R.I.P COPLAND COMMUNITY SCHOOL 1952- 2014

Professionals and Mercenaries
 

Guest blog by ‘All in this together’.

Richard Marshall, the interim Copland Head hired by the Gove/ Pavey/IEB coalition to do their dirty work for them, this week  gave a new meaning to the much-abused word ‘professional’ when, in his last-day-of-term address to staff (and his first official recognition that any member of staff had left the school all year) he used it to describe the manner in which staff at Copland had responded to the one hundred and thirty three redundancies he had diligently imposed on the school since last July. By ‘professional’, Mr Marshall presumably meant that his sackings had been achieved without loss of life and, ultimately, with a kind of cowed resignation from the staff. In George Osborne’s  would-be-macho world of balding male willy-wagglers, where’ tough’ decisions have to be made with a fearless lack of concern for the comfort or security of any individuals (except themselves), this version of ‘professionalism’  can be framed as some kind of brave and realistic acceptance of the unavoidable new realities. 
                                                   

The inconvenient truth, however, is that Copland staff did not behave at all in the manner which management clones mean when they employ the weasel word ‘professional’  to mean ‘that of which I approve’.  In reality, Copland teachers  used their collegiate solidarity to resist at every stage what Richard Marshall and his sidekick  Nick John had been hired to do. When the pair arrived last July and demanded of Copland Heads of Department that they nominate people they wanted sacked, apart from the odd shameful exception they refused to do so. When the Heads of Department were then threatened that they themselves would go unless they provided names, they still refused. That resistance, an expression of the self-confident autonomous decision-making which is the mark of real professionalism, set the tone which continued throughout the year. Teachers at all levels (except senior management, inevitably) have been united in their action against the surrendering of the school to Ark Inc and its removal from local democratic accountability.   In the end, the fight was lost, as any fight by a few hundred teachers, parents and pupils  against Cameron plus Gove plus their friends on Brent Council plus a hand-picked and craven IEB plus a couple of hired ‘tough’ guys was always going to be lost. 

However, there are defeats and there are defeats.  Ark and the spivs who own it have grabbed Copland. They will give it a new name and claim the credit for the new  building (which, in fact, was planned to go ahead whoever ran the school).  But Gove has gone from the DfE and, as a result of his perceived ‘toxicity’ in the eyes of the electorate (in large part a result of the loud and active resistance of teachers like those at Copland) his hopes of leading the Tory party, and God help us, the country, have gone too.  

Copland staff can feel  proud of the fight they put up in defence of the jobs of their colleagues (including dinner ladies, classroom assistants, mentors, support staff, sports coaches, caretakers, cleaners as well as classroom teachers).  Their professionalism was manifested in action not in apathetic quiescence and  this kind of professional engagement and concern  is a crucially important part of the checks and balances in any democratic society’s resistance to a bullying centralised state. 

So ‘professional’ is certainly what the great majority of Copland staff have been, particularly in face of the despondency and disillusionment which they inevitably felt as they watched their various ‘Leaders’ abandon them. But to use the word ‘professional’ in the way Mr Marshall used it on Wednesday was an insult.  However, there is another variant of ‘professional’’s  many shades of meaning  and it relates to an any activity performed primarily for financial gain. At this point the word almost takes on the meaning of ‘mercenary’, where any moral qualms on the part of the people hired to carry out the activity can be silenced by, to misquote a great British politician of the past, ‘stuffing their mouths with ten pound notes’. There were  people in the hall at Copland on Wednesday who maybe were worthy of such an appellation; but it was certainly not those teachers and ex-teachers who were having to listen to that ill-judged  speech.

Congratulations to all the staff, parents and pupils who fought so hard and persistently to prevent forced academisation. Although you didn't succeed it was a battle worth fighting and an example and inspiration to others.

Martin Francis 

Deafening silence on Copland victimisation allegations

Guest post by Mistleflower

According to the  Brent and Kilburn Times website last Friday,  teachers union president Hank Roberts has accused the new management at Copland School of victimisation of union members who  have opposed  the forced academisation  of Copland School and the privatisation of English education in general.   As the man who brought to an end (with no help from Brent or the DfE)  the  financial corruption at Copland which resulted in the upcoming trial on fraud charges of  Alan Davies and five others, Mr Roberts knows a thing or two about blowing the whistle on  unlawful activity by school managements and the victimisation of union members which results. He and his union colleagues acted, at great risk to their present jobs and their career futures, to stop the haemorrhaging  of  Brent taxpayers’ money into the pockets of their chiselling bosses. His observations, therefore, carry some weight in Brent and beyond. Despite this, the only response from the new Copland management to appear in the BKT article are these words  from Mr Nick John, one of the two new men hired by Brent and responsible for the alleged victimisation:

Teachers and students at Copland Community School are preparing for the new school year, we are looking forward to working with parents and families to improve standards and secure good lessons for all children.

