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!

Quit your moaning and get on with it!

Secondary school league tables have received a mixed press this week following the release of the final results from the 2014 examinations, with Head Teachers from various schools lining up to either applaud or denounce the league tables, perhaps depending in some cases upon how their individual schools have fared.

I have found this whole debate this week quite interesting – league tables are a rather crude way of providing parents with a comparative idea of just how well their local schools are performing, and perhaps it is no wonder, given the arcane complexity of this country’s educational statistics, performance measurements and acronyms, that parents look for a simplistic way of judging whether a school is ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

In the same way that Ofsted inspections are subject to the ‘human’ variable, so too is the league table system. Ever since league tables were brought in, schools have been looking for ways to manipulate the system or ‘play the game’. This is not surprising considering the impact that a poor showing in the table will have, both in terms of parents choosing to take their children elsewhere (with its consequential effect on the school budget) and the Armageddon that then comes raining down on to the schools from the Local Education Authority, Ofsted, Regional Commissioners and Her Majesties Inspectorate of Schools.

Playing the system

In previous years, many schools, both local authority and private, have attempted to ‘play’ the examination system, looking to enter their students into examinations with what they consider to be perhaps less ‘rigorous’ exam boards and to offer other vocational qualifications that carried ‘equivalent’ GCSE grades and which were counted in the league tables. The iGCSE was a prime example of this behaviour. The effect of this was to boost their league table standings, enabling these schools to crow triumphantly about how well they were performing and what a great job they were doing.

Now I have nothing at all against vocational qualifications, I believe these are a valuable addition to the traditional curriculum which by definition cannot always cater to the abilities of every individual student. However, I believe that these qualifications should be offered as the exception, rather than as a quick and easy way to boost the schools performance in league tables, which is what has appeared to have happened over the past few years in some schools.

Understandably this was all rather irksome to those schools that chose to play the league table game with a ‘straight bat’. By offering their students what was generally perceived to be the harder, more traditional GCSE curriculum, inevitably these schools appeared to perform less well, as fewer students delivered pass grades compared to those in other schools following an ‘equivalent’ curriculum.

Now the Government has removed these ‘equivalents’ from the league table measures, which in my view does help to bring greater transparency and clarity to annual performance measurement. This has meant that many schools have now found themselves plummeting earthwards in the table rankings and crying ‘foul’ to anyone that will listen. Well, I am sorry that your schools have been knocked off your pedestal, but hey; it wasn’t as if you were not told well in advance that this change was going to happen!

Holsworthy Community College flying high!

At my school, Holsworthy Community College, we have always tried to offer a mixed and balanced curriculum in order that every child was able to achieve the best outcome that was possible for them individually, regardless of their ability or aptitude. In other words, playing the ‘straight bat’ mentioned earlier. Over the years this has meant that perhaps we have not shone as brightly in the league table standings in comparison to some of our peer schools in Devon and we have had to deal with that situation, from the local authority, from parents and from others with perhaps a more vested interest in rubbishing our school – you know who you are!

With the 2014 league tables now published, we can see the effect of the changes that the Governments ‘level playing field’ has achieved. Out of 76 schools across Devon, Holsworthy Community College was ranked joint 16th, with 57% of students achieving 5+ A*-C grades including English and Maths at GCSE level.

In terms of Total Average Point Score per pupil, Holsworthy Community College was ranked 17th in the county, with 392.1 APS per pupil. Coupled with the ‘Good’ rating from Ofsted that was achieved last year, I think we can be justifiably proud of all the staff and students at our school, who are continually improving their performance and are really going places.

Credit where it’s due…

I am not generally a fan of Government meddling in education, however on this particular issue, I am prepared to give credit where it is due. I hope that the changes to performance measurement through these league tables will bed down and that a degree of continuity can be achieved, as these tables only work for parents and educational professionals alike when the measurements are applied fairly and consistently over time.

And for those schools that are moaning about the new league tables, think about this – You can’t take the plaudits when you’ve been milking the system, then scream blue murder when you’ve been found out. We can see what you are doing and it isn’t very edifying.

I suggest you get over it, pick yourselves up and start giving your students the consistent and high standard of education that we all; as taxpayers, are paying for and that we all, as parents; expect for our kids!

