Route 39 – Double standards, surely not?

Route 39, the as yet unproven free school academy in North Devon, and their supporters are currently basking in their dubious ‘success’, having received news recently from Torridge District Council that due to austerity cuts, the council simply cannot afford to challenge; via an expensive judicial review, the Secretary of States decision to over-rule the council planning authority (what authority?) and the Governments own Planning Inspectorate.

Led by the Acting Principle of the School; Mr Jordan Kelly, in a ‘Protest’ march on April 1st (no, its not a joke!), Route 39 supporters picketed the council offices at the vote, waving placards, chanting and apparently verbally abusing other people trying to get into the council chamber to speak. Later that same evening, following the councils decision narrowly in their favour, the school supporters then proceeded to drive through the tiny village of Bucks Cross, where their new school will now be constructed at huge taxpayer expense, blaring their car horns and screaming the name of the school out of their car windows!

In the meantime, the Route 39 website states “We look forward to working productively with local residents to ensure that the school becomes the asset to the community we intend it to be” and on their Facebook page the following promise is made: “The hand of partnership is proffered. Although it might be too soon at the moment, we believe that combined energies could be a formidable force for good in north Devon.”

This week, Chair of Governors, Mr Richard Bence and presumably the trustees of the ‘free’ school appeared to hold out an olive branch to the local community, stating again on Facebook: “To those who have fought with passion against the development, please consider using your energy to be a part of how the Academy develops. It will be a positive and pro-active benefit to the students, the Academy and the AONB. PM me or this page.”

Shame then that on Mr Bence’s personal Facebook page this week, it seems his good lady wife might not share the same community spirited view as he, writing “Huge congratulations and thanks to all the governors and teachers at Route 39 Academy who have worked so hard throughout all the filth, slander and lies that have been thrown around over the last 4 years. Finally their undivided attention can be spent on the right thing. (Maybe they could spend a while responding to the appalling rubbish that some people have spread, as they were too professional to slag off the ‘no campaigners’ and people who should know better. Boy, did I want to though!?) Welcome back to our husbands and wives! It will be good to have you home.“

Having never met Mrs Bence, one can only presume the ‘filth, slander and lies‘ and ‘appalling rubbish’ she must be writing about was all the negative, disingenuous and misrepresentative comments peddled by Route 39 and their supporters when they were trashing existing local schools to prospective parents, the fiction that made up the Route 39 application to the Department of Education (particularly that bit about the numbers of children that would be attending the school) and the constant social media bad mouthing of the local community of Bucks Cross and Bucks Mills, describing them as “selfish retired people that have never had kids”!

As regards being ‘too professional to slag off the no campaigners‘, one would have thought that Mrs Bence was aware that Mr Bence and the trustees of Route 39 attempted to have NDG removed from his role as a Governor of a neighbouring secondary school, claiming that postings as NDG had “brought the role of governor into disrepute”. In a face to face meeting in July 2015, Mr Bence accused NDG of libelling himself, other trustees and the school itself and of deliberately targeting the children at the school!

Mr Bence and the trustees were cordially invited to put forward evidence that NDG had stated anything that they considered to be factually incorrect or inaccurate – NDG offered to remove anything on this blog that was proven to be untrue and would apologise unreservedly if this turned out to be the case. Both Mr Bence and Route 39 Academy have to date furnished no evidence at all to substantiate their outrageous claim.

It was also pointed out to Mr Bence that the opinions stated were exactly that – opinions, that we all have a right to hold and that as the Chair of a school funded with tax payers money – they are a ‘state school’ as he now proudly proclaims, he, the other trustees and the employees of the school are considered ‘civil servants’ in public office and as such are held to a higher level of accountability than the average man in the street. This means that their actions are also open to a higher degree of fair scrutiny and criticism, a role which NDG has provided consistently throughout this period.

In respect to Mr Bence’s allegation that NDG had deliberately targeted the children at the school, this was vociferously challenged and he apologised and retracted these despicable comments.

Mr Bence was finally asked how else NDG could further assist him and he asked if NDG would be willing to speak to the children at Route 39 directly? This request was agreed to but rather unsurprisingly, the invitation failed to arrive!

These personal attacks from Route 39, its trustees and its supporters simply serve to remind us why we must continue to stand up and challenge inequity, inequality and self-serving greed wherever we find it. We accept that we may not always be successful, as in this unfortunate case, but no-one can ever say we didn’t do our level best to protect our local children’s education and the countryside in which we reside.

Finally, one pearl of wisdom that Mrs Bence might like to think on – “Don’t get confused between my personality and my attitude. My personality is who I am, my attitude depends on who you are!”

Just saying….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…. it might be now!

Sadly, Torridge District Councillors last night voted 15 to 11 not to pursue a judicial review against the Secretary of State’s decision (against all advice and the planning inspectorates recommendation) to let Route 39 Academy build their new secondary school in the North Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Route 39 has 123 students, less than a typical primary school and about 1/3 of the number they told the Dept. for Education they would have attending. To buy the site and build the school will now cost us all £ millions and the countryside will never be the same.

