A letter to parents reports that the controversial Headteacher of Whitehill Primary School, an Academy and part of the Gravesend Grammar School Academy Trust has been given leave of absence and the Associate Head of Gravesend Grammar has been put into the school as Acting Head. 

This follows a particularly turbulent year in the life of this troubled school. Much of the background to this sorry story is reported elsewhere in this website.

Allegations of cheating in SATs last year, which saw the school’s Key Stage 2 results annulled, and in Early Years Assessments in 2014 and 2015 have bedevilled the school, and the Department for Education carried out a visit last week which may have triggered the leave of absence.

Turnover of staff is very high, staff morale is rock bottom, and by one measure the school is the most unpopular in the county, with 30 children allocated to Reception classes by KCC in April who had not even applied for the school. I am regularly contacted by parents seeking advice on how to avoid sending their children to Whitehill Primary.

One of the many questions being asked by so many people in the local community and by many past and present staff is why this scandal has been allowed to continue for so long, especially after the Headteacher was removed by KCC from the neighbouring Kings Farm Primary School in July 2014 where she had been installed as Executive Head in January 2014........

Medway Council has launched its second initiative to improve standards across its schools in three years, this one called “Get Medway Learning” , the previous initiative entitled “Effective Challenge of Underperformance in Schools” having sunk without trace or effect.

The initiative aims to raise the bar in local primary and secondary schools, ensuring children are receiving a quality education and achieving to the very best of their ability, certainly a laudable aim, as for 2013-14, the last year for which results are available, Medway Primary schools came bottom in the country in both Key Stage 2 performance and OFSTED Inspection outcomes.

However, I remain unconvinced it will fare any better than the 2012 attempt, except that perhaps Medway Council is at last realising the seriousness of its situation and the damage being done to Medway children’s education. The only bright sign on the horizon is the continued good performance of Medway secondary schools, producing GCSE results above the national average, and demonstrating they are turning round the underperformance in the primary sector.

The main themes of the initiative are:…..

As regular browsers will know, I make considerable use of the Freedom of Information Act to secure information about education matters in Kent and Medway for parents. However, it is important to use the service responsibly and not make requests that will obviously be refused on grounds of unreasonableness. Two recent requests about the Kent Test:

Very reasonably and politely, Kent County Council responded:

Too many young teachers are being lost to the profession through a lack of support in the classroom, chief schools inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw has said. Sir Michael, giving evidence to the Commons select committee on education, said he had been upset by the number of talented teachers who complained about the lack of support available to them at the start of their careers.

“What used to upset me was talking to people who were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, hugely enthusiastic  about coming into teaching, wanting to do well for disadvantaged youngsters, saying to me that they were put off teaching in the first few years because they weren’t adequately supported by leaders”.

This statement coincided with an article I had been asked to write for Kent On Sunday, on why so many teachers were leaving the profession, which was published on Sunday. My article is illustrated by a number of recent examples of schools affected, drawn from Kent and Medway, although I have provided another below which I believe dwarfs these examples but may of course not be unique.....

Mid Kent College has cynically left 175 students in the lurch 24 hours after they received GCSE results which qualified them for A Level courses at the College. All A Level courses for new students have been scrapped less than two weeks before term starts, at both the Gillingham and Maidstone campuses. Some of the students learned of the decision only after news was published in local media and before they received letters informing them that their career plans had been torpedoed by the College.

According to the College the decision was taken in order to focus more effort on apprenticeships and vocational training. The College had ‘reviewed its curriculum in the face of fewer resources and recent government policy’ although I am aware of no government policies that have changed in recent months to precipitate this change.

And then, there is the remarkable coincidence outlined at the foot of this article.......

I have had a very interesting morning, being used as an “expert” by the BBC on a circuit of Local Radio stations commenting on today’s news that the number of parents being taken to court over the unauthorised absence of their children from school is rising fast. 16,430 people in England were prosecuted for failing to ensure that a child went to school in 2014, up a quarter on 2013 when 13,128 people were taken to court.

My main sympathy is with the schools who have to police an increasingly difficult situation, but the reverse side of the coin is that the number of cases of persistent absence appears to be on the decline thank to the new tougher measures. The latest, I have been able to find show that in 2012-13, there was a sharp fall in persistent absence in that year from 433,130 to 300,895, down nearly a third after the regulations were tightened up.

The current rules are now quite explicit - You have to get permission from the headteacher if you want to take your child out of school during term time. You can only do this if: you make an application to the headteacher in advance and there are exceptional circumstances. The last of course begs the question “what are exceptional circumstances?”…..

