previous year, 2016-17, there had been 45 permanent exclusions from state-funded Norfolk primary schools and 157 from secondary schools, the Eastern Daily Press reported. This meant that the county contributed more than a quarter of the permanent exclusions across the whole of the East of England, which Baldwin’s sprawling zone includes. Over this period, there were also more than 5,000 fixed period exclusions in the county.

In 2018-19 there were 234 exclusions from Norfolk schools, which was a slight dip on the figure of 252 from the previous year, data from the council itself showed earlier this year.

There was also another indication, in a survey released yesterday, that the number of children being educated outside the mainstream system in this county may be relatively high.

The company Oxford Home Learning, having submitted Freedom of Information requests to 201 local authorities in England, Scotland and Wales, found that Norfolk had the fifth highest rate of home education in England, at 1.5 per cent.

The academies sector, which Baldwin oversees, has in recent years also been very interesting in the county, particularly as it is the base of the Inspiration Trust, which was set up by the former academies minister Lord Agnew.

Norfolk as a whole is relatively highly academised, with this website reporting last October that half of its primaries were no longer under the auspices of their local authority, compared to 34 per cent nationally.

A year ago, an FOI request from campaigners at Waltham Holy Cross primary school in Essex, whose academisation Baldwin forced through in the face of sustained community protests, found that she had not visited a string of schools caught up in controversies in her area.

Indeed, the remoteness of RSCs from the scene of contentious decisions has been a persistent complaint, most notably in the case of Whitehaven Academy, which was run for several years by the now-defunct Bright Tribe trust.

Emma Corlett, deputy leader of Norfolk’s Labour group, who has raised the issue of exclusions at its children’s services committee and also in full council, said: “We felt it was important for the RSC to attend so we can offer challenge about high levels of exclusions in Norfolk and also find when local councillors have a concern about an academy school in their community what the route is for raising this and getting it resolved.

“I also have had concerns about the lack of detail in the headteacher board minutes that meant it was impossible even to follow what decisions are being taken that may impact my community.”

I understand that Baldwin’s appearance at the county council will be broadcast live on the council’s “democratic services youtube channel”. This, of course, is a level of public scrutiny which is completely absent from the Headteacher Board meetings over which Baldwin and her fellow RSCs preside, which members of the public are not allowed to attend, and where schools’ futures are decided.

So Baldwin’s appearance stands to be very interesting.

Academy trust departures

Education Uncovered is hearing of a string of departures from senior leadership roles at the Wellsway multi-academy trust, which is based in Bristol and operates in and around that city and nearby Bath.

Last month, the website “Somerset Live” reported how the headteacher at a Bath special school run by Wellsway, Stefan Madzarevic of Aspire Academy, had become the second leader of that school to depart in two years.

But Education Uncovered understands that two other heads within this 13-school chain have left in the past three years, and that leadership changes at the top of the trust – though not including its chief executive, Andrea Arlidge, are in the offing.

Wellsway saw its long-serving chair, Professor Kate Reynolds of Bath Spa University, stand down last July. (Reynolds now says on her LinkedIn profile that she is director of education at “Brighter Futures for Children”, a not-for-profit company now running children’s services for Reading council).

Rumour has it that the future of the Wellsway trust’s remaining studio school, IKB academy, is uncertain. The closure of its other studio, called Bath Studio School, was announced last year.

Education Uncovered reported on the complicated case of Wellsway’s alternative provision service, which had been operating without being registered, back in 2018.

It remains an interesting trust to watch.

Another local authority school faces academisation after inspection just after new headteacher arrives

Should schools be given a period of grace by inspectors after new leadership arrives?

Well, this seems to be the philosophy behind the clean slate given to schools when they are taken over by an academy trust: their inspection records are usually wiped – even in cases when the school has been in special measures – presumably on the argument that a new trust needs to be e given time to work its magic.

But this approach is not applied in relation to headteachers after they have taken charge of local authority schools.

For a sense of injustice about a new head arriving and then the school having been inspected, found wanting and then lined up for academisation, has been at the heart of anti-forced academy campaigns such as that at Waltham Holy Cross, and at Littlegreen, near Chichester, West Sussex.

There is now a current example of this phenomenon, with Ormskirk School in Ormskirk, Lancashire, facing academisation in what campaigners argue is a move which will see it losing “charge of its own destiny”, after more than 400 years of history (its origins go back to 1612; and this case carries echoes of that involving the John Roan School, Greenwich).

The Liverpool Echo reported that Ormskirk’s most recent inspection, in May 2019, “came just 21 days after new headteacher Martin Witter was appointed”.

Under the local authority system since the late 1980s, we have had local management of schools, with the headteacher and local governing body in charge. So if the idea is, in relation to academies, that when the control changes, inspection backs off for a period, why does this idea not apply in the local authority sector?

Given that Education Uncovered reported last year that, actually, academy trusts get to keep their former schools’ outstanding ratings from before academisation, but to discard less favourable ones, this seems another example of a subtle bias in the inspection system towards the government’s favoured policy is school control. It can have big implications at local level, as the Ormskirk parents will testify.

Parents at free school “want it to leave academy trust”

Parents at a Sikh free school in Chadwell Heath, East London, reportedly want it to leave the academy trust which controls it, after a clear-out of its governing body.

The Ilford Recorder reported how the chair of Atam Academy Redbridge’s governors, Mankamal Singh, had been “dismissed,” while “the remaining members of the governing body were told they needed to reapply for their jobs”.

This seems a strange development, given that the school, which is controlled by the three-academy Khalsa Academies Trust (KAT), was rated outstanding by Ofsted less than a year ago, with inspectors praising governance as “highly effective”.

The local paper also reported that the governing body had “raised whistleblowing concerns” with the government’s Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) after the three-school trust had been handed a “financial notice to improve” by the ESFA last month.

Governors had then “held an emergency meeting…to discuss its grave concerns over the management of KAT with parents, school founders, former governors and councillors”.

Singh was quoted as saying his suspension was a result of the whistleblowing. The trust’s chair, Shaminder Kaur Rayatt, “said the restructuring of the governing body was in line with the rules and regulations of running a multi-academy trust,” the paper reported.

“The Board of Trustees has undertaken a full review of governance arrangements across all schools following recent Ofsted inspections and the Department for Education (DfE) guidance requires a ‘single line of accountability’ and ‘no duplication of governance functions’, between the trust and the local school governing body,” Rayatt was quoted saying.

She added: “To facilitate this change, all governors from across our network of schools are being asked to reapply for new roles.”

Schools can find it very hard to leave a multi-academy trust, even if relationships break down, since the system has been set up so that ultimately, all decision-making power within the organisation sits with the overarching board.