Now that the Government has announced that all schools will be Academies by 2020, why do we need this one? All the other local secondary schools have spare places available for students and most are rated good by Ofsted – Route 39 got a ‘requires improvement’ last Summer!

The Government are now teeing up all schools to be integrated in MAT’s or Multi-Academy Trusts, comprising clusters of schools with centralised financial budgets and control, ripe fruit for ‘out-sourcing’ to the likes of Babcock, Pearson, Ark, E-ACT and other large corporate ‘for profit’ education providers. These companies top slice the first 10%+ from each schools budget for their own shareholders before spending a penny on the children’s education and welfare.

I wonder how many Conservative Party supporters, donors and former Ministers sit on the boards of these organisations?

What a warped world we live in!

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchers?

With everyone still waiting for the Secretary of State to make his pronouncement regarding the future of the Route 39 free school in North Devon, it has been quite some time since anyone has cast an eye over their recent activities. So, given the poor weather this past weekend, NDG decided to catch up with the ‘goings-on’ in Happy Valley, just to see how they were all doing. Surely all must be well in La-La Land?

With the fairly recent departure of the very principled former principal, NDG was interested to see what changes had been initiated in pursuit of the ‘requires improvement’ judgement that Ofsted had placed on the free school. Regular readers will no doubt recall that ‘quality of teaching’ and ‘achievement of pupils’ were the two most glaring; shall we politely say ‘areas of under-achievement’, that were highlighted by the Ofsted inspectors, when they visited the free school in that idyllic ‘Summer of 2015’.

Well, it now appears that governance and financial control may be other areas that ‘requires improvement’.

On October 6th 2014, NDG highlighted the deficiency of Route 39 and its trustees to conform to the standards and regulations for public transparency that other schools across the nation have to abide by and to which Route 39 trustees agreed when they signed their Education Funding Agency (EFA) funding contract. In particular we highlighted a lack of clarity and avoidance of public scrutiny through an apparent inability to publish the minutes of any governing body meetings on the Route 39 website.

A quick look at the Route 39 website tonight reveals that the Academy Trust has not published a single minute from any meeting since 16th October 2014. Well, we hear you shout, ‘they probably haven’t had any meetings since then!’. Unfortunately this is not so – a short read of the ‘Report of the Trustees and Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31 August 2015 for Route 39 Academy Trust Limited‘ clearly states that within the time frame of the report, the trustees held seven Board of Trustees meetings (Page 7) and seven Finance and Personnel sub-committee meetings (Page 8), the minutes of which should all be in the public domain as; after all, this is public money that the trustees are accountable for!

Perhaps publishing minutes of these important meetings on the school website for parents, colleagues and the local constituency to read is yet another thing that Free Schools can arbitrarily ‘opt out’ of, however this would seem most unusual for any new school seeking to demonstrate its openness towards its local community: Respect – Engage – Aspire we seem to recall!

The Report of the Trustees… also reveals a couple of other very interesting points.

In terms of internal audit and scrutiny of the financial systems and management controls being exercised within Route 39, the trustees decided that this year, they didn’t need to fuss themselves with the appointment of an internal auditor, instead appointing the Chair of the Board of Trustees as a ‘reviewer’, to carry out some internal checks (Page 10). A reasonable person might stop to wonder how appropriate it may be that the individual responsible for signing off the Effectiveness of Governance Statement is also the same individual that is conducting the audit of internal financial control?

Also, having obviously read diligently through the Report of the Trustees and Financial Statements for the Year Ended 31 August 2015 for Route 39 Academy Trust Limited, and then duly signed (or ‘singed’ as the document incoherently states) these official documents as a true and accurate record of affairs on behalf of the members of the Board of Trustees, one wonders why they failed to notice that the Report of the Independent Auditors to the Members of Route 39 Academy Trust Limited states quite clearly that their Senior Statutory Auditor has audited the financial statements for the ‘Steiner Academy Exeter‘ for the Year Ended 31 August 2015 (Page 14).

You’d think that with the £000’s being paid to the auditors for their ‘professional advice and diligence’, the very least they could have done was ‘cut and paste’ the correct Academy name into the documents and that the trustees could have bothered to read and check the statements properly before signing and publishing them, after all they are responsible for more than £918,000 of our money!

Which leads us to perhaps the most perturbing part of the financial statement and the conclusion of the Independent Accountant.

The Conclusion on Page 17 states that “the Academies Handbook 2014 requires an Academy to manage a programme of risk and checking of financial controls appropriate to the Academies circumstances. Furthermore, the Academies Handbook 2014 requires an Academy to reconcile bank and control accounts regularly.”

The conclusion further states “From our work, the Academy did not carry out adequate checks and bank and control accounts were not reconciled. As a result of these issues of non-compliance, the risk of irregularity is high.” (Page 17)

Do we see something of a pattern developing here?

