No views required
When is a consultation not a consultation When it can be installed place by the dep. for Education, as component of plans to force a college into sponsored academy status, it kind of feels.
As reported in these pages last month, Roke primary school in Croydon is being primed for academy conversion as portion of the Harris chain, but a letter seen by the Guardian from the brand new schools minister, Lord Nash, to local Conservative MP Richard Ottaway suggests parents, teachers and members of the area people shouldn’t be invited to present their views concerning the proposed conversion until after it’s been agreed by the DfE. Nor will it’s very impartial, it sort of feels.
The letter says: “The formal consultation [that is a legal requirement] is often started when the proposed sponsor was agreed by the dept, the governing body has met with and agreed to be sponsored by this sponsor, and the proposal was given ministerial approval to take forward.”
To add to the ire of folks campaigning against the plans, the consultation might be finished by Harris. Lord Nash’s letter explains: “From experience, consultation is most meaningful when the proposed sponsor, as opposed to the dept, is thinking about the method as they can set out the express benefits their involvement will bring to the college.”
No say for councils either
Lincolnshire county council has voiced strong opposition to proposals by the West Grantham Academies Trust to shut certainly one of its four schools, the Charles Read academy within the village of Corby Glen, next year.
The trust says the move will allow Charles Read pupils, who will transfer to a different of its schools some 12 miles away near Grantham, to review a much wider range of subjects, in a faculty where more students achieve high grades.
But the council has published a highly critical statement on its website, saying it had not been consulted and that the move would go away Corby Glen pupils travelling “vast distances”, while the proposals did not take into consideration likely future population growth.
There seems little, though, that Lincolnshire can do in regards to the plan, which, in line with a press release on its website, have been developed by the trust after consultation with the DfE. It will doubtless be greeted with ironic cheers by anti-academies campaigners within the county, who called at the council to take a more sceptical view about schools opting clear of the local authority back in 2011, because of concerns about losing local democratic influence over academies’ decisions.
All quiet at the Ofsted front
A system install by Ofsted that permits parents to rate the standard in their child’s school has had a comparatively small take-up up to now, data released to Education Guardian by the inspectorate has confirmed.
About 167,000 questionnaires had been completed at the Parent View website, which permits the general public to reply to questions about the standard of education provided by a faculty, starting from teaching standards to the way it handles bullying, the result of which might be published online. The figure equates to about seven for every of England’s 23,500 schools covered by the system since Parent View was organize 16 months ago, which seems surprisingly low, considering that the info is used to tell the result of Ofsted inspections.
The National Association of Head Teachers is without doubt one of the sceptics, and this month claimed a victory in persuading Ofsted to not publish results online until a minimum of 10 people from a selected school have completed surveys on that institution (previously, Ofsted was publishing results at the basis of only three survey responses). But many faculties on Ofsted’s site don’t seem to have had a single response posted.
