New Labour Academies Attack Teachers and Students

[conspiracy analyst]

Teachers to strike over sackings at academy

Seven teachers are being fired at a school run by a charity that pays its director £260,000 a year.


* Jessica Shepherd and Warwick Mansell
* guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 April 2010 16.08 BST
* Article history

Bruce Liddington

Bruce Liddington, formerly Tony Blair's man in charge of the academies programme

Teachers will go on strike tomorrow over sackings at an academy school run by a charity that pays its director more than a £250,000 a year.

More than 50 teachers – almost all the staff – at Crest boys' academy in Neasden, north-west London, are refusing to work in protest at seven redundancies.

The academy's sponsor, E-Act, has warned that it intends to fire four teachers in senior management posts and up to three classroom teachers.

The sackings come as E-Act's director general, Sir Bruce Liddington, is under attack for a salary of £265,000 – likely to be the highest of any education executive in the UK.

The Guardian revealed earlier this month that Liddington, formerly a civil servant in charge of the entire academy programme, has also claimed £1,436 for two nights in luxury hotel suites.

The sackings will raise fresh questions about the financial arrangements of academies, which receive state funds but are privately sponsored and run independently of local authorities.

Paul Holmes, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Chesterfield who was a member of the Commons children, schools and families select committee, has called for a government inquiry into the finances of academies and the trusts that run them because they are not open to public scrutiny.

E-Act said Crest boys' academy is overfunded by more than £1m and "must return to an operating balance and be capable of sustaining itself in terms of pupil numbers and staffing structure". E-Act receives about £50m from the government. It sponsors eight academies and is developing five more.

Teachers at the academy said they had been promised there would be no redundancies when E-Act became its sponsor in September. They said Liddington's salary was being covered by sacking teachers.

Hank Roberts, the honorary secretary of Brent Teachers Association, said E-Act were "on a gravy train at the taxpayers' expense".

"How utterly disgraceful to say they can't afford to pay staff and have to sack teachers to the detriment of pupils' education while for themselves, money appears no object."

Shane Johnschwager, the secretary of the Nasuwt teaching union in Brent, said: "E-Act, as a charity, should focus on teachers not taxis, and books not bonuses. Parents would rightly expect a charity of an inner-city school to channel money into teachers and frontline resources, not huge salaries for its directors."

A spokesman from E-Act said the strike would be highly damaging and inappropriate: "Every effort is being made to prevent compulsory redundancies among classroom teachers ... and support them to find alternative roles. We have tried hard to keep compulsory redundancies to an absolute minimum. We would urge unions not to resort to strike action – because it's not in anyone's interests.

"The strike is irresponsible and we very much regret the unions' decision to press ahead with it. It disrupts pupils' education, at a key time leading up to exams. And it is entirely self-defeating. We sympathise entirely with the views and concerns of our hardworking staff, but it's a simple fact that there were too many teaching staff for the number of pupils on roll. We've reluctantly had to make a number of people compulsorily redundant. As a result, we have now got a sustainable ratio of teachers to pupils – which is still high compared to the national average."

A spokeswoman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) said it was the responsibility of the board to ensure that financial matters were managed properly. "We do expect all academies and academy sponsors to use public funds in a responsible and transparent way, to the benefit of the education of children in their schools. All charities, including E-Act, need to be able to justify their use of funding in support of their charitable objectives, and are required to submit their audited accounts to the Charity Commission."

Liddington is a former headteacher, who was appointed schools commissioner for England under Tony Blair. He was charged with expanding the academy school programme and promoting the government's agenda to provide parents with more choice in their children's education.

The role was abolished in 2007, when Gordon Brown became prime minister, Ed Balls was appointed schools secretary, and the academy programme was reformed.

Liddington joined E-Act in February 2009. This year, he and six department heads were awarded a 5% bonus. The rest of E-Act's 40 staff received a 1% pay rise.

[conspiracy analyst]

From head of geography to whistleblower

One teacher's willingness to speak out led to suspension of senior staff at his school. Francis Beckett talks to him



* Francis Beckett
* The Guardian, Tuesday 7 July 2009
* Article history

Hank Roberts

Hank Roberts was suspended on 'trumped-up' charges but later exonerated. Photograph: Felix Clay

What kind of teacher has the courage to blow the whistle against their own headteacher? When the head of Copland community school in Brent, north-west London, was suspended while his handling of the school's finances could be investigated, it was largely because of the actions of one member of his own staff.

Hank Roberts, geography teacher and union activist, now knows all the ups and downs of suspecting things are wrong in school and acting on those suspicions. After 20 years in the school, he was the one to stand up and be counted when strong rumours emerged about school finances.

Sir Alan Davies, the headteacher, has now admitted taking tens of thousands of pounds in bonuses. It is alleged that up to £1m was paid to the school's senior management team over seven years. And now the school's governing body has been sacked by the schools secretary, Ed Balls.

