Monday 17 March 2014

Another free school makes its pitch in Brent

Another free school has emerged in Brent. The One Degree Academy  wants to set up an all through school in the borough. Like most free schools its website is short on detail including staffing and site. It is derived from the One Degree charity that offers 1:1 mentoring to underachieving GCSE students and claims to have helped 200 in the past 6 years based on 'personalised support and inspirational role models'.

Clearly it is a big step to running a school for ages 5-19 and it is not clear from the website LINK how many of the staff will be qualified teachers,  They are having an Open Day on Saturday from 12-3pm at Harlesden Methodist Church.

Gladstone secondary free school has still not got a permanent site although they are having discussions with the Education Funding Agency and the DfE on a Foundation site.

It has emerged that the 'innovative' writing method promised by Gladstone, 'Do it WRITE'  LINK is the product of a company LINK owned by Jim Gatten, Gladstone's Project Director, a governor of the school and partner of vice chair of governors Marie Evans. They are both directors of the Gladstone school company. So far, according to the records, the company has yet to make a profit.


21 comments:

Anonymous said...

'Do it WRITE' seems to produce 'innovative' sentences too. This (unattributed) from its website:

"It's re-awakened that love of why I got into the job ". Que?

Anonymous said...

Not so innovative to set up a company to supply services to the school you govern - some would say a conflict of interest. I am sure they have declared their service company to the DfE so as to avoid any embarrassing questions about profiteering from the school they govern once the school is operating.

Anonymous said...

The 'One Degree Academy' website (can you be a 'free' school AND an academy?) isn't too promising either. They're promising a 'no excuses culture'. That's the kind of meaningless pap they teach them to say at Future Leaders Club. It seems to mean 'not open to evidence or reasoned discussion'. Still, the piss-poor Deputy Head I knew who used to chant this mantra certainly made no excuses for her own ineptitude. Mainly because she was blissfully unaware of it.

Anonymous said...

I'm sure I saw Gladstone's Jim and Marie on Dragon's Den last year.

Martin Francis said...

In an LA school such an interest would have to be declared and the person concerned would not take part in discussion or decision making when buying in that service. The GB would be expected to consider bids from other companies offering a similar service and make a decision based on 'best value'.

Martin Francis said...

Free schools make up their own names and often use 'academy' for status and 'community' for marketing. One describes itself using (lower case) 'outstanding' knowing that it is an Ofsted term, despite the school not being open yet.

Anonymous said...

Jim Gatten & Marie Evans are Directors of Head-Line Communications trading as Do it WRITE which will supply the Gladstone School with services. They are also Directors of Gladstone School so naturally will be part of the decision making for buying in Do it WRITE. This seems to be the free school way, set up charity trust/school and set up a FOR-PROFIT limited company for the services of IT, HR, Educational services and you profit from your charity. To any decent human being this seems like a massive conflict of interest and morally wrong - where are all those people that do it for the children???? Oh yes, they are called qualified teachers who study to provide a better future for children. But these wonderful people will dwindle in numbers as they become more overworked and pressurised by DfE....

Anonymous said...

It's the Tory/New Labour way, isn't it? Who cares what you make money out of as long as you fill your pockets. What was Mandelson's famous quote: 'Get yer snout in here, squire, there's plenty more room in the trough'? I don't remember the exact words but that was the general drift.
The lack of interest in Michaela is heartening and might indicate that Brent parents aren't the suckers that these chancers seem to imagine they are. However, it's going to be important to continue to emphasise the risks of signing up your kids' 13 year education to a bunch of ex videoshop or timeshare 'entrepreneurs' taking temporary financial advantage of the half-arsed policies of Gove's neo-liberal fruitcakes.
By the way, on their website One Degree 'Academy' are looking for 'volunteers'. What can this mean?

Anonymous said...

