The gossip: week of June 4th

“The gossip” is a new reporting strand on Education Uncovered, and at the moment a bit of an experiment. I am getting so many interesting tip-offs, I need a format for processing and reporting on them which is perhaps less detailed/multi-sourced than you might find in a conventional news story on the site, or even in our diary column.

Instead, here you will find snippets of information, sometimes with the institution concerned anonymised to reflect the slightly more provisional nature of the story. But I suspect readers are going to find it interesting, so let’s get going with it….

Thursday, June 7th

Is DfE about to unveil new free school site for troubled academy trust?

Will this week’s news that the £270,000-a-year headteacher leading an academy trust has left her post “with immediate effect” prove extra-embarrassing for the government, as it prepares to announce a site for the trust’s new free school?

That was the thought of a local source, who reminded us of longstanding plans for the trust running Ashlawn School in Rugby, Warwickshire, to set up a new secondary school.

Lois Reed, Ashlawn’s headteacher who has also been a director and accounting officer for the trust running it, was revealed as “not returning” to Ashlawn after her salary package, which included a rise of at least £50,000 in 2016-17, provoked a media storm in March.

Since July 2016, however, Ofsted-outstanding Ashlawn has had permission to open a new free school in the town. Originally scheduled to open last September, the location of a site seems to have been a challenge.

When that free school proposal was announced by David Cameron in one of his final acts as Prime Minister, the intended opening date was September 2017.

However, the school did not open then, and it remains on the government’s list of free schools which are “in the pipeline”, seemingly meaning it is unlikely to open before September next year, at the earliest.

And a list of proposed “new schools” on Warwickshire County Council’s website states that Ashlawn Free School’s site “has not yet been confirmed”.

Our local source says: “There is a strong possibility that the DfE may be about to announce that they have found a site to build [Reed’s] academy a brand new extra secondary school in Rugby. The DfE’s timing really could not be better”.

Is there any stopping sky-high academy CEO pay?

With recent months having seen the government writing to academy trusts asking them to justify the six-figure salaries of those leading them, many people will hope that this might have some effect.

It was with a weary sigh that we learned, then, of a case of a recently-appointed chief executive, whose pay package seems likely to attract controversy when his trust’s 2017-18 or 2018-19 accounts come out.

This person has only started recently as the leader of a relatively small trust in the north of England, which by our calculations based on government data had fewer than 4,000 pupils as of last year.

His pay? A total of £177,000 a year, which apparently is an increase of £67,000 on his predecessor, in an area of England where the cost of living is relatively low.

We are not naming him, as none of these figures have been confirmed yet in the annual accounts. But it seems that the government’s decision to deregulate pay and conditions through the academies scheme is going to continue to generate headlines for a while yet.