DfE approves Village-Woodfield MAT NEU considers Judicial Review

The headteacher of The Village School, Kingsbury, told staff on Friday that the Department for Education had approved the formation of a Multi Academy Trust (MAT)  by the two schools. The MAT will come into being on September 1st 2018.

The decision follows months of campaigning and strike action by members of the National Education Union. In a press release the NEU saluted the staff at the Village School  for 'their magnificent anti-academy campaign to stop the privatisation of their flagship special school.'

The NEU announced that they are now looking at taking legal action through a Judicial Review and pledged to continue to fight academisation at every step. They said that part of the problem in Brent is that the Labour Council have 'an inadequate opposition to the loss of their schools from the Local Authority. This policy must change and we will continue our campaigning to do this.'

On a related issue the NEU has written to Damian Hinds MP, Secretary of State, to express concern following  information received via  FOI requests to The Village and Woodfield over the due diligence undertaken by Mr Greg Foley who was paid as a consultant when he was also the Chair of Trustees at Woodfield School.  The NEU allege that during this time he was paid through his company School Business Strategic Services (SBSS) an average of over £7,000 a month for a period of 28 months. That fact that the school could claim 20% VAT back makes no difference to the amount SBSS was paid according to the union.

The NEU calls for an investigation by a relevant financial watchdog and has written to the DfE and Brent Council in similar terms.

The current edition of Private Eye magazine describes the financial payments outlined above with invoices totalling some £240,00 over the period, and states that the school accounts do not list the payments under 'related party transactions' (where one party has control or influence over another) as required by law.  Headteacher Kay Charles told Private Eye that the contract with SBSS had begun before Mr Foley joined the trustees and 'he took no part in decision making over its management.' She said she would raise the fact that the contract has not been listed as a related party transaction in the 2016 and 2017 accounts with the school's auditor.

Private Eye on Brent Council’s Case Again ?

Guest Blog by Audrey N. Stables

After the national expose of the Brent Council racism, discrimination and workplace bullying scandal in Private Eye’s last edition, Davani, Gilbert, Ledden, Potts and others named and shamed may well have thought they deserved a rest from the limelight.

However, it seems that Rotten Boroughs (Private Eye’s regular dodgy-local-authority section) is not the only page that  the Civic Centre chums will now want to flick straight to as they check their cuttings each fortnight. The cartoon below appears in the current edition of the Eye and, though it principally relates to similar scummy practice by some NHS managers, will surely resonate with Davani and Gilbert and Fiona Ledden (and, even more so, with some of their more honest, and therefore no-longer-employed, ex-colleagues). 

Brent Council CEO Christine Gilbert Announces ‘Whistle Blowing Hotline’

Christine Gilbert

 

 

                       Confidential hotline for concerned staff’ planned.

Guest Blog by 'Gilbert Harding'

Christine Gilbert, perpetual ‘interim’ CEO of Brent Council which, together with HR lead and interpersonal staff relations role-model Cara Davani, was recently found guilty of racial discrimination, victimisation and workplace bullying,  has announced her plans  to set up ‘a confidential whistle-blower hotline so that any staff who had serious concerns’ could communicate their worries to their bosses.

This would be a great relief to those many Brent Council employees who have, openly on this blog, privately to Martin Francis, and most recently and publicly to Private Eye, expressed their ‘serious concerns’ about bullying, victimisation, threats of dismissal, cronyism, gagging clauses  and corruption at Brent Council’s Civic Centre.  Such a move would be welcomed as an appropriate intervention by a leader wanting to find out what was really going on in her organisation with a view to turning a troubled situation round in an open and transparent way.  

Slightly disappointingly, however, Ms Gilbert made the whistle-blower announcement quoted above not recently but a whole 6 years ago on December 10^th 2008 to a Commons Select Committee and in relation to her then job as Head of Ofsted (the previous employer also of Cara Davani, Clive Heaphy and Ark Academies employee Dame Sally Morgan).    

(Details HERE )

Nevertheless, Brent Council staff will be feeling confident that Ms Gilbert’s passionate desire to let some light into the murkier corners of institutional malpractice will not have faded since her earlier statement and that her principles remain intact.

 Indeed, one hooded and masked Civic Centre employee was relaxed enough yesterday to tell me, in an unsigned encrypted  message smuggled out  past a cordon of G4S security personnel and hidden in a camouflage-pattern green and  brown envelope :  ‘I think I can speak for all my anonymous colleagues when I say that I believe Ms Gilbert’s earlier interest in openness and transparency and her very real and publicly declared desire to tap into the honest, uncensored and unintimidated experience of the people she leads, still burn as  brightly now in 2014 as they did in 2008.’

A statement from Ms Gilbert on plans for a new updated whistle-blower hotline is now expected. But perhaps not for another 6 years.

Alternatively, less patient Civic Centre whistle-blowers may find it more productive to communicate their serious concerns more urgently to Private Eye's 'Rotten Boroughs' contact here:

                                            tim.minogue@private-eye.co.uk.

(Ms Gilbert was unavailable for comment).

Library campaigners get Great Britons Award and Transformation Team get a Rotten Borough Award

The Independent on Sunday  has named the Brent Library Campaigners as among the 50 Greatest British 2011

And so, this being as close to the end of the year as this newspaper shall get, we have the temerity to name our 50 Greatest Britons of 2011. These are the people who have been, to our world-weary eyes, the most admirable. Some are very well known; others, we feel, have not had their full due. We hope that this humble list helps to put that right

 

Brent library protesters
Library campaigners
Residents fighting the closure of six libraries in the London borough of Brent represented the outrage felt by much of the nation's readers and researchers about cutbacks by staging a round-the-clock protest outside Kensal Rise Library, which was opened by American writer Mark Twain 111 years ago. The campaigners were the first in the country to seek a judicial review into library closures.

Yesterday Brent Council's Library Transformation Team received the Library Award from Private Eye's Rotten Boroughs column, for closing six of the borough's 12 libraries in 2011. Last week the Team got an Award from Brent Council for their work.