We were told the free school would be great, we were told that these people knew what they were doing, we were reassured by Government and MP’s that everything would be fine – and yet we see pitiful demand for the free school, independent inspections finding inadequacies in the fundamental elements of teaching and achievement and now we see that the financial governance, management and control appears, if you believe the published statement of accounts, to be virtually non-existent! What is going on?

Does anyone else perhaps think the ‘Chief Watcher’ – the Secretary of State needs to hear about this pretty smartly?

 

 

Route 39 – Certainly Closer to Closure?

Having taken some time to reflect upon the the documentation submitted by Route 39 to the Planning Inspectorate which; without any shred of irony, they refer to as their ‘proof of evidence’, one could again be inclined to question and challenge some of the statements that have now been put forward as justification for overturning the majority decision made last September by our locally and democratically elected representatives on Torridge District Council’s planning committee.

Playing the blame game!

In statements submitted by Mr Richard Bence, Chairman of Route 39’s Board of Trustees, Route 39 is plainly seeking to place the blame for the schools woeful record of attracting and retaining students on the fact that they haven’t been able to spend upwards of £2 million building their ‘vision’, bang in the middle of our protected AONB countryside.

The document states “Significant concern and uncertainty on students and parents who had already chosen Route 39 Academy as their secondary school and were due to start in September 2013. This led to a reduction in the number of students attending in the first year by an estimated 5 students. Continued uncertainty regarding site has led to significant student instability. In Year 1 of operation, 25 students left during the year and to date, 21 have left this, our second year. This has been balanced in part by students joining, dissatisfied with other schools. In Year 1, 20 students joined the Academy in year and to date 15 have joined this year.”

As usual, this ‘evidence’ makes completely unsubstantiated claims about parents dissatisfaction at other local secondary schools (another example of the denigration of our local school provision that Route 39 openly say they never do!) yet makes no clear comment at all about the dissatisfaction of both parents and students that have left Route 39 for a myriad of reasons, choosing only to say this was because of ‘uncertainty’.

Of the parents who have pulled their children out of Route 39, while uncertainty may indeed have played a small role in their decision, in almost all cases it most certainly was not the primary driver. The quality of teaching, the behaviour of fellow students, odd-ball teaching methods, transport costs, lack of proper governance and the strong perception among some parents that Route 39 has become a school catering predominantly for SEN children from around the wider region (in order to keep the student numbers viable) are just some of the many examples cited by some of these parents that made this very difficult decision for their children.

It is very wrong to grossly generalise the deeply held feelings of these parents, who made their original choice with the very best intentions, but who quickly found that the reality of Route 39 was far, far removed from the image that they were ‘sold’. Rather than undermine these parents, Route 39 might consider acknowledging their failures and admit publicly that their experiment in education does not, in fact, have all the answers for all parents and students.

It’s not us, it’s them!

The documents go on to blame Route 39’s inadequacies on everyone else but themselves. “While the temporary accommodation provides sufficient resources to cover the 11 to 14 curriculum, the Academy is unable to implement significant aspects of the vision including land-based learning. In addition, options for GCSE are limited as there are few specialist facilities available. We have lost a couple students recently to other schools able to offer a broader curriculum. Continued uncertainty regarding a permanent site have had a negative impact on the recruitment and retention of both staff and students. This year alone we have had two candidates refused an interview and one refused a job offer due to uncertainty regarding the permanent site.”

So, according to Route 39, it’s not only the fault of all the other schools locally that have better facilities, better GCSE options and a broader curriculum, it is also the fault of those teachers that refused to join their school. Again, they put this down to that elusive condition of ‘uncertainty’. So did these professional teachers not buy in strongly enough to Route 39’s ‘vision’, were they not offered enough money (Route 39 is not restricted as to what they pay in salaries to staff) or did they perhaps see something in the way the school is actually operating that rang alarm bells? After all, Route 39 did promise its parents and students that their teachers and teaching would be ‘outstanding’, so it stands to reason that teachers would be throwing themselves at Route 39, wouldn’t they?

And while not content at simply blaming those teachers that didn’t want a job at this particular Free School, Route 39  goes on to pillory Torridge’s District Councillors on the Planning Committee. Not withstanding the fact that these people are democratically elected and that they are duty bound to exercise their duties under the Nolan Principals for Public Office, showing no fear or favour in their decision making, the statement castigates TDC Councillors by proxy because they didn’t deliver what Route 39’s board of Governors had promised to the parents, students and staff of the school. “Parents have experienced the outcome of two Torridge Planning Committee decisions and have no faith in the committee acting in the best interest of their children. It would be unreasonable to expect parents and students to have the will to endure another planning application that would require the approval of the Planning Committee once again…The delays caused by Torridge in planning applications for Route 39 Academy have had a significant impact on the short-term viability of the Academy.”

So what is the motivation?

