Holland Park’s future facing pivotal day today –at meeting in private with the community’s favoured solution not even under consideration by Department for Education advisers

The highest-profile academy controversy currently on the landscape in England is being provisionally decided in private today, with the overwhelming choice of the community for the future of the school not on the table for consideration by the government’s advisers.

Holland Park School, in Kensington, West London, is on the agenda for a recommendation at Department for Education's snappily-named North-West London South Central Advisory Board, chaired by Dame Kate Dethridge, the regional schools commissioner.

The board is due to make a recommendation to Dame Kate as to which trust Holland Park, which has had an extremely troubled year after allegations first surfaced that it suffered from a “toxic” working environment, gets handed to.

Over the past five months, after a newly-constituted governing body announced out of the blue that England’s largest academy chain was its preferred choice to take over Holland Park, the community seems to have registered in just about every way possible its favouring of an alternative solution.

This would see Holland Park, which is currently run as a single academy trust, joining a local multi-academy trust established with nearby Kensington Aldridge Academy (KAA).

The Conservative-controlled local authority swiftly threw itself behind that, with it being revealed that the council would loan £1 million to the single academy trust running KAA to take on the school.

The local Conservative MP, Felicity Buchan, has also urged the DfE to reconsider. And parents who are part of the Holland Park Parent Collective, which is also favouring the local solution over United Learning and has been campaigning for the community to be consulted meaningfully in decision-making, took the top positions in election to Holland Park’s board earlier this year.

Finally, members of the National Education Union, who have been opposed to the lack of consultation over the proposed takeover by United, have been on strike this term, with more in the offing from September.

None of this local voice, however, appears to have had any effect on the DfE. For, in agenda papers for today’s meeting of the advisory board, its members are not being presented with any options other than handing the school to United, the 75-academy chain based in Peterborough.

Under “trust change”, the board was simply being advised: “To discuss and consider the transfer of Holland Park School [a Single Academy Trust, in] Kensington and Chelsea, to United Learning Trust.”

As usual with these meetings deciding schools’ futures, communities and the public are not deemed by the government to be worthy of seeing even detailed papers which sit behind the board’s decision-making. Neither do parents, students or staff have any right to attend any part of the meeting.

Neither is there any public announcement of the result, until minutes are published some time later.

Dame Yasmin Bevan, the chair of United Learning, is one of only six board members currently listed as advising Dame Kate on the board, having been appointed to that position. Board members with interests in decisions leave the room during discussions of the relevant item – suggesting that only five members will make the recommendation on Holland Park to the commissioner.

Lawyers acting for Holland Park parents have announced possible legal action against Ofsted’s recent inspection and inadequate verdict for the school, which effectively took the decision out of the governing body’s hands itself, and gave the government direct control over the school's future.