Academy spending

Another good account of what is happening:
www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2014/02/academy-chains-a-scandal-that-needs-to-be-ended/
A scandal that needs to be ended, indeed.

Another financial scandal involving a federation that runs four academies and a free school

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-26262957

While I was a school governor - about 20 years - there were, as far as I can remember, eleven secretaries of state!

Yes Estelle was the only Sec of State that I recall, who actually had a teaching background. Unfortunately Blair reshuffled that role nearly every year he was in office (Blunkett, Clarke, Kelly and Balls to name the others that I remember...) Unfortunately Cameron did not take a leaf out of his book.

I am aware of an academy that was totally of the rails - budgets, standards, everything. It was only when it got a bad OfSted and the head vanished that people started to take notice. But, as others have said, no accountability. The governors (or "board of directors") were, as always not education professionals and they believed what they were being fed by the head.

It is appalling. Yet the people who are allegedly so interested in the misuse of public funds don't seem to have very much to say about any of this. Funny, that.

An interesting article by an under-rated former Secretary of State.

Accountability - the minister can't run the education system! This kind of problem should be dealt with at a very local level but academies are divorced from local democracy. www.eveshamjournal.co.uk/news/11034126.Gove_fails_to_find_answers_over_missing_Worcester_head_teacher/?ref=eb

Thanks for the link, Jess. I'm very concerned about the machinery for accountability, or lack of it, in the academy programme. And about the motivation of some of the sponsors.

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/10659289/Academies-chain-stripped-of-10-under-performing-schools.html

Major academy chain is stripped of 1/3 of its schools. Had to end in tears that mad rush to make "failing schools" all become academies. We were looking for our own sponsor (kindly allowed to choose, rather than have one imposed by The Department).
I met some outfits that were obviously completely ill-equipped to step into the shoes of the local authority.
Such was the scramble, about 2-3 years ago, that a few academy chains grew from a handful of schools to having as many schools as a small local authority, within a couple of years.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/10659289/Academies-chain-stripped-of-10-under-performing-schools.html

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The other wild card that goes into this statistical minestrone (to mix metaphors, if I may) Is that some schools get a lot of "additional admissions" between 11 and 16. Children moving into area, mainly, or kids chucked out of other schools. Could be a dozen or more per year, LAs are obliged to find places for them and if you are an LA school with theoretical spaces you get leaned on, heavily.
So if you are a less popular school to start with you get all the poor little disrupted kids whose parents are moving in and out with partners or parents - from across the borough (not just your catchment). Ditto ones arriving from Europe, Africa and troubled middle eastern countries like Afghanistan. Many of these don't speak English. The worst ones we ever had were Afghani asylum seekers who were, we believed to be over 18 (and who were accused by a 13 year old of sexual assault outside school) and one young man that was probably an ex child soldier who obviously had some severe mental health issues. And kids taken into care - which included the unaccompanied asylum seekers.
Of course the most popular schools tend to be full and don't have to accept all these additional problems. In the case of the last boy, the alarm bells were ringing so loudly from the first visit, that he was only allowed in on trial (not officially on roll at all). It did not work.
Even if they don't appear on the exam statistics they require a lot of resources.
I think academies are probably better placed to fend off LA pressure - but not sure of their legal position.

They might be following a different vocational pathway in the 14 to 19 curriculum but they would still be on roll and their exam results would still count in the school's performance data. If the year group has shrunk by 24% that suggests something different.

If you have a look at the Oak Academy website, they have a separate school for 14-19 year olds who want to concentrate on the arts or on athletics. That's obviously where the 25% have gone.
It sounds like the middle school system, or the Leicestershire system.

The national percentage of statemented pupils is 2.8. This has remained unchanged for five years. Oak Academy has lost 24% according to the article.

Sorry the "yes that is true" was in reply to Jess.
No Jen these would not be statemented pupils; the percentage statemented is tiny. They would not be left out of the data set either; some of the brightest pupils in schools may have statements.

Yes that is true, though I gather it is likely to change to a measure of progress from KS2 rather than using the 5 A* to C figure.
Of course the point is that these stats are being used to try and prove that academies perform better than maintained schools. If you take out a large number of the lowest performing students you can do that.
This is an interesting article too.
www.localschoolsnetwork.org.uk/2014/01/journalists-please-treat-dfe-press-releases-with-caution/

An even better article in the Guardian today is an interview with Tim Hands who criticises both Gove and Wilshaw, head of Ofsted for changing things without consulting people. He says that many changes in the education system are due to just one person's experience of the system, rather than done through consensus.
Hands says that he never hears Gove talk about the less talented pupils. To be a good head or a good teacher you have got to understand what it is like to find work difficult.
I agree with that.

I always thought that kids with statements were excluded from the figures anyway. Is that not what the Oak Academy is doing? My grandson is in what his school calls the Nurture group, which is like a school within a school.

Yes it is just another way of "taking them off roll" before that final January date, to make the number stack. Have to say that an LA school would never get away with this level of fiddling the numbers - I'm not sure whether OFSTE would pick up on this when looking at attainment.
I was not trying to minimise - just saying that the reason is totally to do with stats and the pressure to "get them right"
You also get the "give the best teachers to the borderline groups" syndrome - you have to get those Cs at least in English and Maths and those are the classes where the reputation of the school rises or falls.

This is a bit more than losing one or two. In all the years I worked for LAs I never heard of anything like this.

"At Oak academy in Bournemouth – formerly Oakmead College of Technology – 188 pupils are recorded as having been at the college as 12- to 13-year-olds in 2009-10. By the time the year group took their GCSEs last summer, the number had fallen by 24% to 142, with the year group shrinking from 194 pupils to 142 during 2012-13 alone.

The academy explains that the drop is the result of a re-organisation, with some pupils now being educated within a new "studio school" on site, focusing on workplace preparation, performance and sports. Executive principal Annette Minard says: "The children have not gone; they are just working within a separate school within our federation."

This has been going on for years and not just in academies. If you are a smallish school with around 100 in a year group then just one set of poor results will make the difference between being branded as a "failing school" or not. It is a product of setting such strict boundaries between failing and not failing e.g. 40% a-c grades in English and Maths. This kind of target setting does have some positive effects but it also has some negative ones.
Oxford Spires though does seem to have been shedding more than one or tow a year!

Sorry forgot to blue
www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jan/21/gcse-pupils-disappearing-from-school-rolls

Another interesting Academy story today:
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jan/21/gcse-pupils-disappearing-from-school-rolls

That is a fantastic list mamie and got me up to date on the gossip regarding the sponsor I had dealings with. Some of these sponsors grew very rapidly going from a handful of schools to being the size of a not-very-small LEA in just a couple of years. But with their schools spread over a wide geographical area They were of course under pressure from The Department to do so.