The Telegraph has a great interactive Schools League Table on its website – click here:

 

 

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.

Ofsted – Once again it’s more stick and no carrot!

Chief Inspector of Schools Sir Michael Wilshaw, delivering Ofsted’s annual report today chose once again to slam the UK’s secondary schools as failing to make sufficient progress, stating that many have ‘stalled’. He makes this assertion on the back of Ofsted’s pronouncement that there are now 170,000 pupils in inadequate secondary schools (schools not rated Outstanding or Good), about 70,000 more than two years ago.

It strikes me that rather than praise secondary school principals and teachers, of whom more than 71% are working in schools that have been inspected and judged to be either Outstanding or Good; as is so often the case these days, Ofsted and Sir Michael instead opt to denigrate the profession at large, using headline grabbing negativity to paint a dismal picture of the UK’s educational system and its employees.

When he behaves like this, Sir Michael Wilshaw reminds me of the ‘Dads Army’ character Private Frazier, walking around shouting ‘We’re all doomed…’.

It could very easily be suggesed that Ofsted’s continual rubbishing of the educational sector that it is entrusted to inspect and report upon has a rather self-serving agenda. The more Ofsted declare how useless our schools are, the more likely they are to be listened to by the readers of the Daily Mail and the more emphasis (and by this I mean money) is subsequently directed towards the very inspection regime that is then required to tell the government of the day just how useless our schools are.

Similarly, by arbitrarily changing the inspection grading as Ofsted have done – a school previously inspected and rated as ‘Satisfactory’ overnight becomes rated as ‘Requires Improvement’ – they once again push down schools that are striving to progress, which in turn enables them to come out to the media with even more ‘doom and gloom’ headlines for the Daily Mail readers to leap upon.

The Chief Inspector has today stated that “They (by implication, all secondary schools) are failing because they haven’t got the essentials right – governance and oversight is weak, leadership is poor, misbehaviour goes unchallenged and teaching is indifferent.” He paints a picture that I am certainly not familiar with at my school, and I am pretty certain that my experience is replicated at the majority of our secondary schools, but this doesn’t make for an attention-grabbing headline.

Any educated observer would realise that despite the warnings from Sir Michael Wilshaw about stalled progress, the number of both primary and secondary schools graded by Ofsted as either Good or Outstanding are at record high levels! Yes, there will always be laggards, and yes, we should always devote energy and resources to raising standards in under-performing schools, however there is absolutely no need to tar everybody with the same ‘you suck’ brush!

So why use the media stick to beat up our tremendously hard working heads and teaching staff, the herds of volunteer governors that freely give of their time and energies to help schools across the land and the support staff that care for all our children when they are at school? We know it is because they are an easy target, like Nurses, Police Officers and Fire fighters, people who have a vocation and will take the drubbing, because they truly care about the public that they serve. I think this is pretty cowardly of the Chief Inspector and his crew.

Instead, and this is my personal suggestion to Sir Michael, why not just say ‘Thank You’ for once!

Route 39 – It’s not too late to change your mind!

One day on from Route 39 Academy Trusts shambolic showing at the Torridge District Council Planning Committee meeting and now we begin to see how Route 39 and their supporters have chosen to react to the rejection of their ‘nonsense’ free school (as it was described in the meeting).

Which direction now for Route 39?

Some supporters of Route 39 are tossing around accusations and bad-mouthing not only those that opposed their plans but also the Head Teacher of Holsworthy Community College, whose statement to the Council contained more truths in 3 minutes than Route 39 have been able to deliver in over 18 months!

The official line stated by Route 39 in their presentation to the planners yesterday was that 777 responses had been received to their so-called community consultation, implying that these were all in support of their scheme, but it now transpires (see below) that this number included all those responses that OBJECTED to their proposal. Why didn’t they say that at the time?

“Route 39 Academy Dear XXXX  777 responses in total, for and against. The percentages given do not imply all parents or all teachers, but those who responded to our consultation. We know that local schools were encouraging their staff to respond and 100 did.“

They have also now claimed (unverified) that 72% of teachers in local area schools support their plans, from 100 responses. They don’t say who (primary or secondary teaching staff) was asked, when they were asked and what exactly they were asked. I guess from their results we can only assume that none of the teachers invited to respond were from any of the Secondary Schools that were likely to be affected (as I said before, ours weren’t approached), as of course, this might have skewed Route 39’s percentages in a rather different way.

