A high-profile member of the government’s flagship free schools movement, the Greenwich free school in southeast London, has been labelled by Ofsted as requiring improvement after its first inspection.
The grade – Ofsted’s second lowest of four – is a mild embarrassment for some of the secondary school’s prominent supporters, including the education secretary, Michael Gove, and for its chair of governors,Jonathan Simons, the head of education at the thinktank Policy Exchange and a co-founder of the school.
Simons was an author of a Policy Exchange report last month that criticised Ofsted and called for an overhaul of its inspection regime to allow it to “focus more of its resources on struggling schools”.
The school’s other co-founder and vice-chair of governors, Tom Shinner, is Gove’s senior policy adviser and was recently appointed as the Department for Education’s director of strategy and performance.
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/apr/24/greenwich-free-school-ofsted-inspection
