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    Hmm. All above board and no conflicts of interest I'm sure

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      From 2014, this is the same trust.

      https://www.theguardian.com/educatio...achel-de-souza

      Emails expose how superhead’s schools knew Ofsted inspectors were coming

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        https://twitter.com/phil_baty/status/882127916011708416?s=21

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          Another free school closes. This time in Cinderford, the sort of working class town that these schools were supposed to be helping.

          https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-en...shire-44207680

          As Warwick Mansell says, the DfE pull a nice PR trick by blaming it all on the school when they've been overseeing it since 2013. When an LA can't improve a struggling school, it's the LA's fault.

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            Just glanced at a report on the London Challenge by the Institute for Government. Stephen Twigg comes out of it extremely well, as Minister for London Schools, respected by LEAs.

            He was pretty poor as Shadow Education Secretary (Milliband demoted him) but I wonder if he could do a job again in the future?

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              Yet another 'Quelle surprise' piece of news

              Discovery School closure: £9m flagship science school forced to shut just four years after opening

              Newcastle City Council leader Nick Forbes called the school's failure a "damning indictment" of Government's "high risk experiment" in academisation


              (how much is that now fucking wasted in Free schools, must be well over £1bn all told).

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                See, this is actually an area where I am getting a bit frustrated by Labour not moving swiftly and boldly on. We really need to flesh out the National Education Service stuff and be much more robust in saying we will END academisation, not just prevent further academisation.

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                  Is there anything to the NES besides a cracking name?

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                    It was £1bn overspent 4 years ago, per the National Audit Office.

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                      Originally posted by E10 Rifle View Post
                      See, this is actually an area where I am getting a bit frustrated by Labour not moving swiftly and boldly on. We really need to flesh out the National Education Service stuff and be much more robust in saying we will END academisation, not just prevent further academisation.
                      I agree. Parents being able to vote the school back in the LEA could be a nice simple quick win.

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                        Originally posted by Tubby Isaacs View Post
                        It was £1bn overspent 4 years ago, per the National Audit Office.
                        The most important cost of course is the human cost, so many families messed around and kids’ education severely disrupted because of these Tory cunts.

                        These Free Schools are something else, aren’t they. Yep, Education and running schools is a proper job folks and Toby Young’s devotees. It involves for instance devising and carrying out watertight Risk Assessment policies, preferably checked and overseen by experienced staff who’ve done it many times before, which then ensure that you do not leave kids behind on school trips...

                        A specialist science and technology free school in Newcastle will close this summer, three months after one of its pupils was left behind on a school trip.

                        https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news...error-14435902

                        A head teacher has apologised for a “failure” which saw a child left behind on a school trip to London.

                        The principal of the Discovery School, in Newcastle, has apologised directly to the child’s parents after they were left in King’s Cross station while the rest of the group boarded a train back to Tyneside.

                        It’s understood there were four staff who visited the capital with the cohort. The teenager got home safely, meeting a teacher who had got off the train to wait at York.

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                          Cameron once left his kid in the pub, to be fair.

                          You know how these buccaneers in academy chains take over troubled schools? Well, Harris (chief executive on £500k) doesn't want to take over Durand Academy in Lambeth. Durand being a previous Gove fave.

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                            This picking & choosing is one of the many aberrations and limitations of the academisation system. An academy chain fucks up somewhere, buggers off the area, no-one wants to take over as they’ve made a hames of it so good old L.A. has no choice but to mop up behind these egregious incompetents who have washed their hands of the whole thing. The lack of accountability of these chains is criminal. It’s one of the things explained in this book.
                            Last edited by Pérou Flaquettes; 06-06-2018, 22:05.

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                              Shock report findings: bears shit in woods

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                                Spectacularly depressing and predictable.

                                This sounds like a pretty underwhelming bit of spin.

                                And thanks to our reforms schools that aren’t delivering for young people are being turned around, with 65 per cent of schools made into a sponsored academy seeing improvement from inadequate to good or outstanding.
                                35% carry on getting Inadequate? What's the rate for LA schools, who get lumbered with some of the schools academies don't want?

                                Plus this is interesting and I don't know where they go from here with policy.

                                analysis by the academics shows there is no positive impact from MAT status for pupils in either primary or secondary academies when compared to pupils in similar standalone academies.
                                There must be a few "nice" schools where they went academy to get extra money. I expect the last thing the parents there want is to be put into a business chain.

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                                  The Ofsted report on the Discovery School in Newcastle (free school, https://www.onetouchfootball.com/sho...=1#post1433980) is out and I perused it last night. I've never ever read such a damning report, well worth a butcher's, it's astounding considering this is/was (shutting in 3 weeks' time) a very small, brand-new "flagship" school with, what looks to me, pretty good staffing levels, at least initially.

                                  From The Chronicle:
                                  “A hard core of pupils display riotous behaviour and they roam the school in a predatory manner. The small numbers of girls and others who are singled out as different are vulnerable and do not always feel safe.”

                                  Inspectors also described the behaviour of Year 9 pupils being so bad that they were barred from using machinery or the computer suite because of safety concerns.

                                  The report claimed “racism, sexism and bullying” were “prevalent”,

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                                    sorry, forgot to put the Ofsted link: https://reports.ofsted.gov.uk/inspec...der/ELS/140976

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                                      Christ.

                                      https://www.tes.com/news/exclusive-8...inked-minister

                                      Exclusive: 81 pupils 'removed' from academy linked to minister
                                      Numbers 'removed' from Great Yarmouth Charter Academy in eight months after it joined the Inspiration Trust include 38 pupils being home educated

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                                        Hurrah for a new moral panic from the desk of the Secretary of State -

                                        https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...nts-must-also/

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                                          My favourite moral panic was "scruffy worksheets". Like it's the schools fault that some kids complete them and allow them to get creased up.

