Mass exodus of teaching staff at Future Academies primary which was chosen as face of government’s post-lockdown communications drive

A primary academy which was chosen as the face of the re-opening of English classrooms last month has been dealing with a mass exodus of staff.

Millbank Primary Academy in Westminster, central London has already seen six of its teaching staff leave this academic year, with another five having handed in their resignations and due to leave by July, Education Uncovered understands. In addition, last week another teacher left, I have been told.

These 11 teachers leaving during the year constitute a very high turnover for this two-form-entry school, which government records state had 26 teachers as of 2019-20. As this website has also reported, Millbank will move onto its eighth headteacher in five years when current leader Kate Jefferson departs next month.

Millbank also appears to have had a chequered record on covid mitigation, with changes to safety procedures in the playground in the autumn seemingly only having come after sources close to the school had raised concerns with this website.

And yet this was the academy, which is part of the Conservative peer Lord Nash’s trust Future Academies, which was singled out from nearly 17,000 primaries across England for government-backed media coverage on how schools could emerge from remote learning.

Education Uncovered can now reveal that the decision to choose Millbank as the primary face of this campaign was taken by the Cabinet Office, where Lord Nash is a non-executive director.

The “sponsored coverage”

As Education Uncovered reported in March, Millbank featured prominently in three sponsored articles in the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph as most pupils across England returned to school following the most recent period of remote learning.

The school was the only primary to feature in the pieces: it was written about alongside a college and a secondary academy in the Mail, alongside the same secondary academy – Small Heath Leadership Academy in Birmingham - in the Sun and on its own in the Telegraph. Jefferson featured prominently in the coverage, with no mention that she was leaving the school, despite this being public knowledge at the time, in a move which will happen at half-term this month.

Two of the three pieces were badged as sponsored by the government (the Telegraph’s piece worded the sponsorship as “Brought to you by the UK government”), while the Sun’s just had the strapline “sponsored”.

The articles placed a heavy emphasis on covid-19 safety measures, and seemed to emphasise pupil wellbeing over academics. However, as this website pointed out in March, in the autumn Millbank had had to change its infection mitigation measures in relation to parents picking up children at the end of the day, after sources close to the school had raised concerns, while children returning to the school last month faced a diet of repeated tests, handwriting exercises and “rote learning”.

Millbank was also chosen for a ministerial visit – by Baroness Berridge, the academies minister – on the first day of the return of all pupils, post the latest lockdown.

DfE reveals “sponsorship” had come via government department where Lord Nash is on the board

I asked the Department for Education’s press office about these sponsored articles. Specifically, I said the school appeared to be being viewed very favourably by ministers, and asked how much the government had paid for the “sponsored” articles to appear.

In a response badged as “background information,” the DfE’s spokesperson replied that it had not been that department, but the Cabinet Office, which had organised the sponsored articles.

The DfE’s response said: “Government campaigns are run through the Cabinet Office. All costs involved in the campaign will be published as part of regular transparency reports on gov.uk.”

This was interesting, as Lord Nash, who founded Future Academies with his wife Lady Caroline Nash, and still presides over the organisation as its chair, also serves on the Cabinet Office’s board*.

I asked the DfE spokesperson if there was a potential conflict of interest in that a Cabinet Office director was founder and chair of Future Academies, of which Millbank Academy was a part; whether this relationship played any part in the school, which will be on its eighth headteacher in five years as of later this year, being selected for coverage; and whether that potential conflict of interest was flagged up at any point in the process of sponsorship of these articles in national newspapers.

There was no response.  

I also asked whether the “transparency report”, flagged up in the DfE’s response as revealing the cost of sponsored campaigns, would go into the detail of spending on particular articles. Again, there was no answer.

There were 16,784 state-funded primary schools in England as of last year, DfE statistics show. So, it is interesting that, of all the institutions the government could have chosen for this coverage, it was this one.