Having been resoundingly humiliated in the council chamber, Route 39’s supporters are now calling ‘foul’ on just about everything they can, claiming that the opposition has lobbied councillors (like Route 39 hasn’t), that objectors have been rude to them (which is exactly how the opposition felt when Route 39 refused to discuss their valid concerns in public) and amazingly they are also complaining that teaching staff have been encouraged to oppose their plans! You really can’t have it both ways Route 39!

Hardly gracious in defeat, Route 39 is now littering their website with empty reassurances blatant misinformation, and a re-hash of all the old chestnuts around choice, population and unquantifiable future achievement in a frenzied attempt to prevent a mass migration of concerned parents back to the established local secondary schools.

They say they have the public’s support, but this is based on the already discredited consultation process that Route 39 continues to espouse like a drunkard on a street corner. They say they have the Planning Officer’s recommendation of approval, but he’s now left and they didn’t get the critical support of the Highways Department. They say they have the support of Devon County Council, but crucially not the District or Parish Councils, who know the local area intimately and represent the interests of its people.  They do have the full backing of the Department for Education, of course, because the DfE don’t care what happens to all the other children in the area, they just want as many free schools as they can get, regardless of the impact on other schools, the actual need or the final quality of education provided.

Route 39 are ultimately blaming their demise on ‘the verdict of a small number of councillors’ but actually 62.5% of the vote was against them! This is not small, it’s a landslide!

If I were a parent that had signed my child up to start at Route 39 in September, I would be seriously worried and reconsidering my options right now. The chances are that although Route 39 will attempt to appeal and overturn this decision, this may take months, by which time the new school year will have started and I’d then be desperately looking for somewhere for my child to begin school.

It’s still not too late to change your mind and to get your child into one of the outstanding (my definition, not Ofsteds or Route 39’s) established local secondary schools here in North West Devon – it might just be the best decision that you have ever taken for your child!

Hurrah for Common Sense!

Today, bravery, democracy and common sense truly prevailed and I would like to send a heartfelt ‘Thank You’ on behalf of myself, my school governing body and all the secondary school children of the area, to the members of Torridge District Councils Planning Committee, who this morning overwhelmingly rejected the application by Route 39 Academy Trust to temporarily site a completely unwarranted ‘free’ school at a theme park here in North Devon.

The good people objecting against this quite obscene waste of educational funds (tax payers money) are just local residents, concerned parents and a few dedicated educationalists, who have come together in a common cause to resist what has plainly been a less than subtle attempt by a very small group of clearly misguided, misinformed and ultimately self-serving individuals to subvert the democratic and socially responsible process of public consultation that we revere in this country.

Let’s not beat about the bush – Route 39 thought that they had this whole thing stitched up from the start! The have thrown thousands of pounds of taxpayers money at advisers, P.R. specialists and pseudo-political / commercial organisations, in a vain attempt to get what they want for their own needs – a new secondary school, right on their own doorstep for their own small clique of children, which they can then play at running, while thousands of local children lose their teachers, have to be taught in larger class groups and are restricted in the breadth of subjects that they can then study at GCSE level.

And Route 39’s arrogance doesn’t end there – in today’s planning meeting, a self-elected chair of governors, in trying to justify the schools viability, openly stated that they had ‘ran a community consultation and received 777 responses’. Route 39 didn’t tell the councillors how this so-called ‘consultation’ had been conducted, by offering free entry to the theme park to anyone that signed up ‘to find out more about Route 39’, or that the group had assiduously avoided any kind of public debate or independent consultation in order to present a false view of public demand and support. Furthermore, the speaker than went on to claim that ‘more staff at local schools supported Route 39 than opposed it’ – this is both disingenuous and rather rich considering that they have never even approached our secondary school teachers in order to ascertain whether the teaching staff support their concept or not!

According to reports, supporters of Route 39 in the public gallery, decked out in their lovely t-shirts emblazoned with the school motto ‘Engage-Respect-Aspire’ (again probably paid for with cash that should have been spent on educating children) were understandably shocked (after all it was a ‘done deal’, wasn’t it?) upset and quite hostile once the planning decision had been taken – not much respect on display then!

