Here is a deeply
worrying piece of correspondence between Alison Beer and a student at Worthing High,
which occurred during the consultation period earlier this year. We’ve left out the name of the student and
have paraphrased their key questions in order to protect their anonymity. Under each of Alison’s responses we’ve
clarified what we believe to be the true position.
Questions sent to
Alison Beer on 24th April 2012 from a student:
1. On the basis of academy
status’s main advantage being financial, the student asks why extra funding is
needed by a ‘good’ school, what needs improvement at the school and what plans
there are to use any extra funding.
2. On independence from
the Local Authority, the student points out that the LA may have greater knowledge
on educational affairs then the governors.
3. The student goes on to
ask how teachers may be affected by the change in school status and asks about
changes to their salary.
Response from Alison Beer
24th April 2012
I am happy to clarify the
following questions for you
- Actually the school is struggling year on year
to reach balanced budget and almost had to make teachers redundant this year
like other schools in the area.
Therefore we can use the extra funding to stop this happening as
well as other student improvements such as better computer facilities,
wireless throughout, move to better mobile technologies such as Ipads etc
plus give the departments more money. If I am honest the list of things we
need to improve student learning is endless.
WHAAG comments: April 24th (the date of this email exchange)
is in the financial year 2012-13. This
extract is taken from the School’s Report to the Governing Body Spring Term
2012. (Item 7 March 1st 2012 Governors Meeting)
Karen Hayler – Business Development
Manager:
“Our initial budget
allocation for 2011-12 was £4.459m during the term additional grants from WSCC
and the Government have increased the fund allocation to a current budget of
£4.724m. I am projecting achieving a
balance budget for year end 31st March 2012.
We were able to allocate
£48,000 to buildings works this year which was mainly spent on our new Food
Technology Classroom which opened in September 2011. An additional £75000 has been invested in ICT
including moving to a virtualised server environment, installing windows7, new
PCs in T3, T1 and E13 plus installing WI-FI throughout the school.
Following guidance from
WSCC we are expecting a budget of £4.742m for 2012-13 which includes a
substantial uplift for the Pupil Premium Grant, which now includes students who
have been registered for FSM anytime in the last 6 years. In addition, several funding pots which had
been previously held by WSCC are being delegated to schools – but are likely to
have SLAs attached – so the funding will come in and go out again.
Leadership Team have been
looking at budget models for next year, based on our expected £4.742m and a
final budget will be presented to the Environment Committee for approval on 24th
April 2012 – we are not anticipating the need to make further redundancies.”
Clearly this was
written before the final budget was finally closed but West Sussex accounts
show the school recording a surplus for the year end 2011-12 of just under
£100,000.
It is true that she
school went through a cost saving exercise earlier in the 2011-12 as it was
anticipating a deficit in the budget of £45,250 which was addressed based on a
budget of £4.459m, although you will note from Karen’s commentary above that
this was not the year end position and that funding increased by over £200k in
the year. The cost saving exercise,
detailed in the minutes of the Governor’s Environment Committee 26th
April 20122 did result in “real” headcount savings of 1.56 fte achieved through
a number of routes including redundancies of support staff.
So what to make of
Alison’ response to this student’s first question?
“Actually the school is
struggling year on year to reach balanced budget and almost had to make
teachers redundant this year like other schools in the area.”
Remember this is taking
place on the 24th April 2012.
The school is predicting a balanced budget and not anticipating
redundancies. This feels like
scaremongering.
Alison then states:
“Therefore we can use the
extra funding to stop this happening as well as other student improvements such
as better computer facilities, wireless throughout, move to better mobile
technologies such as Ipads etc plus give the departments more money.”
Now let’s remind
ourselves of what Karen Hayler reported to the Governors:
“We were able to allocate
£48,000 to buildings works this year which was mainly spent on our new Food
Technology Classroom which opened in September 2011. An additional £75000 has been invested in ICT
including moving to a virtualised server environment, installing windows7, new
PCs in T3, T1 and E13 plus installing WI-FI throughout the school.”
There is a concerning
chasm between what Alison Beer is telling this pupil and what Karen is
reporting to the Governors has already happened.
On to Alison’s next
response to this student’s questions:
- Unfortunately we have had no input from West
Sussex County Council for a year or two now as they have no capacity to
support good schools anymore. We
therefore have to find new support networks and The Academy school network
is very strong where we would gain good support.
It’s difficult to know where to start
with this. WSCC provide s number of services to WHS including Educational
Psychology, Welfare, Sensory Support, EMAT etc.
Indeed her own consultation document
states “However, we will need to use this additional funding to pay for
services that the school will no longer get
automatically from the LA including
Insurance, Educational Psychology Support, Sensory Support, Outdoor Education
Support, Legal Services and various group licenses.”
Alison’s answer to her student is
very misleading and surprising.
And so to Alison’s
final response
- I do not believe that Academy status would
affect the teachers here in a negative way. The only way it would affect things like
salaries is if they improved as we would have more resources. The unions, which protect the teachers,
do not like the move to Academy status as currently, they have quite a lot
of say in the local authority which they don’t have with the department of
education so cannot influence local schools as strongly. Also, some of the “Sponsored” have
changed the teachers’ pay and conditions but “Converter” Academies (as we
are proposing to move to) do not tend to as they are good schools which don’t
need to change things.
This answer is a combination
of political opinion, which suggests that unions have a negative impact on
schools, and anecdote, on academy approaches to pay and conditions. We think
this is inappropriate.
So to Alison’s final comment
“I hope this helps” we say it clearly meets your agenda Alison but has misled
one of Worthing High’s students, a student who posed some very intelligent
questions.