The Corrupt Academies/Free Schools Thread

There's going to be a lot of cases like the one below, so might as well have a thread on them and keep the info on one thread.
The head and two staff at Bradford Kings Science Academy have been convicted for fraud.
Bradford Kings Science academy staff convicted of fraud - BBC News
They are likely to go to jail. Good.

 

Good idea Orang Utan.

 

Disciplinary hearing for suspended college principal
Maybe we could include colleges - this case is not recent but there has been a lot of this sort of thing. Colleges were taken out of LA hands over a decade ago and run like fifedoms in some respects - tax payers money but private business mentality. Commercial income generation taking precedence over students and education. In some ways the colleges were the dry run.

 

Channel 4 Dispatches had a whole enraging 26 minutes on this recently - will be up for another 21 days and I guess still on All4/ digital services:
Dispatches - On Demand - All 4

 

They were corrupt right from the start:
Scandal of Blair's £31m flagship school: A leaking roof, broken designer toilets and a useless computer system

 

Perry Beeches saga: who was involved

Perry Beeches academy chain in Birmingham pays £1.3m to company that headteacher is director of and gets a £160k wage from. Not sure if the academy chain actually had the schools taken off them or not.

 

Id be interested to know what went wrong with the IT. The mail says it failed from day one and had to be replaced at a cost of 1.2m. I put WiFi and LANs into a few BSF schools and I don't get how failure of the systems would cause the school to have to fork out money. It would be up to the integrator to fix it, not the school.

 

Used to work in a primary school which has just become an academy.
The head and deputy head were never interviewed for their jobs. They were appointed by the Executive Head.
One of the management teams brother was appointed in a leadership position . The best friend of another (and chief bridesmaid) was appointed in a leadership position. The Heads partner was employed as a teacher without an interview. The parent of one of the leadership team was appointed as senior finance officer. Siblings and friends of favoured staff were also appointed.
In the 18 months of having a CEO at least 12 staff left. All new staff were known to someone in leadership positions (close friendships, family or previous work relationship).
The lack of interviews, employing family and friends and having a family member as the finance officer makes the school look corrupt imho. It felt very uncomfortable working there as there was a clear difference between how staff were spoken to.

 

Tautological thread title

 

Loads of staff at my 'current' school were appointed without interview or advertising.
The head has brought about 20 people from their previous school, and many ex pupils from there work as support staff

 

I experienced the same thing, though not in a school. Nepotism, cronyism or whatever you want to call it is always bad for an organisation and leads to corruption and cover ups. I have a friend who works in Lambeth early intervention and they have a lot of problems with Academies covering up a absences of at risk kids just to keep their attendance figures up.

It may be worth reporting them as I think it is illegal to just award jobs and they should also be advertised.

 

The spate of redundancies that came along with regionalisation of colleges in Scotland threw up an interesting take on redundancy for some senior staff. Large redundancy package, standard rules that post not person is redundant and bar from being re employed for two years. We had several take redundancy only to turn up next term as 'consultants'. Cronyism and nepotism - an individual who was on a part time post as a library assistant, no other work background, no teaching experience or qualification got promoted to a full time post as Director of Learning. From a pro rata 15k part time junior admin role to a 55k senior management role. But she is a 'twitter expert'. I guess someone forgot to tell the Principal that so are 90% of the students. A lot of the cases of fraud never see the light of day because the individuals retire early and the problem vanishes.

 

Adam Smith College four may face fraud charges
ela.blogspot.is/2015/10/ministers-sack-board-of-college-after.html
Glasgow college principal suspended just months after winning OBE
Adam Smith College boss appears in court charged with £3m fraud

 

grace and favour residences for senior staff should be abolished from uni VP positions, to be going on in schools is just as disgraceful. You get enough money to rent/mortgage. The TA's aren't housed for free. Rip off cunts. Now think that they wanted to turn every school into such cash cows. The cheeky cunts

 

This may be a bit international for the thread, but I think it's relevant. Recently, the government of Liberia announced that it would turn over it's entire school system to an American for-profit corporation called Bridge International. The unique selling point of this group is that they try to replace actual trained teachers with a collection of randoms who are pulled off the street and given some cursory instruction in doing rote learning off a computer tablet.

An Africa first! Liberia outsources entire education system to a private American firm. Why all should pay attention

What could possibly go wrong? Well, this group's activities in Uganda were being studied by a Canadian researcher. They arranged to have him arrested by the Ugandan peelers on a trumped-up charge:

The weird story of the arrest of a Canadian education researcher in Uganda

 

Not education sector, but same approach applies:

Two G4S police control room staff fired over 999 'test calls'

 

Jesus, "From January, there will be a new chief inspector of schools: Amanda Spielman, the secretary of state’s choice, whose appointment was confirmed in the face of fierce opposition from the Education Select Committee. Spielman has never been a teacher; her background is in corporate finance and management consultancy. More recently, she was on the original management team of Ark Schools, the UK educational arm of Ark (Absolute Return for Kids), an international children’s charity set up in 2002 by a group of hedge fund bosses...."

LRB · Matthew Bennett · Ed Tech Biz

 

And oh look, the academy chain has a £2.1m deficit, I wonder why.
Deficit of £2.1m found at Perry Beeches The Academy Trust - BBC News

 

Lecturers in strike threat at Edinburgh College

Here a lecturer is suspended for - among other spurious charges - calling a student Honey. The students name is Honey. Union rep who represented him has now also been suspended. As she says in the article 'the only people bringing the college into disrepute are the SLT and HR'. She is a very effective rep - hence constantly at the end of a management purge. EIS motto should be #the more they hate you, the better a job you are doing#

 

From the comments thread on that link:

"I don't care whether these allegations are true or not; what matters is that they are true. Sack every one of these leftie union whingers and make them reapply for their old jobs on zero-pay contracts. And then ban them from applying for work at any other employer, and from claiming any state benefits."

 

Maybe the 'author' needs to use a college to get support for logic, reasoning and structre.

 

It's like a claymore mine packed with deadly balls of stupidity

 

I thought this was quite interesting

The One Type of Leader Who Can Turn Around a Failing School

The most rewarded school leaders are the ones with the worst long term contribution to school performance.

 

Presumably with his invisible hand he thought he'd get away with it.

 

I wish I'd thought of this.

 

Usa is now on a similar track, intresting to see how much money goes in and what gets shat out.

 

Sneaky fuckers setting up back door grammar schools

 

There's another Birmingham academy under investigation for fraud: Baverstock Academy: Police in fraud inquiry over collapsed school

 

It's so sad what's happened to that school, really feel for the community in Druids Heath.

 

not in the 'corrupt' bracket ( so far ) , but in the absence of a general FS thread, thought I'd leave a progress update on our local £15-20M free school

• 140 pupils have joined in 3 yrs, so the school was fined £250K by ofsted in Feb for the chronic under attendance ( the claimed high demand for places that helped win personal intervention from Gove to get planning through was vigorously questioned by those in the know from the off - unsurprsingly, in a rural area, with several good, underattended schools in the locale
• They didn't feel able to enter A SINGLE YR 11 PUPIL FOR GSCE'S THIS YEAR ( see TES link for deets )
• Ofsted has now put school into special measure , deemed ' inadequate'

Free school that entered no Year 11 pupils for GCSEs is put in special measures

North Devon’s first free school rated as ‘inadequate’ by Ofsted