Trust founder’s 15-minute Facebook interview with former Brexit Party MEP fails to spell out wider pressures it is facing from DfE

Why would you spend a 15-minute interview talking about the pressures from government on your academy trust, without disclosing that the Department for Education had in effect threatened to wind it up if it did not comply with a string of demands to improve its financial management and governance?

The thought occurred as I watched a surreal encounter, on a Facebook channel, between the principal of a free school which has featured twice recently on this website, and the former Brexit Party MEP who is the channel’s “chief presenter”.

David Perks, principal of the East London Science School (ELSS), had been in the media in late February over his decision to “defy the Government’s guidance on face masks in the classroom”, by refusing to insist that face coverings be worn in lessons.

Perks set out the thinking behind that decision in the interview last week on the Facebook channel “Unlocked”. This describes itself as a “new common-sense media channel for those abandoned by the MSM [mainstream media]”.

Remarkably, Perks also went into detail on the pressure he said had been put on him and the trust running the school, by the Regional Schools Commissioner, as well as a behind-the-scenes stand-off with another academy trust over the ongoing lease of temporary buildings for the school’s sixth-form.

The interview seemed to end up leaving Perks at odds with the government – which has funded the school since it was set up by three founders including Perks and his partner* Jennifer Perks – the neighbouring trust and even, it was possible to wonder at least, members of his own governing body. So it seemed a surreal moment.

The East London Science School opened in 2013, but has been in temporary premises ever since. It currently operates from three sites. Perks’ revelations centred on the extension of a lease on a site which its sixth form operates next to Eastlea Community School, a secondary which academised in January.

Perks was speaking to the presenter, Martin Daubney, a former editor of the lads’ mag Loaded before he became a Brexit MEP, as was Claire Fox, who runs and part-owns the Academy of Ideas, who as Education Uncovered reported earlier this week received a “not at cost” payment of £14,400 from ELSS for a “teacher training” event.

Perks took Daubney through the pressure he said the office of the Regional Schools Commissioner for his school’s area – Sue Baldwin – was putting on his trust over those recent comments about masks.

He said: “The RSC was not pleased and had sent in a message saying that they wanted me to retract what I’d said and explicitly said they wanted to ask me if I was going to get children to wear masks in school which I can’t believe they actually did.

“But it’s in black and white – I’ve got it – and I’ve been pulling my hair out over the last two days trying to work out how to get round this. Because it’s just not fair that they’ve put that pressure on my board, who are trying to negotiate a future lease agreement for our sixth form.

“And the implication is: ‘you don’t buckle on this, and we’re not going to back you’, which I find appalling.”

Daubney then asked Perks if he was saying that the government was effectively “threatening to close down your sixth form unless you do a u-turn”.

Perks responded: “Not quite. What they won’t do is write a letter of support to the trust that sits on this.” By “the trust that sits on this”, Perks meant another academy trust, which operates Eastlea School next to the current ELSS sixth form building.

Perks added: “There’s another trust, another school trust that are giving us a hard time, and I’m slightly suspicious that they don’t like me – [laughing] whatever - …what the RSC promised was to write a letter in support of us to that trust to say ‘do a deal. Just do a deal. It’s a good sixth form, stop being silly: just do a deal.

“Now they are threatening to withdraw that letter of support. Not the lease; the letter of support. Which is quite a big thing for a school to get that from the RSC. Well they sit on your ability to be a trust. They can turn you off. And so to get that [the letter of support] is really positive; to not get it is really negative.”

Perks’ complaint, then, seemed to come down to a claim that Baldwin’s office had threatened – seemingly behind the scenes and perhaps, or perhaps not, in writing - not to write a letter of support in favour of a lease on one of its sites being renegotiated on non-negative terms for his school’s trust.

Yet at no point during the interview did he mention the financial notice to improve from the Department for Education’s Education and Skills Funding Agency which has been hanging over his school and the trust running it since it was published just before Christmas – so well before those mask comments around which this interview centred.

As I wrote again this week, this notice, which of course is public and has gained media coverage here and elsewhere, sets out 16 conditions the East London Science School Trust (ELSST) must meet in order to avoid the termination of its funding agreement with the government.

Not only is there that threat, but a specific condition of the notice is that the ELSST must consider joining a multi-academy trust. Although the ELSST has given no indication of making this move, again to do so would effectively spell the end of the trust in its current form, as it would be swallowed up by a larger organisation.

Not to mention this, then, in a lengthy interview centring on a much more micro point, seems very strange. And at no point did Daubney ask Perks about the financial notice to improve and the DfE’s wider concerns about the trust, despite these having been set out in publicly-available media articles such as this.

Perks then lifted the lid further on what seemed to be a dispute with the neighbouring trust about that lease for premises for his school’s sixth form. He said he thought the other trust was trying to “squeeze money out of the DfE”, presumably through a rise in the cost of the lease.

