Over £600 raised in 24 hours for Save Roke Campaign
The Save Roke parent group, along with school governors have instructed a lawyer specialising in academy law to prepare a legal
challenge to the plans of Michael Gove, the education minister, to
hand their primary school over to a private academy.
The group started fundraising on Tuesday, and is working with the
Anti-Academies Alliance to raise funds to pay lawyers’ charges. Within
a day, they had already received enough donations to make legal
instructions.
Roke campaigners believe that they may have a case in law to challenge
the Secretary of State’s actions, which they believe have gone beyond
his powers by referring the state primary school in Kenley to the
Harris Federation when the school is not a “failing” school and also
on issues surrounding the legality of the consultation process.
Roke parents joined forced with parents from other protesting schools
yesterday and issued a statement yesterday in which they announced a
new campaign organisation ‘Parents Against Forced Academisation’. They
called for an immediate public enquiry into bullying behaviour and
fake consultations endemic in forced academisation of schools.
Yesterday evening, Roke parents received the first of several sham
consultation meetings run by the preferred academy sponsor the Harris
Federation at the school. Parents received no representation from any
other party and Lord Nash has already declared the decision
irreversible.
After we announced our plans for legal action on our facebook group
and the Save Roke website, and after the DfE received had complaints
from Roke parents about the legality of the consultation process and
the fact that parents had not even been asked if they wanted to become
an academy on the official consultation questionnaire, the DfE and
Harris last night moved preemptively, and issued a new consultation
questionnaire with the question added. This suggests that the initial
consultation document was not indeed not legal, and that we had got
them flustered enough to move very quickly to close this legal
loophole. This demonstrates that legal process has not been followed
with due diligence by the DfE or Harris.
Many thanks to all who donated so generously. We will continue to fund raise to make sure we can keep on campaigning!