Conversely, and contrary to how the ‘Supporters of Route 39’ have painted them across the social media, the objectors behaved with quiet dignity, decorum and respect throughout the proceedings. Perhaps parents thinking of sending their impressionable little ones to Route 39 might like to ponder on this ‘life lesson’.

Route 39 are now telling their supporters that ‘Plan B’ has gone into effect. They have not said what ‘Plan B’ is, but don’t worry, everything will be absolutely fine and, according to their expensive website, “Our school WILL OPEN in September 2013”, in fact they are EMPHATIC about this. Ahem, haven’t you forgotten that inconvenient little thing called planning consent?

Now far be it from me to burst anyone’s ‘free school balloon’, but isn’t it about time that Route 39, its eclectic band of supporters and those individuals in government responsible for education got ‘real’ and started to understand that this whole fantasy/pantomime of theirs is actually harming the education of school children in our area. For me, that is truly the worst sin of all!

It’s a tough job…but someone has to do it!

It has been fascinating to be involved in the work to help our local secondary schools in the North Devon area deal with the autocratic ideological diktats of our centralised government and it’s insidious undermining of local children’s education through funding cuts right here in our rural backyard.

Through its flawed policy of ‘parent driven’ free schools and academies, such as the proposed Route 39 school which is currently being foisted upon us all by a group of perhaps well meaning, but clearly misinformed, greedy, self-centred and generally naive people that appear to care more about their own children than they do about anybody else’s, the government has set local communities, teachers and parents all across the country against one another in a manner more akin to civil war!

What is so shocking is that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the people that support this proposed free school actually seem to believe all the propagandist nonsense that they and the government constantly spout and simply will not engage in any kind of public debate or discussion with anybody expressing a contrary view – from the beginning their attitude has been ‘we want this – it is for us and our children – the government are giving us all this money, which is great, so we can do what we want – we simply don’t care how it affects you or your children – you are ignorant for not seeing what we see – you should be with us, rather than with those other oiks sending their children to the local secondary schools – we are much better than they are!’.

What’s even worse is that as we come to learn more about how Route 39 and this government intend to drive this proposal through, despite the overwhelming number of objections lodged by local people opposed to this ridiculous scheme, we begin to see how the cards are stacked against anyone that dares to question, challenge or god forbid, oppose what these people are so selfishly trying to do.

Route 39 have received many hundreds of thousands of pounds from the Department of Education to spend on consultants, legal experts, PR managers and other lobbyists to guide and assist them along the way to ‘fulfilling their dream’. These organisations know the lay of the land; they have (for a nice fat fee) helped Route 39 and many other free school applicants write their prospectus’, they have guided the staff interview processes, they have set out the sale pitch for prospective parents, they have manipulated the ‘evidence gathering’ process (calling it consultation, when it quite obviously is nothing of the kind), they have coached Route 39 in dealing with ‘disruptive local elements that may object to the end-game’ (ignore them and they might go away seems to be the advice to heed) and they have shown them how to influence, persuade and otherwise lobby our locally employed planning officials and democratically elected district representatives. In short, they loaded the dice heavily in their favour and spun their stories faster than Alastair Campbell on Red Bull!

The ‘No to Route 39’ group, on the other hand, has no bucket-full of tax-payers cash to dip into, no steely eyed planning consultants to show them how to ‘present the right things to the planning committee’, no ‘Eli Gold‘ style campaign manager to get the story ‘on message’ or to tell them what to say to appeal to the ‘core demographic’ – they simply understand what the fundamental difference is between right and wrong and are not afraid of standing up in public and saying how they feel. They want what is best for ALL the children in North Devon, not just what is best for a small cadre of the privileged minority!

David Cameron came into this coalition government preaching the ideals of localism and the ‘big society’, stating, if I recall correctly, that people in local areas should be empowered to make the right decisions for their local communities ‘at large’ and that each of us, as individuals, should essentially ‘do our bit’ to support our local institutions at ‘grass roots’ level.