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                                            Originally posted by Tubby Isaacs View Post
                                            My favourite moral panic was "scruffy worksheets". Like it's the schools fault that some kids complete them and allow them to get creased up.
                                            I was once given a "Good" instead of "Outstanding" during a mock inspection (done by an external team made up mostly of Ofsted inspectors and Ofsted trainees) because the inspector "noticed that, at some point, 1 or 2 pupils looked a little bored and disengaged". I asked the inspector to elaborate as I didn't agree with him (well, I was a little puzzled as the lesson had gone particularly well and I hadn't noticed any such thing) and he said: "Well, during one of the activities, I noticed that a pupil was looking out of the window." (this was, of course, an Ofsted inspector who had not taught much, and not in the state sector, and not in a decade or so. And he'd never taught MFL of course).

                                            True story. As it happened it didn't matter obviously as it was a mock inspection and well, whether you're graded Good or Outstanding, there's not much difference, but it could well have been between "Good" and "Safisfactory" (which, of course, means Unsatisfactory in Ofsted parlance), which is far more of a problem of course if it's replicated school-wise as it's an entirely different ball game for the school as you know.

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                                              Phew, we’re safe people, the charitable "I want to give something back" brigade has come to rescue us incompetent benighted mortals, how kind and considerate of them, I hope they get their statue one day outside of the DfE building.

                                              Silver army of teachers comes top of the class

                                              Middle-aged high-flyers who heard a plea for teachers have graduated

                                              They are the start of a wave of older high-flyers who could transform state schools.


                                              So, let me get this right, a handful of people, 42 this year (graduates from the Now Teach charity set up by ex FT journalist Lucy Kellaway) and not much more in years to come, could "transform state schools". Even in our hyperbolic age, that is some statement.

                                              And 42 graduates certainly doesn’t mean 42 teachers, Lord no, a number of them will not be teaching come September or January, either they won’t have found a school to employ them or will have found something unsuitable to them and turned the position(s) down, or they will never even teach, apart from doing the odd term or a bit of supply. Some will go and work in the independent sector straight away too probably. Many newly-qualified teachers never get to teach in the state sector, 30% according to 2012 figures, probably more now:

                                              https://fullfact.org/education/do-40...e-within-year/

                                              But there's another way that new teachers can leave the profession: by simply not entering it. After qualifying, NQTs can apply for a job in a state school or they can 'leave' for a role in an independent school or a different career entirely. DfE figures suggest that the proportion of teachers leaving before getting their first job has increased from 12% in 2005 to 30% in 2012
                                              Many of these people will probably only work part-time anyway, in good/excellent schools, will be given easy/easier classes – A level, good GCSE pupils, small groups etc. – and will quit within a few years or, if they half know what they’re doing and are dab hands with spreadsheets & Ofsted-generated admin, they'll be given an in-school box-ticking type of position with only a few teaching hours a week (I’ve worked with several such people or know similar stories of people who treated education as some charity hobby: the vast majority quit within a few years or went part-time soon after entering the profession when the brutal realities of teaching hit them, sometimes literally).

                                              Fair play to them, I certainly won’t knock them for trying and I wish them well. I understand why they would want to do that at this stage of their life (free of life’s complications, commitments and pressures – they’re well-off, probably have savings/a pension, they have time, a home, no mortgage/debts, no kids etc.) as teaching can be headily rewarding but the way these people and the media invariably present it ("to give something back", as if they were some higher caste condescending to help the poor and needy by volunteering at their local Emmaus centre and bestowing their superior knowledge and merciful ways on the lower echelons of society) is so insufferably smug, borderline disdainful, that sort of message simply contributes to devalue this profession already in free fall.

                                              It all sounds innocent and well-meaning but there could be a detrimental effect here, in the way the media love to wheel these super cheerful people out as if these initiatives and their guinea-pigs were the panacea and things were that simple. Fuck, if it was that simple, you wouldn’t have 40,000+ teachers (~10% of the workforce) leaving the profession every year for reasons other than retirement.

                                              Will the Times do a follow-up article in a few years’ time and tell us what’s become of these people? I hope so but I doubt it, strangely enough I’ve never come across such "Where are they now?" articles (there’s been similar last-ditch schemes in the past but you never find out the actual outcomes, i.e where those people are 4-5 years down the line, the true real measure of success).

                                              I mean, even if they are successful in their new career and the numbers go from 42 to 420 or even 4,200 in a few years (an insane extrapolation but let’s assume that), are these people really the solution or even part of the solution to solve that crisis? (to have 55 or 60 yr olds entering for a few years. I’m not being ageist here, I’m a great advocate of having a wide mix of ages and backgrounds I schools, everybody benefits from it but what about trying to keep those teachers who are leaving in their droves instead, shouldn’t that be the priority?)

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                                                Well, there's no way that this isn't a "back of a fag packet" idea in order to excuse yet more private intervention in education. "Tech"? How about not cutting speech and language support?

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                                                  More example-setting ethics from the Harris academy chain:

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                                                    Our exam results were again awful so I'm expecting an OFSTED sometime this year, hopefully it'll bring about the real change that is needed. How the school was allowed to convert to an academy last year I'll never now.

                                                    This week I've discovered that SLT has been going around changing legal marks entered on SIMS by teachers, they call it tidying up whilst I'd be calling it forgery.

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