“The progress of the Academy thus far has placed significant reliance on the team of volunteer Governors. Many have worked for four years on the Academy without pay and at significant cost personally and on their families. I am concerned that there is a point at which this volunteer goodwill becomes exhausted.” Route 39 seem, within this statement to perhaps hint that Route 39 Governors should, in fact, be paid for the work that they have done over the past four years!  This is incredible! Route 39 would do well to realise that school governors at all schools across the area and in fact across the nation, don’t do what they do for money, we all do it because it is precisely what needs to be done for the children. As Governors we volunteer to help our schools and we don’t expect to get paid for it! Why should Governors at Route 39 be any different?

The future is certainly uncertain!

Like a soothsayer reading the runes, Route 39 finally launch themselves into predictions for the future. “The viability of the Academy going forward is reliant on the number of students attending. The impact of continued uncertainty regarding the site has a high likelihood of dissuading future applicants.” they appealingly state.  “As funding is based on the number of students attending the Academy there will be a number of students below which the Academy is no longer viable. It is not possible to give an accurate figure for this as it is dependent on the needs of the students, the breadth of years and the number of students in each year.”

It might be suggested by some that this prediction is already false – the Education Funding Agency (EFA) set a minimum intake of 50 students per year into Route 39 and the academy has consistently failed to attract and, crucially, retain these numbers of students. Indeed, with only 139 students signed to attend the school from September 2015 (Update October 2015 – only 130 actually turned up in September!), the school has only 35% of the total number is stated it would have in its EFA funding application.

It is not unknown for the EFA to withdraw its (our) funding from unviable free schools and academies and with the current situation continuing, it can perhaps be said with a greater degree of certainty than ever that Route 39 is now certainly closer to closure.

Route 39 – The numbers just still don’t add up!

In a previous NDG article, ‘The prize for fiction goes to…Route 39‘, posted in January 2015, we wrote concerning the publication of the Route 39 Free School’s application to the Department of Education and the Education Funding Agency for £2 million of funding, to build a new school that nobody wanted in a place nobody wanted it!

This article, clearly pointed out the ‘demand analysis’ that Route 39 had used to justify its application, where they confidently guaranteed to the authorities that they would attract 700 children to attend the school per year, over a period of 7 years – 100 children attending in each year group.

These figures, which were challenged most vociferously by local educationalists and parents at the time, were highly dubious at best, however upon these numbers the DfE and EFA very generously agreed to hand over the £2 million from educational funds, effectively removing this money from thousands of local secondary school children, as this “wonderful development” (Michael Gove’s words, not mine) would “be the catalyst for a rise in educational standards locally“. The EFA even went so far as to state in their funding agreement that even if Route 39 only got 50 kids per year, they would still cough up the money!

Opening day attendance numbers were ‘adjusted’, as it soon became all too obvious to the trustees that the Year 7 applications were going to fall woefully short of their predictions, so they opened up the intake to Year 8 and even Year 9 children to make up the shortfall. Even then, they only managed to scrape through the 50 children mark, fewer than the vast majority of annual primary school intakes around the country.

The article went on to suggest that “You could be forgiven for thinking that last years intake failure was simply just ‘opening day blues’, but one year on and September 2014’s figures were no better, in fact they were even worse, with only 49 students making up the new intake and the current total standing at a paltry 107!

Now, we know the numbers for September 2015 and you’ve guessed it… again they don’t add up!

Because Route 39 are too embarrassed to reveal the numbers of students that they are attracting, interested parties have to resort to Freedom of Information Act requests to get this information.

It has been discovered that Route 39’s September 2015 intake numbers are a mere 38 from Devon and just 9 from Cornwall, a total of only 47 children. The more keenly observant reader might realise that this number is well short of the 50 children required by the EFA to continue funding and massively below the 100 children the trustees of Route 39 have always claimed, from their application and ‘demand analysis’ would wish to attend the school. Even wishful thinking can’t get them above the minimum numbers that Route 39 needs to be viable!

Isn’t it quite obvious now that there simply is not a demand for this school that the EFA were led to believe existed and shouldn’t this hugely expensive ‘white elephant’ be closed immediately and its allocated funding of £2 million be better used to help the thousands of local secondary school children in this area? Isn’t it now time to end this farce once and for good?

Free Schools Report: Not all they are cracked up to be!

The Academies Programme has, according to the Government in its Free Schools Report today, introduced what it calls ‘healthy competition’ into our education system, that it claims may have helped drive improvement in English schools since 2010. Of course, as usual, that is only part of the story.

Schools are getting better… but they are not necessarily Free Schools!

While the government are spinning the report like crazy, saying that the academy model has made the state of schools improve generally, Graham Stuart, the Chair of the Education Committee actually said today: “It’s still too early to know how much the academies programme has helped raise standards. What we can say is that, however measured, the overall state of schools has improved during the course of the programme.”

What this really indicates is that the ‘threat’ of compulsory academisation, coupled with stricter Ofsted standards, and £ millions of educational funding being thrown at ‘experimental’ free schools has perhaps resulted in an improvement in ALL schools over the past 5 years.

What is crucial is that this report categorically does not state that this improvement is as a direct result of academies and free schools – most of the improvement has come from local authority schools and the report itself makes no mention at all of the sunken cost to achieve this improvement.