I thought when I became a parent governor at a rural North Devon secondary school that this was what I would be doing – giving freely of my time, interest and experience in order to ‘put something back’ into my local community. For me, helping to provide the school with essential support and oversight, assuming the role of a ‘critical friend’ and acting as a representative and voice of all the parents whose children attended the school seemed like the right thing to do. Little did I realise that I was about to be pitched into the front line of educational armageddon! It is certainly a tough job… but someone has to do it!

I truly hope that at the upcoming planning committee meeting, that our local district Councillors will do the right and just thing; taking account of the strong and sincerely held feelings of hundreds of local residents, educationalists and concerned parents that are rightfully fearful of the consequential impact that this free school proposal will have on the educational prospects of the 4500 children currently being taught in our local secondary schools. Our Councillors have a duty to do what is in the best interests of the MAJORITY of our young people, which is quite obviously not to approve a multi-million £, tax-payer funded educational experiment that will in the short to medium term only benefit the 55 children of the proposers and their like-minded friends!

Watch this space!

“Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics” – Why Route 39 are in a spin!

One of the core arguments made vociferously by proponents of the proposed Route 39 Free School at Bucks Cross, North Devon to justify the building of a completely unnecessary new secondary school; within an area of outstanding natural beauty no less and to be constructed with £ millions of taxpayers money at a time when local secondary school budgets for  learning and capital programmes are being decimated, is that there is a proven need as there are not enough pupil places available within local schools to meet future demand!

Janet Downs has done some deeper investigation into this claim and her detailed report reveals evidence that Route 39’s case simply does not stack up:

“According to the (Route 39) website, the proposers (claim to) have, among other things, demonstrated a “Need – in terms of population projections, social demographics and area-wide education performance.”

But information on the ‘New Schools Network’ site did not list North Devon as an area with a shortage of places. And the National Audit Office map shows there is no shortfall in primary places in Devon or Cornwall. As each council has to ensure sufficient secondary places for its primary pupils, it is unlikely that there is a shortfall in secondary places.

The Profile of Torridge 2009 (p.20) gave the following figures re: the number of children in the area:

Age 0-4 2,927
Age 5-9 3,195
Age 10-14 3,769
Age 15-19 4,040

These figures show the number of children declining in the future, not rising as claimed by Route 39.

http://www.torridge.gov.uk/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=1563&p=0

Route 39 also cite the Office of National Statistics (ONS) as the source of a forecast rise in the number of 11-17 year olds in Torridge. Here are the figures from the 2011 census:

0-4 3,157
5-9 3,091
10-14 3,493
15-17 2,336

These children will now be 2 years older and the 10-14 year olds will be 12-16. In other words, they will already be in secondary school. There are 3,493 of them. The census shows that there will be a small reduction in the number of secondary children requiring places.

Route 39 also cite ‘The Draft North Devon’ and ‘Torridge Local Plan’. This is what the plan said about population projection:

“The demographic changes and housing trends are driven mainly by high net in-migration and the urban concentration strategy of past plans. The area’s population is projected to increase by almost 11% between 2011-2031, during which time the age profile of the population is expected to change dramatically. Limited growth is projected in those aged under 15 and very small growth in those aged 25-34″

Note: “Limited growth is projected” for the under 15s

Route 39 say that the extra housing required means there will be more secondary children. But the local plan says it is housing for the rising population of elderly people that is needed:

“There is an imbalance between the very high proportions of large family homes with the increasing demand for smaller accommodation. Changing patterns of household formation and the needs of an increasing number of elderly residents requires a variation in new housing supply in type and size from that which has historically been provided.”

http://consult.torridge.gov.uk/portal/planning/localplan/draft?pointId=s1354529649742#section-s1354529649742
http://neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/LeadTableView.do?a=3&b=6275286&c=Torridge&d=13&e=13&g=6417095&i=1001x1003x1004&m=0&r=1&s=1364400782138&enc=1&dsFamilyId=2474”

It is about time that Route 39 stop playing ‘fast and loose’ with the truth, as it only takes a little research by any sensible person with a broadband connection and a few minutes to spare to realise that they are playing the ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’ game.

All parents deserve to be able to make informed decisions about their children’s education, with both sides presenting the known facts and acknowledging the truth. Unfortunately, Route 39 are seemingly unwilling or unable to do this, which is why we shall endeavour wherever we can to present the reality, rather than the ‘sales’ spin!