Asked by Daubney whether he would back down on his position on masks, given the pressure he was facing from the RSC over the lease, Perks responded: “I have really thought about this a lot, I will tell you straight, because I don’t want to put the school in a difficult place, I really don’t.

“I don’t want to put anybody in the school in a difficult place. I certainly don’t want to jeopardise the deal we’re trying to do with the sixth form. But I think that’s just, you know, hot air and politics between us and the trust who want to, in effect, squeeze money out of the DfE to let us stay there.

“It’s like – how dirty can you get? – but that’s it, right? So I think that deal will be done regardless of what the RSC says. But the point is their approach is extremely damaging to us in terms of having a relationship with them.

“And it shouldn’t be like this - it’s just nonsense – it shouldn’t be on this basis.”

Which other trust was he talking about?

It is not difficult to work out which other local trust Daubney was talking about. Eastlea academised under the Newham Community Schools Trust on January 1^st. Until that date, this was a single academy trust, running Sarah Bonnell School, also in Newham, where it remains based.

The East London Science School Trust’s just-published annual accounts, which were signed off on January 29^th this year, include a section on the leases for its various sites. The accounts state: “Lease for the sixth form site at Eastlea is to be renegotiated with NCST [Newham Community Schools Trust] in forthcoming year.”

Temporary leases need to run until 2024 because, as the accounts revealed, ELSS would not be opening in permanent premises until that date: a remarkable 11 years - or 1.5 times the length of any student’s passage through the school – after it opened.

The idea that ELSST would be negotiating with this other academy trust on a lease to operate through buildings on the latter’s site seems to me to be odd. This is because both the schools which now make up NCST – Sarah Bonnell and Eastlea – are former local authority community schools. In such cases, sites and premises are usually passed to academy trusts on 125-year leases, with local authorities retaining the freehold. It seems more logical, then, for ELSST to be in negotiations with Newham council, rather than NCST, over this lease.

I put both Perks’ points during the interview and the point above about leasehold/freehold to the Newham Community Schools Trust but did not get a response.

During the interview with Daubney, Perks even intimates, seemingly in real time as a buzzing sound was heard in the background, that he was coming under pressure from a board member to change his position on mask-wearing in school. He states: “I think that the RSC’s office have overstepped the mark, very clearly on this, and I’m just getting a message now from one of my board trying to put pressure on me,” but that he was of the view that the government’s RSC office was not correct in interpreting its own advice on how schools should be acting on masks.

One source said it appeared that, given the pressures on ELSS overall, Perks was seeking to use the masks row to drum up sympathy on social media, when in reality the school was under pressure from the government for a host of other reasons.

More detail on the school’s position on masks

Perks described the government’s guidance on mask-wearing in classrooms as “incomprehensible”, and said he felt he would be “kicked around, [to] try to come up with a compromise”. He was now being told [presumably by the RSC’s office] to take a letter to parents off the school’s website that sets out its position that it was up to parents – and their children if they were old enough – to choose whether or not to wear masks in class.

This letter, dated February 26^th, was still visible this week, via a lengthy url. It said: “Although the Department for Education guidance now recommends that face coverings be worn in classrooms, I am leaving this to pupils and parents to decide. We will not be enforcing the use of face masks for either staff or pupils in lessons. We will encourage their use in corridors and communal areas unless social distancing can be maintained.”

The letter did not seem obviously accessible via the site’s homepage, however: it seems not to feature in the “letters to parents” page.

The school’s overall position on the masks issue appears unchanged, according to minutes of a meeting of ELSS’s health and safety committee last week (March 3^rd).

These admirably detailed statements show the school’s position as being that “staff should not be directly telling pupils to wear masks but school will offer assemblies to model how masks can be worn,” although it seems that at several points there were questions as to what the school’s position was, with one minute recorded as “query – are pupils wearing masks in school or not?”

ELSS’s position was that mask-wearing was optional in classrooms, and also outside class within school buildings. The DfE guidance states that, in secondary schools, “we recommend that face coverings should be worn by adults and pupils when moving around the premises…such as in corridors and communal areas.”

Nevertheless, against a minuted question of “school masks – do we have enough?”, the health and safety committee meeting saw it stated that “5-7000 masks [were] to be delivered in last week from DfE”.

To sum up, then: a free school operating on temporary premises for at least 11 years after opening, now under pressure over financial dealings including a related party contract; talk of behind-the-scenes “deals” key to securing its future; seeming rivalry between two academy trusts; controversy over the competence of a government department; all this set out on a social media channel seemingly unwilling or not able to put wider context around an interviewee’s statements…

Welcome to the strange world of how education and the media seem to operate in 21^st century England.

*It looks as if Jennifer Perks is David Perks’s wife. Theirs are two of the three names on the ELSST’s memorandum of association – the legal document through which it was set up in 2012 – with these signatories being three of up to four possible founding members of the trust, as that document sets out. Members then had the right to appoint up to 10 governors, effectively then giving them control of the governing body. I use the term “partner” as this was the word used in the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s recent investigation report on ELSST.