Readers should remember that the initial converter academies were limited (some might say ‘cherry-picked’) to those schools with an existing Ofsted judgement of “outstanding” and then to schools which were rated “good with outstanding features”. These schools also received approximately 10% additional funding through the Local Authority Central Spend Equivalent Grant (LACSEG) until funding regulations were latterly brought into line. It should come as no surprise that with this bonus in their bank balances, these schools should have gone on to show even more improvement than their peers. What may surprise you is that in more than a few cases, many of these schools actually FAILED to improve!

According to a recent National Audit Office report, the Free Schools budget is nationally £1 billion overspent and that the academies programme has caused the Department for Education (DfE) to be a further £1 billion overspent is a national scandal. Why is the government not being taken to task for this horrendous mismanagement of public spending at a time when every other public service, from libraries to old peoples homes to the emergency services is being cut by £ millions each year?

The money wasted on free schools could and should have been spent on all school children, regardless of where they happened to live or at the very least targetted at the most vulnerable categories of children, not just those who happened to be in a particular kind of school favoured by the then Secretary of State’s own political ideology.

The report published today goes on to state that “current evidence does not prove that academies raise standards overall or for disadvantaged children. It is clear though that academisation has led to greater competition (NDG: which implicitly the government believe is good), challenging many maintained schools to improve and incentivising local authorities to develop speedier and more effective interventions in under-performing schools.”

The report says that “While some (academy) chains have clearly raised attainment, others achieve worse outcomes, creating huge disparities within the academy sector and compared to other mainstream schools. To address this problem, Ofsted should be given the power to inspect academy chains in the same way it does local authorities“.

“Nearly half of all academies are not part of a chain. By being ‘stand-alone’, these schools risk becoming isolated from others and as such as both less likely to contribute to others and less supported if they begin to fail. In future Ofsted should require evidence of effective partnership with another institution before any school can be judged ‘outstanding‘”.

These findings raise serious questions around the establishment and funding of existing free schools and the basis upon which the decisions to approve them were taken.

Free School Funding Approvals Flawed

The Education Committee continue: “With regard to free schools, the DfE needs to be far more transparent about how and where it decides to fund new free schools. The DfE should also generally avoid opening free schools in areas which have both spare places and an overwhelming majority of good or outstanding schools.”

At long last someone in government seems to recognise what we in North West Devon have been saying for the past three years.

With overwhelming evidence that the Route 39 Free School application was based upon wholly fanciful and unrealistic projections of demand, misrepresentations of local secondary schools performance and a complete (and some might say intentional) failure to engage with the local community, the DfE and the Education Funding Agency should be seriously reviewing the decision-making surrounding the approval of the Route 39 application and taking appropriate steps to recover the situation.

Until this is done, the public can and will have no confidence in either organisation and one has to wonder how long this charade can continue!

Conclusions and recommendations

In its report from the wide ranging inquiry into the impact of the Government’s Academies and Free School Programme, the Education Committee has today called upon the Department for Education to:

Academies

• Publish clear information setting out the process and criteria by which sponsors are authorised and matched with schools.
• Publish data on the performance of individual academies and each Multi Academy Trust or chain.
• Publish clear information setting out the process and criteria by which funding agreements are reviewed and renewed.
• Review the length of funding agreements (in the light of US experience of Charter Schools) with a view to reducing the model agreement to five years.
• Analyse what makes academy chains effective and actively promote best practice  more widely amongst other chains.
• Separate the regulatory and funding roles of the Education Funding Agency, in order to restore public confidence in the academies process.
• Address the serious problems posed by conflicts of interest by taking further steps to strengthen the regulations for governance in academy trusts.
• Create a mechanism for schools to be able to leave academy chains where appropriate.
• Be more open and transparent about the accountability and monitoring system applied to chains and the criteria used to pause their expansion.
• Give Ofsted the power it needs to inspect academy chains.
• Require all academies and chains to publish the salary and other remunerations of senior leaders (within bands) in their annual accounts.
• Publish a protocol for dealing with the failure of a large chains and for how individual schools will be treated when a chain can no longer run them.

Free Schools

• Make clear how competition for free school funding is decided and the relative weight that is given to innovation, basic need, deprivation and parental demand.
• Ensure that local authorities are informed of any proposal to open a free school in their area.
• Collect statistical information on free school intakes and monitor the impact of new schools on the intake and attainment of neighbouring schools.

Primaries

• Commission research as a matter of urgency to assess the impact of academy status on attainment in primary schools.
• Make maintained primary schools in federations eligible for funding through the Primary Chains Grant to assist collaboration between primary schools.
• Review the lessons of wholesale rapid conversion across the secondary sector to identify lessons that can better inform any future expansion.

The Committee has also called upon the Education Funding Agency to:

• Enhance transparency and accountability around how it monitors academy funding agreements.
• Revise its guidance on ‘at cost’ transactions to make expectations of academies clearer.

