Academy chain, set to lose its largest school, hits out at government for way the process has worked

An academy chain has taken aim at the government’s process for transferring schools from one trust to another, after confirming to staff that it is poised to lose its biggest institution following a devastating Ofsted report.

The Griffin Schools Trust wrote yesterday to staff at Stantonbury International in Milton Keynes about the government’s decision, revealed by the Milton Keynes Citizen and followed up by this website yesterday, to transfer the 1,600-pupil comprehensive to a new “sponsor” next year. l

Its letter took aim at the process, arguing that there was “no published process or criteria”; that the trust had not had the opportunity to discuss its evidence with the government; that it had not had the chance of a follow-up Ofsted visit; and that the office of the Regional Schools Commissioner [RSC] had not visited the academy to check on progress.

The 13-school chain, has been running Stantonbury from its base in Catford, south London, since it was academised in 2016. As I wrote in July after the school was put into special measures, its governance appears to have been closely controlled by trust insiders going back several years.

In their letter to staff yesterday, Anne Powell, Griffin’s chief executive, and Trevor Edinborough, its chair, wrote: “I am very sorry to be writing to you to tell you that the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State [Baroness Berridge, the academies minister] wrote to us yesterday to communicate her decision to re-broker SIS to a new sponsor.

“We have sent the RSC for Milton Keynes documentary evidence of the improvements we have worked so hard together to put in place since 2016 along with detail of the more recent and very focused response to the Ofsted inspection in Jan 2020.

“We are disappointed that we were given no opportunity to discuss our submission before decisions were made and that no-one from the RSC [Regional Schools Commissioner] office has visited* to get a first-hand view of the distance travelled since January 2020.”

The letter added: “It is hard to understand why an Ofsted monitoring visit is not an automatic and vital part of this decision-making, for which there is no published process or criteria.”

The letter was signed off on a more positive note, saying: “Stantonbury is a strong community and has proved itself resilient over the years. We would like to thank you for your loyalty and commitment to the vision we have jointly progressed.

“We look forward to working with you to maintain the values we have shared and to achieve as smooth a transition for the school and the community.”

This casts relationships with staff in a rather different light to that of the last Ofsted, however, which had reported that “staff are feeling overwhelmed by their workloads and unsupported by senior leaders”.

The public paper trail does suggest there were interactions between the Department for Education and the trust as the school faced losing its funding, in a protracted process leading to the academy’s transfer.

The DfE wrote to the trust in July with a “minded to terminate” letter, asking the trust for an “action plan” setting out how it would address the failings of the Ofsted inspection, and seeking an “urgent meeting”.

The following month, it sent a “termination warning notice” to the trust. In this letter, the Regional Schools Commissioner Dame Kate Dethridge said the trust had responded with its “action plan”, alongside a “safeguarding evidence document”, and had met Powell and Edinborough on August 21^st to “discuss the support currently in place at the academy”.

Dethridge had written that, following these interactions and what seems a separate “written response” from the trust, she remained “concerned” about the position of the school. It was given a deadline of October 5^th for a further response.

Ironically perhaps, the letter’s complaints about the process of transferring academies might be echoed by communities who have campaigned against local authority schools becoming academies in the first place, or seeking more accountability after they have academised.

Some schools have desperately sought Ofsted follow-up inspections to demonstrate progress which they argued would show there was no need to academise; others have struggled to secure visits from Regional Schools Commissioners to discuss concerns; while the lack of transparency and absence of seemingly binding rules defining the process of RSC decision-making has also been a recurring theme, though perhaps the DfE would say on this occasion that there was a process of increasingly serious warnings to the trust.

For the local authority, as reported yesterday, the whole story showed that academisation should at least be reversible after it went wrong.

Zoe Nolan, the council’s education leader, had reportedly called on ministers to apologise, for there to be an “investigation into why they have let the children of Milton Keynes down over a four-year period”.

The trust’s letter was being greeted with derision by sources close to the school. The trust is in “total denial,” about what had happened at Stantonbury, I was told, with staff members in disbelief that the trust had had the “audacity”, after the Ofsted report, to “blame the government who have finally kicked them out”.
I have not yet had a chance to put these points to Griffin.

- In perhaps a further bitter irony, as I wrote back in July, one of three advisory members of the government’s Headteacher Board which recommended in April 2016 that Stantonbury be turned into an academy and handed to Griffin was…Dame Kate Dethridge.