Staff leaving

Jefferson was quoted in the sponsored coverage stating that staff were “excited” to be returning to school, post-lockdown. But this was not the mood highlighted to me by sources close to the school, one of whom said there had been a “massive exodus” of staff over the past 12 months.

They have highlighted what seems an extremely high rate of staff turnover, with evidence showing that Millbank has been having to recruit some teachers to start at short notice, in the middle of the academic year.

Millbank, whose pupil numbers have declined since Future took it over in 2013, nevertheless remains a two-form-entry primary, with full-time equivalent teacher numbers said in the DfE data to stand at 26 as of last year.

I understand, however, that three teaching staff had resigned between September and Christmas last year.  

Then last month, on Monday March 29^th so two days before the end of term, parents were told that another teacher, who has been on sick leave, would not be returning for the current term. She had only been at Millbank since November.

The school had advertised for a replacement for this teacher on the TES website, to start last month. It had only announced that the current teacher would not be returning post-Easter after the advert had appeared and, I understand, after it had been spotted by parents.

Meawhile, another teacher – who only started last September - was also leaving the school “for personal reasons”, parents were also told on Monday, March 29th.

She has been replaced by a temporary teacher just for this term, though as of February the school had also been advertising for a permanent replacement, also to start last month.

That makes five teachers to have departed at the school already during this academic year, as of the start of last week.

I have now learnt that, on top of this, another teacher left suddenly last week.

Sources say that another five staff have handed in their notices and so will leave at the end of this term. Jefferson herself, whose picture featured prominently in the sponsored pieces, is one of them: she will depart to take over at the fee-charging Westminster Under School after the May half-term.

Another member of the four-person senior leadership is also among the five staff members overall who are in the process of leaving: Aimee McMillan, the school’s special educational needs and disabilities co-ordinator, is departing as of the end of the academic year for what Millbank told parents was a promotion, to a school in Surrey.  

Concerns among staff

Sources who have been close to the school spoke of a demoralised staff, worn down by the pressure of constant lesson observations and frustrated at having to implement Future’s curriculum, about which many have had reservations.

One staff source told me that teachers had been facing six lesson observations from management, each, in a single term pre-Christmas, as Jefferson and her team sought to micro-manage staff. This had been reduced slightly following protests from staff, but had remained burdensome.

Then, after Christmas, teachers had routinely had to endure the leadership team virtually sitting in on at-screen lessons given to children as they learnt at home. Parents as well as staff had been upset by this, I was told.

“This has really annoyed parents – they weren’t told about it, and it’s an invasion of their and their children’s privacy,” said the source.

Last month, Education Uncovered also revealed that pupils at Future’s three primary schools, including Millbank, had in recent years been facing exercises in an ancient history textbook which had asked them to imagine themselves as historical figures about to kill themselves.

There had also been concerns among staff about the overall thrust of history textbooks within the trust. A teaching source who had been close to the school had highlighted concerns about only one ethnic minority person being mentioned in the British history textbook, and slavery only being covered in connection to its abolition.

Controversy over the history curriculum has also featured in the very high-profile row over the management of Future’s flagship secondary school, Pimlico Academy.

Following coverage here about the exercises mentioning suicide, which then triggered outraged protests from parents, Future back-pedalled, withdrawing the books. Support staff were then, remarkably perhaps, tasked with crossing out offending passages with a black marker. The school also said last month that it would be reviewing the textbooks more widely.

However, the staff source said that staff had been frustrated, having raised concerns about the curriculum in the past, but having got nowhere. Some had even left over the issue, the source added.

They said: “It was 12 to 18 months ago that management were made aware [of problems with the curriculum]. The headteacher was made aware of it. Staff members left the school because they refused to teach the curriculum.”

They added that concerns focused on the history curriculum, though there were controversial aspects in other subjects. The source said: “The issue of how slavery is covered in the history curriculum, the fact that it just seems to be a run-through of Kings and Queens…this has been brought up time and time again. A few staff left because they refused to teach the curriculum because of their moral values and principles.”