 Controversial Ebbsfleet Academy Principal Alison Colwell has been asked, according to KentOnline,  to attend another meeting with Schools Minister Nick Gibb, as one of ten "behaviour experts" nationally to discuss the school's "zero tolerance" behaviour policy and how this approach can be used to drive up standards in schools. This follows an article in the Sunday Times Magazine in July 2014, which explained "how it had turned around its reputation as one of the country’s worst performing schools". Puzzlingly, the predecessor Swan Valley School had no such reputation and this statement is completely untrue. The Ofsted Report of January 2011 recorded that "Students’ attainment has risen significantly at Swan Valley over the last few years as a result of improvements in the quality of teaching and learning and careful tracking and intervention, particularly in Key Stage 4. Challenging targets have been set and exceeded. The proportion of students achieving 5A* to C grades at GCSE last year was the school’s best ever result at 63%. When mathematics and English are included, the number gaining 5A* to C grades was 34% in 2010, also a record for Swan Valley ". For 2011 GCSE performance, this figure rose further to 35%. Strangely, in spite of this significant progress the then headteacher (OFSTED: "The headteacher, passionate about obtaining the best for his students") was suddenly removed later in the year and replaced  by Ms Colwell who had been seconded to the school to assist him a few months earlier. Further controversy followed, as explained here, and here.

For 2012 and 2013, under the new management, GCSE performance had slumped to second worst in the county in both years, at 24% and 28% respectively. Overall over the past three years there has been a fractional improvement in GCSE results as the 2014 GCSE pass rate has inched up from the 35% of 2011, just before the putsch, to 36%, hardly endorsing the claim in the Sunday Times article of turning around its reputation. However, what is more notable is that the popularity of the school has fallen sharply in the same period, the most recent figures for admission in September 2015 showing that there were just 47 first choices for the 150 places, with 52 places, or over a third of those available, being taken up by Local Authority allocations of children who hadn't even applied for Ebbsfleet Academy. This is the third highest proportion in the county, the Marlowe Academy being first having now been closed through lack of demand.

Oddly, although I was also interviewed by the Sunday Times reporter, none of these factual statements were mentioned in the article!......

A senior member of staff at a Chatham Primary School is reported to have been suspended by the Academy Trust running the school, after alleged cheating in SATs this year was reported to the Trust. This followed an inquiry by the Chief Executive of the Trust who made a comprehensive report to the national Standards and Teaching Agency (STA), which then took the decision to annul all 90 Year 6 results. The Phoenix Junior Academy is run by the Fort Pitt Thomas Aveling Academies Trust, which has clearly behaved very responsibly and professionally in the matter. Rightly, the Trust has issued a statement explaining the situation to parents, noting that no class teacher was involved in the maladministration of the SATs and is now reportedly engaged in a confidential employment process so understandably unable to comment further.

How different from the situation at Whitehill Primary School in Gravesend….

Congratulations to all at Gravesend Grammar School for what I believe is one of the most glowing “Outstanding” OFSTED Inspection Reports I have ever read. You will find this superb report on an outstanding school here.

The whole Report is carefully shaped around the school motto and opens: “The school’s motto of ‘consule cunctis’ meaning care for all permeates all aspects of the school’s work. It fuels the powerful drive for excellence of the executive headteacher and the governors and is understood and shared by all members of the school community”.

Unusually for a grammar school, it next highlights students’ exceptional behaviour and outstanding relationships within the school. It continues with the challenging curriculum, the outstanding teaching, and high standards. The excellent progress of students which culminate in an excellent preparation in the sixth form for student’s next steps in life as they value highly the opportunities for academic study and the exceptional quality of the experiences they are offered for leadership and enrichment, are other highlights of the report. “Safeguarding and child protection arrangements are exemplary”.

And yet…….

The Daily Mail has published an article claiming that the proposed Sevenoaks Annex is being blocked because of legal issues.

The article asserts that the legal problems are such that, even if the Secretary of State were to approve the scheme, it would be overturned by a legal challenge in the courts. Fear of a Judicial Review was likely to put a stop to the proposal going ahead.

The current scheme is the fourth to be proposed  since the satellite grammar school was first proposed three and a half years ago, planning permission for the new annex has been granted, and builders are waiting to move in. Meanwhile on the same site, the new buildings for the Trinity Free School are already in progress.

The article gives no clue as to what the legal obstacles might be and, whilst they were evident in each of the three previous schemes, it is harder to see what is now suggested to be blocking the proposal.