These conclusions and recommendations paint a fairly damning picture of the mistakes, mismanagement and wilful disregard for our children shown over the past five years by the DfE and EFA in their pursuit of this Governments assault on our education system and despite the clamour and objections of educational professionals, parents, carers and communities across the country.

It’s about time this Government took responsibility for these failings, though one expects with an election looming, perhaps the individuals that have orchestrated and overseen this mess won’t be around very much longer to have to worry about it!

And the prize for fiction goes to…”Route 39″

Earlier this week, following the successful campaign by Laura McInerney through the Freedom of Information Act to get public access to the application forms submitted for Free Schools, the Education Funding Agency (EFA) application from Route 39 Academy Trust was published by the Government, and what delightful reading it makes.

The application from Route 39 seeks to present and describe to the EFA the lofty ideals and aspirations for this proposed free school in such a halcyon manner that it was hardly surprising that the EFA swallowed it ‘hook, line and sinker’. One does wonder though, had Captain Edmund Blackadder read it, he might have described the epic tome as “… the greatest work of fiction since vows of fidelity were included in the French marriage service.”

As soon as one begins reading the diatribe of misinformation, half-truths, spin and disingenuity contained within the document, it quickly becomes apparent why the Department for Education (DfE) were so very reluctant to reveal the contents of these applications to concerned local communities.

For example; within the document, Route 39 have deliberately misquoted or omitted comments made by local Head Teachers that were met in the preliminary stages of the application process, meetings that Route 39 sought in order to be able to claim that they had ‘consulted’ with local Secondary School principals.

Local school heads and teachers have been portrayed as supportive of the application when in fact they were not, while at the same time, the Route 39 application implies that our local schools are worthless and under-performing. Small wonder the strength of feeling towards this arguably divisive and disrespectful organisation from our local education professionals and the wider community alike.

What we can now see of course  is exactly what we have long suspected – that the Route 39 application made what could be described as wildly inaccurate, completely unsubstantiated and factually flawed statements about the demand for the school from the local area, the performance of other local secondary schools in the same and adjoining catchments and the suitability of their proposed site for a ‘safe, secure and environmentally sensitive’ school.

The Route 39 application states quite clearly that from the ‘massive’ demand they perceived from the local community for their proposed school (you will remember herds of people flocking to the Milky Way when Route 39 offered them free entry tickets – that was the ‘demand’ that they presented to the EFA), that they would subsequently get 100 Year 7 students attending the school in September 2013/14 and further 100 Year 7 students attending in September 2014/15 and each year thereafter (see the table from the application below).

In fact, the numbers that actually started in September 2013 amounted to no more than 58, of which only 33 were Year 7 students, the remainder being made up of children from Years 8 and 9 that were attending other local secondary schools.

Route 39 had to draft in these other children to make up the numbers as crucially, the EFA had set a minimum target of 50 children starting in September 2013 in order to qualify for funding.

Obviously one would have thought that in return for the £millions of educational funding being requested by Route 39, the EFA would have demanded that this minimum number of students should be from the Year 7 cohort, but that would assume a logic that appears to be sadly missing from the EFA, no doubt because logic would run counter to the current educational ideology of their masters; the DfE. At that time, the Governments headlong rush to open as many grammar school ‘look-alikes’ funded from the public purse as possible before the next general election, would make Usain Bolt look like he was running backwards!

Even Dr John Sentamu, Archbishop of York has today described the governments free schools policy as a “failed attempt” to create grammar schools benefiting those with “means and ability”.

You could be forgiven for thinking that last years intake failure was simply just ‘opening day blues’, but one year on and September 2014’s figures were no better, in fact they were even worse, with only 49 students making up the new intake and the current total standing at a paltry 107! (Ed. May 7th 2015 – We now know the September 2015 intake numbers, 38 from Devon and 9 from Cornwall, a total of just 47 children. This number is below the 50 children required by the EFA and massively below the 100 the trustees of Route 39 have always claimed, from their application and ‘demand analysis’ would want to attend the school. Isn’t it obvious now that there simply is not the demand for this school that the EFA were led to believe existed and shouldn’t this hugely expensive ‘white elephant’ be closed and its allocated funding (£2 million) used to help the thousands of local secondary school children in the area?)

Students (and their parents) arriving at the school full of joy and hope soon appear to discover that Route 39 cannot deliver as bucolic an educational vista as they so evocatively and eloquently describe in their EFA application and the raft of glossy marketing materials subsequently produced by the school (with tax payers cash that should be spent on childrens education).

Even in this past couple of weeks, a local secondary school has welcomed yet another ex-Route 39 student to join its classes, obviously from parents disillusioned by the reality of the Route 39 experiment.

Local educationalists were more than bemused by the claims made by Route 39 within their application document prior to their approval to proceed. Among these were the lauded claims that they would not permanently exclude any student, which was a key example of Route 39’s ‘Definitions of Success’.  They also proclaimed that their absence target (5%) would be “significantly below the national and local values due to initial start up status of the school and implementation of engage, respect and aspire.”

