New: School improves Covid safety procedures following Education Uncovered reporting. educationuncovered.co.uk/news/148741/sc… Continuing the tale of two Future Academies institutions and their coronavirus responses.
There’s no doubt that public coverage of a school’s covid response and other issues around management can be uncomfortable for those in charge, but this does seem to have yielded some positive results for this community. Arrangements for children departing at end of day now safer
This is a trust where there have long been concerns about a lack of accountability given that it is essentially privately controlled by a former academies minister and his wife. I haven’t had any response from the trust about any of my recent reports.
I’m still surprised, as an outsider, to hear of this school having continued with lesson observations of staff despite covid crisis. Surely extra-stressful for staff. Obs were continuing last week;head has promised to back off a bit from now on. How widespread is this, I wonder?
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New: Academy chief executive, who oversaw primary school with the highest number of permanent exclusions on record in England, put forward by government to be the next Children’s Commissioner. educationuncovered.co.uk/diary/diary/14…
New piece on Rachel de Souza.
This piece looks at past investigations around de Souza’s Inspiration Trust and its record on pupil departures, including the place of two IT primary schools in the top 10 for most permanent exclusions in 2018-19. educationuncovered.co.uk/diary/diary/14…
One of those schools, which is in special measures, saw Ofsted highlighting in two reports its fixed-term exclusions, though strangely not mentioning permanent ones.
This story came about after I was staggered to read, in a DfE consultation on “greater transparency” in the non-academy sector, the government saying that academy trusts disclose details of their people paid £100k...
This was in a section of this DfE paper going on about a “disparity in public access to information on high salaries between maintained schools and academy trusts”, seemingly with the latter being said to be more transparent.
New: charitable trust refusing to grant academy chain access to school site, in forced academisation clash loaded with controversies: educationuncovered.co.uk/news/146506/ch… The extraordinary case of Ormskirk School, Lancashire, which DfE decided to press on with despite Covid-19 this month.
As I write in the piece, this is one of the most multi-faceted controversies I have come across in 20 years reporting on the academies policy. educationuncovered.co.uk/news/146506/ch…
And yes, I know,crowded field in terms of trying to single out a single most controversial academisation case.
Because of the number of aspects of contention in this case – I list eight issues of controversy in this case – website subscribers will see that I have written something of an epic. But sometimes these sagas need to be investigated in all their detail.