Whatever, we are left wondering if this is just another of the myriad of rumours that have swirled around this project from the start, as confirmed by any internet search for "Sevenoaks Annex". In particular (updating five days after the original Daily Mail article) it is curious that no other media outlet has picked up the story, or is it just they have been burned before....

Fleetdown in Dartford: In its newsletter dated 26^th June, the Headteacher announced that she and her governors may take away the place of any child who goes away on holiday in term-time and offer it to the next child on the waiting list. This is of course illegal, as the only way the place can be removed is by permanent exclusion. As the absence results from the parents' decision not that of the child there are no grounds to exclude because of serious misbehaviour the main criterion for permanent exclusion. The illegality is then compounded by the creation of a panel of governors to rule on whether the child can be offered a new place, a procedure which has no basis in law.

Hempstead Junior in Gillingham: as confirmed by the Medway Messenger, five of the eleven school governors have resigned “with the utmost reluctance” as it was “the only viable option left open” to them. In a letter to the school which I have seen, the governors said: “Despite our considerable efforts over the course of many months, we no longer believe we can work with the current head teacher to deliver sustainable progress for the school in general and, most importantly, for the children”. The clerk to the governors appears also to have resigned. Cabinet Member for Education, Mike O’Brien, is reported to have said “The decision by some of the governors is entirely a matter for them.” – Obviously no concerns there then!

Second Update on Hempstead: There is a comment below by the recent vice-chairman of Governors; another by the last but one chairman of governors; and a third, moving statement by teachers at the head's previous school. This is building up to be a strong indictment of current management and makes Medway Council's position look even  more precarious.

Continued……

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the abdication of responsibility for the Bishop of Rochester Academy in Chatham, as the Diocese of Rochester, the previous main sponsor, decided to abandon its attempts to improve the standards and popularity of the school. The Academy has now been passed on to the Thinking Schools Academy Trust, headed up by The Rochester Grammar School, incorporating Chatham Grammar School for Boys and several primary schools.

Now comes news of a surprising merger between two more Medway Academy Trusts, an agreement having been reached to merge The Thomas Aveling Academy Trust (TA) with the Fort Pitt Grammar School Academy Trust (FP), under the catchy title of Fort Pitt Thomas Aveling Academy Trust. 

What is notable in a Local Authority whose academy chains are currently dominated by grammar schools (the third chain being the Sir Joseph Williamson’s Academy Trust), is that this time the non-selective school appears to be at least equal in status.

Parents of children at Bishop of Rochester Academy in Chatham learned on 10th March that the school was to pass from lead sponsorship by the Anglican Rochester Diocesan Board of Education to the Thinking Schools Academy Trust (TSAT), headed up by The Rochester Grammar School and All Faiths Community Primary School and that the Principal had already left the school. The other two sponsors, Canterbury Christ Church University and Medway Council, will also have withdrawn from Bishop of Rochester as it becomes a TSAT Academy this month.

Meanwhile, TSAT has withdrawn from its intense campaign to secure Twydall Primary School as a Sponsored Academy.....

Updated 6th April, following the Conference 

On 1st April 2015, I spoke at The 11 Plus Conference , about the effects of coaching on the Kent Test. The aims of the Conference were: “Bringing together teachers, head teachers, examiners and education industry experts in the area of the 11 plus preparation; Providing a platform for discussion and debate in the future of the 11 plus; and raising money for the Charlie Waller Memorial Trust”. The Memorial Trust has been set up to work with young people suffering from depression. You will find a transcript of my talk here.  The Conference now plans to put on a separate meeting targeted at the Kent Test in June.

I have frequently covered the failings of the three Maidstone primary academies run by the Academies Enterprise Trust on the pages of this website. At last there are signs of relief for the poor families whose children are forced to attend one of Molehill Primary Academy, Oaks Primary Academy and Tree Tops Primary Academy as they are taken away from AET control and transferred to the Leigh Academy Trust, currently Kent’s most successful academy chain, on 1st March.

All three schools have been failed by OFSTED in the past few years, an article I wrote in January 2014 being entitled: “Is this the worst school in the country, run by the worst academy chain? - Tree Tops Academy”. An update on the fate of the three schools followed in September. AET, the largest Academy chain in the country, is currently banned from taking on any new academies and received a highly critical letter from OFSTED, following the focused inspection of 12 of its 71 schools (OFSTED is currently not allowed to inspect academy chains directly), in September.……