The letter from Baroness Berridge, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the School System, is utterly damning about the performance of the Griffin Trust.
'The school has been with the trust now for over four years and as stated in its most recent report, Ofsted found that “the trust has overseen the decline of the school since the last inspection”. The progress made by pupils is well below national average and has remained so for the last 3 years for which data has been published. Again, Ofsted noted that “pupils do not achieve well” and that many children do not feel safe in the school. Ofsted judged that the arrangements for safeguarding at the school are not effective and found that there was a high level of poor behaviour, disruption in lessons and that leaders have not been effective in managing pupils’ behaviour'. It continues 'the representations offered by the trust lack evidence that that the trust has the capacity to make the rapid and sustained improvements required at the academy. Given the trust’s track record at Stantonbury International Academy, coupled with the fact that another of the trust’s secondaries, Nicholas Chamberlaine School (which joined the trust in 2013), has declined from an Ofsted good rating in 2015 to Requires Improvement in 2019, there are concerns about the secondary capacity within the trust. There is a very real risk that performance will not improve, and children will not receive the education they deserve. The monitoring report commissioned by the trust does not provide strong evidence of impact'.
As if that is not enough, there now comes one of the most breathtaking and arrogant statements I can conceive from a school threatened with closure and bears repeating. The letter states: 'While the report references a number of actions taken in respect of safeguarding and leadership it states “Leaders are not able easily to provide data and records of impact. This evidence finding takes up too much of their valuable time.”'
The letter continues relentlessly: 'The representations offered by the Trust raise serious concerns about the trust board’s ability to hold the trust leadership to account for school improvement...The evidence from Ofsted and from pupil outcomes from the last three years indicate that the unacceptable standards at Stantonbury did not come about, as the trust describes, as the result of a “lapse in rigour” but is, in fact, more fundamental'.
In summary, the DfE letter places the blame for this abject failure squarely on the Trust Board, whose Trustees and Members are: Trevor Edinborough (Chair of the Board of Trustees); Julie Adams; Marissa Davies (Assistant Director of Education for the Girls Day School Trust); Sarah Galvani; Elizabeth Lewis (founder Director, civil partner also a founder Director); Michael McCreedy; Mary Stiasny (Pro-Vice-Chancellor University of London - what on earth is she doing being mixed up with this?); and Ann Powell (CEO).
An article in the MK Citizen newspaper published yesterday also describes some of the issues.
The conclusion of the DfE letter that ‘the school would improve more quickly with a stronger trust with a track record of secondary school improvement’ should surely act as a death knell for the Trust itself and its management of all the schools it runs, including the three primary schools in Medway.