Only private schools and academies are allowed to pay bonuses. But Copland's chair of governors, Dr Indravadan Patel, claimed that Davies's success in attracting sponsorship, raising £2m for a new building and putting in extra hours to help a primary school in special measures made him "worth every penny". The legality of the case is now being investigated by council auditors.

I've come to a cafe to meet up with Roberts. We are looking across the road at the school where he was first appointed by Davies as a geography teacher 20 years ago. For 19 years, Roberts and Davies rubbed along pretty well. At the start, the head gave Roberts the school's most challenging class, and his exuberance won them over. Davies saw he had a talented teacher and promoted him to head of geography.

So when, four years ago, Roberts heard rumours that Davies was getting bonuses on top of his salary, he says: "I thought it was probably not very much money and anyway, no one had any evidence."

Change in behaviour

At the start of last year, Roberts, by now the full-time branch secretary of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) in Brent but still on the Copland school staff, says he started noticing a change in his boss. "He had always been consensual and democratic and not keen to seek confrontation with staff and trade unions, and quite quickly he became the opposite. I wondered why.

"I wondered if it was related to the fact that the staff had opposed his plan to turn Copland into a trust school, which would mean ... more autonomy for the head." In a secret ballot, the staff voted 99 to five to oppose the plan.

Early this year Roberts decided to start investigating the rumours he had heard.

He went to past caretakers and bursars, and past and present governors, and promised them he would never reveal his sources without their permission. He found that in 2004-05 the head received a £65,000 bonus and his deputies £45,000 each, and last year Davies had an £80,000 bonus on top of his £100,000 salary.

Several relatives of the head and of those staff responsible for finance were employed by the school, and £1.5m was owed to developers.

Now Roberts was in a hurry to get the authorities to investigate, for delay might allow Davies to get trust school status, which could provide greater secrecy. So Roberts sent a dossier to the schools secretary, the Audit Commission and Brent council. He says: "Under the whistleblower legislation, if you reveal something, you cannot be disciplined for it, even if you are wrong, so long as it's something serious and you do it in good faith. I made sure it was done in my capacity as the elected NUT branch secretary in Brent and copied it to the three teaching union general secretaries."

The legislation encourages whistleblowers to go to the authorities, not to the press and the public. But his years of union activity, Roberts says, have taught him that "left to themselves, the authorities will cover these things up". So he went to the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) conference at Easter and announced Davies's bonuses from the platform, which gave rise to stories in the national press.

"I knew Alan Davies would find it hard to face me at the first staff meeting of the following term," he says. "But I had made it very hard for him to suspend me."

Instead, Davies did the last thing Roberts expected. The Friday before the school term began, Davies suspended him for something else.

A letter had been sent opposing trust school status from the three union representatives at the school. Roberts's wife, Jean, dispatched the letter without knowing that it had not yet been seen by one of the three, the ATL representative. This, says Roberts, was a genuine error, and made little difference because the ATL representative agreed with the letter, which was in line with her union's policy. But Davies suspended Roberts, and two other union reps.

Roberts's main worry was that the authorities might not act fast enough. So he sent off a second dossier containing more allegations, which are now being investigated, together with a letter explaining his fears:

"You may already know that I have ... been suspended on a trumped-up charge. I know that long-term this simple act of retribution and victimisation will be exposed. However, in the meantime, the very governors who authorised, and the headteacher who accepted, these unlawful bonuses may dismiss me. Protection of whistleblowers should be such that they are protected against trumped-up charges and disciplinary action taken on that basis."

Suspensions

Very soon, Davies was suspended, along with his deputy, Richard Evans, and the school bursar, Columbus Udokoro.

Philip O'Hear, principal of Capital City academy, has now become acting head, spending four days a week at Copland.

The day after Davies was suspended, Roberts was given permission by O'Hear to go into the school for a union meeting. Roberts can still feel the glow of the reception he got that day. He is emotional as he tells me: "It was astounding, teachers and pupils standing and cheering. That was a good moment." The next day, at a meeting with O'Hear, all charges against Roberts were dropped.

Roberts has long been a union activist and has never been afraid to stand up to authority. A fierce opponent of academies, last year he was among protesters who camped out on the site of a proposed academy in Brent to stop the construction work. But he accepts that not everyone is a born activist or whistleblower. To any teacher faced with a decision about challenging the powers that be, his advice is: "If they have evidence, they should blow the whistle, that's the right and proper thing to do. Under the legislation, if they do it in good faith, they are protected. There is also extra protection for union representatives, and they should keep their union informed."

Right now, Roberts is pleased with himself. He hopes the investigation will lead to real questions being asked about what he calls the "bonus culture" in schools. Also, he believes good will come of it at Copland. "One year's bonus for Sir Alan is equivalent to the textbook budget, and the school is very dilapidated."

He hopes he has made school privatisation harder to justify, for in a trust school or an academy it would have been almost impossible to stop the Copland bonuses.

Perhaps, says Roberts, we will start to focus on classroom teachers. "No one ever said: I did well in life because the head managed the school well. They talk of inspirational teachers. These are the people who change lives."