Well, reality tells a different story. Although crowing to the EFA that “Our clear aspiration is that there will (be) zero permanent exclusions and temporary exclusions will be less than 2%”, within the first year, Route 39 had permanently excluded its first pupil.

Attendance rates do not appear to be faring much better, with Route 39’s principal reporting to the academy trust governors in October 2014 that absences were running at 5.9%, going on to inform them that one pupil on the roll had not bothered turning up at all! By way of comparison, the % total absence for Secondary Schools (excluding free schools) across the whole of Devon is 4.9%.

While it is far too soon to begin to assess the actual impact of the educational provision achieved at Route 39 against the almost messianic claims touted within their application manifesto, the word on the street is that once again, the cold reality of delivery is somewhat different to the ‘fairytale fantasy’ contained within the 241 pages of the Route 39 application.

Only time will tell, of course, but whatever the outcome of the appeal made to the Planning Inspectorate over the planning application for the school, in the interests of transparency and accountability we shall continue to scrutinise Route 39’s performance and to hold them to account for the huge amounts of public money that they are spending. This is the very least that we can do for all the thousands of other children in the Torridge area that are being disproportionately denied access to this vital educational funding.

In a Pickle! Secretary of State ‘recovers’ Route 39 Appeal

Many of you may have been wondering what has happened in respect to the Route 39 planning appeal. The latest news is that Eric Pickles MP, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and the Conservative Member of Parliament for Brentwood and Ongar has ‘recovered’ the appeal, which effectively means that he, alone, will make the final decision about Route 39 Academy and its attempts to site itself within the North Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). The reason apparently for this direction is that Route 39′s appeal involves “proposals for development of major importance having more than local significance”!

In the normal course of proceedings, a contentious planning appeal may be “Called in”. Calling-in of a planning application refers to the power of the Secretary of State to take the decision making power on a particular planning application out of the hands of the local planning authority for his own determination. This can be done at any time during the planning application process, up to the point at which the local planning authority actually makes the decision.

If a planning application is called-in, there will be a public inquiry chaired by a planning inspector, or lawyer, who will make a recommendation to the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State can choose to reject these recommendations if he wishes and will genuinely take the final decision. The power to call-in planning applications is very general and the Secretary of State can call-in an application for any reason. In practice, very few applications are called-in every year. They would normally relate to planning applications which raise issues of national significance.

The Secretary of State also has a similar power to “recover” a planning appeal which has been submitted to the planning inspectorate. A “recovered inquiry” is basically a planning appeal (against a local authority’s decision) which the Secretary of State can decide to determine himself, rather than allowing a planning inspector to take the final decision, as is the normal process.

What is interesting in Route 39’s case is that Eric Pickles has recently issued new planning guidelines within the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) specifically seeking to restrict development and further protect Britains AONB’s from unwelcome intrusions of this very kind. With a general election also imminent, it will be intriguing to see how Mr Pickles chooses which way to ‘turn his thumb’ on this appeal.

Will he vote in favour of his party’s educational doctrine and thus also be complicit in Route 39’s plans to turn the North Devon AONB from a green and pleasant agricultural landscape into a suburban overspill, by over-ruling Torridge District Councils almost unanimous vote against Route 39’s ridiculous planning proposal, or alternatively, will he support David Cameron’s ‘Love of the Countryside’ and his ‘Localism’ agenda and follow his own policy guidance within the NPPF for the protection of our precious rural countryside by upholding TDC’s local planning decision? Eric Pickles is, of course, a politician, therefore its anybody’s guess which way he will go!

With the appeal now in, the next phase of the process commences. The deadline for further comments to the Planning Inspectorate is 7th January 2015. I strongly urge you to write again to the Planning Inspectorate, outlining your clear objections to Route 39’s farcical, unsafe, massively damaging and expensive proposals.

If you do wish to make comments, or modify your previous representation, you can do so on the Planning Portal at www.planningportal.gov.uk/pcs or by emailing teamp11@pins.gsi.gov.uk. If you do not have access to the internet, you can send three copies by registered post to: The Planning Inspectorate, Temple Quay House, 2 The Square, Bristol, BS1 6PN.

For more information go to the TDC planning portal – the references are: 1/0127/2014/LBC and 1/0126/2014/FULM or just search Steart Farm.

 

Route 39: Does FOI release reveal lack of financial governance?

October 6th, 2014: Update – Finally, Route 39 have complied with my Freedom of Information request and released the minutes of their Governing Body meetings and Finance and Personnel Committee meetings. They emailed me at 4:40 pm today, 20 minutes before close of business on the final day they were due to reveal the information under the FOI regulations – nice touch chaps, very mature!

The Chair of Governors kindly wrote saying: “In response to your Freedom of Information request, please be advised that ratified minutes of the Governing Body and its committees are available here: http://goo.gl/GP0p4r“.

Who is checking Route 39’s spending? Obviously not the Finance Committee!