This source said that exercises mentioning suicide should have been identified by management as a safeguarding issue. Staff had also been furious that, when the school did issue a statement on the review of the textbooks following this website’s coverage, it had been badged as from “Millbank staff” as a whole, rather than from Jefferson or her leadership team.

“Staff did not agree [to the curriculum], so should not be held accountable to that. The statement should have been signed off by specific names: the headteacher, Future’s chief executive [Paul Smith] and the Nashes. It should not have been written as coming from Millbank Academy staff and team: staff had been the ones raising concerns. Staff are very angry about that.”

The source added that, with most pupils at home and with teachers then teaching them via their computer screens, teaching assistants had largely been tasked with taking in-person lessons at the school during the January to March lockdown, for the vulnerable children and those of key workers who were in attendance.

But the TAs had themselves faced “monitoring” by the leadership team, “going in and out of the classroom, with a timetable, questioning the teaching assistants, saying ‘why are you not following the timetable?’ or ‘what are you doing at this time?’, ‘on the timetable it says this, this and this’. My goodness…the TAs were forced to actually teach, and it’s not their job. There was huge pressure on them.”

The source also mentioned concerns over covid mitigation at Millbank over recent months, some of which featured in articles on this website. There was also unhappiness that Millbank’s four-person management team, which features no-one from an ethnic minority, did not reflect the ethnically very diverse community Millbank serves.

Summing up, this source said, sadly, that: “Over the past 12 months, people cannot run fast enough out of the school.

“It’s very sad for the children, the parents, the community and all of the team, but people in the end have to think of their own health and safety, and their mental wellbeing.”

Jefferson is being succeeded as head by Tessa Marwick, a senior vice-principal who started at the school only in November.

The figure of 11 teachers leaving, against that reported teaching workforce of 26 as of last year, would represent a turnover of 38 per cent – seemingly a very high proportion.

Future Academies has not been responding to any requests for comment from Education Uncovered in recent months. A comment from a parent, Louise Read, beneath my article in March about Millbank and the “sponsored coverage”, countered that it was in fact a “lovely school”, and that children had “loved their first week back there”.

Snap analysis: what do these developments say about this government?

This case seems a microcosm of concerns which are currently being raised almost hourly about this government, on a wider canvas.

When it comes to the ability to gain useful publicity or other forms of favours from this administration, is it more a question of who you know that any objective qualification for such patronage? And is this not especially ironic, and concerning, in a government whose central education priority is said to be social mobility, where personal connections should not matter?

The fact that the government could have chosen thousands of other primary schools to highlight for their work getting ready for the return of all pupils last month, but instead chose this one, appears very revealing.

As reported previously, the government chose to highlight through these sponsored articles a school which has had seven serving headteachers since 2016, and will be moving on to its eighth when Marwick takes over in the second half of this term. That does not look like a record of stability many parents would appreciate.

Then there is the succession of teachers leaving the school, as documented here. Any institution which is having to replace classroom staff mid-year does not look to be in a good place.

Why, then, pick Millbank over so many others? The government, of course, has not responded to questions about whether Lord Nash’s closeness to ministers played any part. It seems unlikely that there will ever be proof of that.

But there seems a pervading sense more widely that this government has used this crisis to advance ideological agendas, as well as to favour its friends. Sadly, in the absence of a detailed rebuttal in relation to Millbank, it is hard not to surmise that the sponsored coverage is another example of this phenomenon.

*Since July 2020, Lord Nash has also been the “lead non-executive” director for the entire government. Among his responsibilities are to “improve governance across Whitehall”. Readers familiar with how his academy trust, Future, seems not to have followed governance guidelines even while he was the academies minister, overseeing the school governance framework for the country as a whole, might just follow Tom Lehrer and conclude that satire is dead.