Staff at St Catherine’s have reluctantly voted to take strike action following repeated arbitrary and bullying behaviour by the Head Teacher. These actions have included breaching promises on confidential information, ignoring staff views, banning trade union meetings, suspending staff (including the NEU rep without good reason), sacking an employee without recourse to any disciplinary investigation or due process. The NEU have sought regular meetings with the school governors, but so far these have not been arranged. Members have repeatedly raised their concerns with governors who have failed to take swift, appropriate and effective action. Now teachers and support staff have no confidence in the Head Teacher to conduct the management of the school in a fair or reasonable way.

Full press statement – click here

Research into “off-rolling” from schools in England has found the scale of the problem may be worse than previously thought, with one in 10 secondary pupils removed from the rolls without explanation.

Researchers from the Education Policy Institute (EPI) found that more than 61,000 pupils out of the national cohort who sat their GCSEs in 2017 experienced an “unexplained exit” at some point during their secondary school career. Of these, two out of five never returned to school again.

The overwhelming majority of those affected were from the most vulnerable groups, including pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), those receiving free school meals or those in the care of the local authority.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/oct/11/one-in-10-pupils-removed-from-school-rolls-to-boost-gcse-results

Read the internal report that shows how GORSE Academies Trust considered maximising Progress 8 scores by removing low-achieving students from its rolls

https://www.tes.com/news/full-report-mats-p8-ideas-low-achievers

A major investigation into the comparative costs of the two parallel schools systems in England, and those of other countries, has found that academies and multi-academy trusts on the one hand, and local authority managed schools on the other, have hugely disparate costs with the former far exceeding the latter.

It also found that while small trusts didn’t deliver value for money in comparison with local authority managed schools, economies of scale for larger MATs also failed to materialise and the costs per pupil for administration often actually get worse.

https://www.teachingtimes.com/articles/englishschoolsystem.htm

Nearly 40 free schools that opened between three and eight years ago are still waiting for a permanent home, figures reveal.

The figures, provided by the Department for Education in a Freedom of Information request, reveal that 38 of the free schools that opened between 2011-12 and 2016-17 are in temporary accommodation.

https://www.tes.com/news/38-free-schools-lack-permanent-home-after-three-years