At least Brent parents are waking up to the madness that is the free school movement. In Camden we have a campaign run by an elite group of parents who are scaremongering people into signing their campaign. They are targeting parents at school gates and generally bulldozing their way through the community LYING about what they are doing. They have no site, no partnership with any educationalist and yet their marketing material would lead you to believe they are to open in 2015 with the partnership of some heads that are not even from the borough or local to Camden! They are hijacking the Kingsgate expansion which could potentially jeopardise the addition of over 400 primary places and all because they don't like the local LEA school on offer for secondary. Yet the majority of the team (which seems to be mainly one woman Dr Clare Craig) send their children to a local LEA Church school in West Hampstead. There has been name calling of locals who object, slur on the reputations of some of the wonderful heads of school and they have taken to local papers to make damaging claims about a local secondary school which they all simply refuse to even visit for an open day. The founder in particular has simply lied to parents about what is really going on - the fact is the founder doesn't really know either! The so called team seem to be apathetic to the whole campaign and are merely on the band wagon out of self-interest. There is nothing community at all about this campaign - couldn't be further from the truth.

Anonymous said...

Clare Craig doesn't seem to be having much success with her other little (non) earner either. This is an online medical consultation business (at http://www.thanksdoctor.co.uk/home) with a few doctors signed up to it. The punters submit their symptoms online and the doctors reply, for a fee. The website contains this deathless (one hopes) reflection on the punters' resistance to reward her entrepreneurship:
'At one point we answered everyone's question and then only showed half (the answer) and asked for £25 payment to see the rest. No-one paid. I don't regret testing it but I did learn that there's a big barrier in the UK to paying to look after our health'.

That's the corrupting effect of socialised medicine for you, eh? Nowadays people know the value of everything and the price of nothing.


Anonymous said...

'At one point we answered everyone's question and then only showed half (the answer) and asked for £25 payment to see the rest'.
Fantastic! The morality of lap-dancing comes to medicine at last. Dr Craig can be proud of herself. And the most remarkable thing, as ever, is the apparently total lack of self-awareness.

Anonymous said...

Maybe the volunteers are the ones who turn up at school gates conning parents into signing to fill a "community need"?

Anonymous said...

Clare Craig of the NW6school campaign for the West Hampstead International School has one strategy she applies to all her pet projects. Her ThanksDr project which is operating a huge financial loss was built on a strategy to undermine the valuable NHS Direct service.
Her latest project is built on undermining local schools, the LEA and the GLA by misconstruing data, misrepresenting the need for the school and pushing for a campaign for her own personal interest.
Based on her Thanksdr company alone it is clear that she is unfit to run a school.

Anonymous said...

Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea for proposers of new 'free' schools to have to appear in front of the Dragon's Den panel. Unlovely though they may be, I'd have marginally more faith in their ability to spot the incompetents, the emotionally damaged, the con artists, the self-publicists, the unhinged and the swivel-eyed ideologues than the current system seems to manage.

Anonymous said...

Surely none of them would survive the scrutiny of the Dragon's Den panel.

Martin Francis said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Martin Francis said...

I noticed yesterday that the hardressers, chicken shop and hairdressers on Bridge Road near the Michaela building have flyers from the school blue tacked up in their windows. Looks a bit desperate. Meanwhile some parents offered the school through Brent's secondary admissions system have turned it down. I have reservations about Brent allocating such an unproven school, with a building not yet finished and a very particular ethos that won't suit all, to parents who did not name it on their preference list. I would be more inclined to advise parents of the possible dangers of buying a pig in a poke, however 'exceptional' the school claims to be.

Anonymous said...

But this is no ordinary pig; this is a pig 'with private school values'.
(Or an attempt to put lipstick on a porker, maybe?)

Anonymous said...

I was offered a place at this school for my child - most bizarre as I hadn't put it on my list. I can only hazard a guess that their "random allocation within a 5 mile radius" means they are targeting parents in desperation to fill the school.

Why do these free schools not include libraries in their buildings?
“A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.” — Susan Sontag

Anonymous said...

The Dragon's themselves are familiar with using taxpayers money to fund their "charities"! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2005371/Dragons-Den-stars-tycoon-academy-9m-row-mismanagement-taxpayers-money.html

Best place for them to start is indeed with the Dragons, after all the free schools claims are proving more mythical than any dragon!

Anonymous said...

A library? So far this 'school' doesn't include a building in its building!