It remains somewhat perplexing that it takes someone like myself to hold this establishment to account, and to ensure that they conform to the standards and regulations for public transparency that other schools across the nation have to abide by and to which Route 39 trustees agreed when they signed their EFA funding contract . Why are not the Department for Education, the Education Funding Agency, Ofsted, the parents of students at the school and the governors themselves ensuring that this information is transparent and available for public review?

But hold on… it seems that between December 5th 2013 and June 10th 2014, Route 39 didn’t hold any Finance and Personnel Committee meetings at all, and the June 10th 2014 minutes are not accessible. Very tardy!

Does this mean that for the first six months of this year, at a time when the school has been heavily involved in funding its abortive planning application, Route 39 has been merrily spending tax payers money without any control, oversight or governance in place to monitor and review their outlay? Surely not?

Why are the DfE and EFA not investigating this poor governance and asking governors the challenging questions that need answering?

Schools have a duty to publish certain information on their school website. This includes but is not limited to: details of the pupil premium allocation and spending plans, the curriculum – content and approach, links to admission arrangements, SEN Policy, Charges and Remissions Policy and Behaviour policy. Taking its legislative basis from The School Information (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2012, the publication of such information is a requirement for maintained schools, academies and free schools.

I also wonder why Route 39’s Governing Body minutes are not accessible to parents and the local community via the schools website, as they rightfully should be – All other local secondary schools do this as a matter of course, but I searched tonight and Route 39’s are nowhere to be found!

Route 39: DfE threatens closure of two North Devon secondary schools

In view of the Torridge District Council Planning Committee discussions being held today pertaining to the planning application for the Route 39 Free School, you may be interested to see the Impact Assessment for the Route 39 Academy Free School, recently released by the Department for Education.

The Department for Education report has only recently been made public, at a time when Route 39 Academy had already expected to have been granted permission to proceed with the construction of its 700 place school at Steart Farm, Bucks Cross. Route 39 would prefer not to have had this information made public, given their repeated claims to support sustainability of rural communities and the catastrophic effect that this report will have on our local secondary school provision and the pupils, teachers and parents that rely on these schools.

This report clearly shows that both Holsworthy Community College and Great Torrington School are at risk of closure due to a reduction in financial viability in the event that the Route 39 Academy Free School is granted permission to open.

Under Threat of Closure Due to Route 39!

Supporters of both Holsworthy and Great Torrington secondary schools, along with the Principals of Bideford College, Braunton Academy, Budehaven School and other local LEA and independent schools have consistently argued that there is no sustainable demand for a fifth secondary school within the proposed Route 39 Academy catchment, a fact that has been borne out by the massive under-subscription of children to the proposed new free school.

Meanwhile, the DfE have finally confirmed that there is currently an excess capacity of over 1100 secondary school places within the TDC area, with more than 665 surplus places within the direct catchment of Route 39 and little, if any perceived future demand, as numbers of secondary school age children within the Torridge area continue to fall in future years. The report clearly states that all the existing local secondary schools were undersubscribed in 2011/12 when the impact assessment was conducted, a situation that has continued in 2012/13 and 2013/14 and a fact that the trustees of Route 39 have continually chosen to ignore.

The impact assessment is also fundamentally flawed as it seeks to downplay the real impact of this proposed new free school by drawing direct comparisons between Holsworthy Community College and Braunton Academy, based simply on a distance calculation ‘as the crow flies’!

The DfE also need a lesson in geography, as anyone living in North Devon will be aware that in order to reach Braunton from Bucks Cross, one needs to cross both the Rivers Torridge and Taw, via Barnstaple. This is certainly not a distance of 11.3 miles as the DfE state (the distance is in fact 21.2 miles), and quite obviously, as the report states, the consequential impact on Holsworthy Community College of opening another 700 space free school in its immediate vicinity will be significantly greater than any impact on Braunton Academy.

Parents opting to send their children to Route 39 will inevitably deplete the cohorts of students attending existing local secondary schools, As these school rolls decline and as this report implicitly suggests, our local secondary schools may be forced to make additional teachers and support staff redundant and ultimately to close.

Another local secondary school and 6th form college, Budehaven, has been completely omitted from the impact assessment, presumably because it is just across the county border, and yet Budehaven is only 17.5 miles from Bucks Cross and will also suffer significant financial impact from a reduction in pupils should Route 39 be allowed to proceed.

The DfE impact assessment concludes for both Great Torrington School and Holsworthy Community College that “The Free School may affect the long term financial viability of the school.”

As each existing local secondary school sits at the very heart of its community, they are particularly important in our small towns, where they act as a focal point for our rural sustainability.  We simply must not and cannot allow our communities to live under the threat of closure of our local secondary schools in this way.

Whatever happens today, I would strongly urge all parents, particularly those with children at Holsworthy and Great Torrington Schools, to read this report, consider the impact on your family and your children of your local secondary school closing and demand that your local Councillors protect our rural towns and our children’s’ education by immediately opposing this unwarranted, ill-conceived and expensive free school experiment.

DfE Impact Assessment – Route 39 Free School