Route 39 – We Quit!

You may have already heard the news…

The Route 39 Trust and parent governors have today handed in their resignations en-masse to Lisa Mannall, Regional Schools Commissioner for the South West. She must be gutted!

In an open letter (Open-Letter-Resignation-of-Route-39-Acad-99) sent by email to Ms Mannall and in their time proven arrogance, the trust governors desperately sought to deflect attention away from their own inadequacies, negligence and catastrophic mismanagement of the £20 million Route 39 Academy Free School currently still under construction and instead, as usual, looked to blame absolutely anyone else but themselves for the complete mess that they have presided over.

Following a second disastrous Ofsted inspection of the school in 2017, where the Academy was judged inadequate in just about every respect, at that time the trust governors attacked anybody they could think of (other than themselves of course) as being the source of their problems. Now, true to form; they have done it again!

Today they blamed Ofsted, for being too critical of their ‘touchy feeling’ educational ethos, they blamed the Inspectors, for being too judgemental and acting ‘inappropriately’, they blamed the RSC’s office, its processes and the Local Authority for not bending over backwards to help them fulfill and extend their ideologically and progressively disastrous teaching experiment that was quite clearly failing every student unlucky enough to attend the establishment and they criticised the Launceston College Multi-Academy Trust (MAT), which had recently been appointed to rescue Route 39; for its traditional (yet quite obviously successful) approach to education.

Without any sense of irony at all, as recently as 13th March 2018, Route 39’s Chair of Governors; Mr Richard Bence had this to say about Launceston College MAT in a letter to parents:

“Launceston College MAT share Route 39 Academy’s central belief that every student has a right to achieve through an education that both challenges and engages with them to develop their personal, social and intellectual potential.”

“Becoming part of Launceston College MAT opens additional opportunities for students. They will have access to a wider range of curriculum options, particularly at GCSE. Courses will be introduced that support the original vision for land-based learning. The range will be further expanded to include courses linked to local economic needs such as high-tech creative industries, arts, business studies and tourism.”

He went on to say that “Launceston College MAT’s ‘A Plus Award’ is strongly aligned to the original vision of a Route 39 Baccalaureate where students are rewarded for adventurous activities, achieving learning goals and being an active member of the wider community. This will further support our students to become adults willing to take on challenges and care for the community and environment where they live. Governors feel this is the right way forward and will keep parents appraised of progress.”

So why the sudden and dramatic U turn? Have the Trust Governors finally been found out?

Is it possible that the Launceston College MAT and the RSC have come to realise and understand what many local observers have been saying publicly and vociferously for many years, namely that the Route 39 Academy was unviable, unsustainable and ideologically flawed from its inception and that its approval and subsequent funding was detrimental to the education of not only the ridiculously small number of children that attended the school but also to the thousands of local school children whose education has been negatively affected by the re-routing of £ millions of education funding to finance this idealistic white elephant?

Perhaps the Department for Education have finally cottoned on that they should not have entrusted these £ millions of the tax paying public’s money to a bunch of amateur pseudo-educationalists who fancied a jolly time playing at ‘schools’. But at what cost?

Up until only last week, the Department for Education was refusing to confirm the exact cost of the Route 39 Academy due to ‘commercial sensitivity’.

Now, according to the open letter sent today, the cat is out of the bag! It would appear that the school has cost the tax payer £20 million. That’s £20 million that desperately needed to be spent educating the 11,000 secondary school age children in Torridge that have had to endure 5 years of cuts, reductions in teaching provision and educational austerity, it seems all for the aggrandisement of the self serving privileged few.

Back in May 2014 we were present at a meeting at the Woolsery Parish Council, where Richard Bence, Chair of Governors and Joss Glossop, one of the erstwhile Principals of Route 39 gave what was billed on the agenda as a ‘presentation’ on their planning application for the construction of a multi-million £ new secondary school within the North Devon ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’ (AONB) at Steart Farm, Bucks Cross. The reason for their brief appearance was primarily to address the objections raised by the Parish Council to their planning application.

The capital cost to buy the Steart Farm site and construct the school was raised by a Councillor, who directly quizzed Mr Bence on how much Route 39 would cost the taxpayer. “£15 million, £20 million, £10 million, £25 million?” he asked, perhaps rather tongue in cheek. Mr Bence declined to give an answer, saying that he really didn’t know!

Now, sadly; we do!

But what about the role of central Government in this fiasco?

It was David Cameron’s (remember him?) Tory Party zealot Michael Gove (and him!) who shang-hai’d a perfectly reasonable educational policy of funding new Academy schools in areas with lack of school places, converting the policy into a ‘free-for-all’ cash grab for any aspiring group, regardless of their educational background or expertise, to plunder the educational finances in order to build ridiculous schools which, in Route 39’s case; there was no need or foreseeable requirement for and in a location that was supposed to be protected.

The local planning experts rejected their planning permission multiple times.  Route 39’s trust governors appealed. They lost the appeal, it being roundly rejected by the Planning Inspector. So they appealed again to the Secretary of State, Greg Clarke (who’s now in charge of business!) He agreed with Route 39 (of course he would) and the money came flooding in. Route 39 were cock-a-hoop!

Skip forward a couple of years, the school is open but with unsurprisingly far less students than the Route 39 governors forecast and Ofsted turn up. One look at the school and they receive a ‘requires improvement’ notice followed by the Principal exiting faster than a Russian diplomat. Unfortunately she was replaced by her Deputy Principal.

Skip forward another year, and Ofsted are back and this time they aim to ensure that things at the Academy have improved, as the Trust Governors had promised. They hadn’t – in fact they had got much worse and the school was rated ‘inadequate’ across a whole raft of criteria. The Deputy Principal then ‘disappeared’ in mysterious circumstances and rather worryingly has not been seen or heard from since!

Rather late in the day, but perhaps better late than never, South Dartmoor Academy stepped up saying they were going to be the saviour of Route 39, then somewhat abruptly stepped back down again; once they saw what they were having to deal with.

Which is where the prospects for Route 39’s Trust Governors took a turn for the worse. With no choice in the matter, they were placed into the professional care of the Launceston College MAT. The fun was over, the game up, – now was the time to get serious about how to run a school. And with that, the Route 39 Trust Governors have now disembarked into the sunset. And perhaps not before time!

Back in 2013 when the Route 39 founders were proselytising about how beautiful, idyllic and wonderful the education was going to be at Route 39 and how rubbish all the other local secondary schools were, we recall Ms Glossop and Mr Bence proudly proclaiming that they were going to be an outstanding school, with educational achievement 10% higher than the national average. We remember clearly Ms Glossop saying that she “knew what ‘outstanding’ looked like”, with Mr Bence smugly grinning away in agreement. One has to wonder how Route 39 thought they were ever going to achieve this aspiration when they failed to enter any children for their GCSE examinations!

We think the only conclusion we can now reach is that Route 39, its trust and its governance has been an outstanding disaster and in the immortal words of Sir Alan Sugar, all that’s left to be said is “You’re fired”!