While this is nice to know and possibly entirely accurate it has nothing whatever to do with the serious allegation made by Mr Roberts, which is  that  Copland’s Humanities faculty has been singled out for ‘special measures’ as a result of its containing  4 union officers and a Teacher Governor  each of whom have a high profile in opposing forced academisation, workplace bullying and the recent blatant misuse of capability procedures connected with this . It’s possible, of course, that the words quoted were uttered by Mr John on some completely different occasion about an entirely unrelated matter and that Mr John had, in fact, gone off on his holidays before Mr Roberts made his allegations. Whatever the circumstances though, you would expect that the new management of a school with a well-known history of unlawful management activity (allegedly) would wish to ensure that its conduct now and in future would be  squeaky-clean in such matters and perceived to be so by the public. Further, the default position of kneejerk defence of the school management by the governing body and by Brent council is already beginning to remind some observers of the bad old days of Alan Davies and I.P.Patel.

The management’s red herring concerning the English department (that it needs to improve and must therefore be relocated to the remotest and most isolated part of the school)  has already been laughed out of court, not least by the English department itself. But there must surely be one member of Copland’s new leadership, or of the newly imposed IEB governing body, or of Mr Pavey’s Children and Families department, who is not yet on holiday and is capable of making at least  a partly convincing rebuttal of Mr Roberts’s  specific allegations.

 On his arrival at Copland, new Head Richard Marshall apparently promised the staff he would not be a ‘Hero Head’ but that he would be ‘transparent’,  and transparency is a quality that Mr John, the IEB and Mr Pavey would all presumably  like to lay claim to. 

However, in the absence of any demonstration of such transparency,  staff, students and parents will have  to come to their own conclusions as to why the Humanities Faculty at Copland is being selected for special treatment by the new management. Below are 5 points any or all of  which currently have wide credence among the staff.  

1.       Humanities is being targeted as a punishment and a warning to others of the consequences  of  legitimately exercising legal democratic rights to dissent.

2.       Humanities is being targeted as a warning to other staff of the consequences of trade union activity under the new regime.

3.       Humanities subjects such as Economics, Law, Psychology, Sociology and Politics are being scrapped in a bid to limit the range of subjects at Copland to the sort of narrow Secondary Modern School curriculum dreamed of by Michael Gove in his Back-to-the-Fifties fantasies.

4.       Copland is being set up ultimately to be a  ‘Grade B’  (or ‘Secondary Modern’)  Academy, catering for those who, in Gove’s plans for a return to selection by national tests ranking children at age 11, come in the lower deciles (10% bands) of ability.  A narrow curriculum will be good enough for these kinds of students.

5.       Achieving the above at Copland (and also the ‘voluntary’ erosion of conditions of service already suggested by the new head) requires that dissent is neutralised and this requires the creation of a climate of fear among  staff.  The interviews Mr John  conducted with Heads of Faculty shortly after arriving ( in which he demanded they name 2 members of their faculty who they would like to see go, and then threatened that they would be the ones  going if they refused) set the tone.  Concocted capability procedures against a large number of staff came next. Refusal to communicate with staff through existing and long-established procedures was there from the start and continues.

There is evidence within the school itself and also in the wider political educational context, both in Brent and nationally, for all of these views.  In the absence of any contrary evidence, or of any specific denial, by the school management or by Brent, either of Mr Roberts’s allegations or of the 5 points set out above, staff can be excused for coming to their own conclusions.

Copland’s Summer Bizarre continues

Guest post by 'Mistleflower'

Sources close to my partner tell me that Copland staff are becoming increasingly concerned about the strange behaviour of new Head Richard Marshall. Following the actions set out in recent blogs on this site, Mr Marshall has set aside next Tuesday for a game of musical chairs involving the English and Humanities departments. 

Staff taking students on end-of-term trips have been told to cancel their plans, come to school in old clothes and be prepared to spend the day moving all the English books, resources, wall-displays, stock, personal effects and other paraphernalia out of the English rooms and over to the Humanities block, a separate building some distance away. 

Humanities teachers have been instructed to do the same thing but in the opposite direction. The instruction came out of the blue, followed the new management style of ‘no consultation, no discussion, no sense at all’ and was ‘explained’ as somehow providing some dubious benefit to the English department ( none of whom believe the reason given or want the move). Humanities Faculty teachers have individually and collectively decided to resist the move. This has been met with the immediate threat of disciplinary proceedings which are rapidly becoming the principal means of management communication under Mr Marshall’s headship. 

How did we get to this ludicrous state of affairs? 

For the real motive we need to look not at the English department but at Humanities. The faculty has historically been one of the most stable at Copland and has contained some of the most experienced, most able, most intelligent and most committed teachers in the school. It has a very strong record at GCSE and particularly at A level. 

Particular faculty individuals have worked tirelessly over the years to help Copland students gain admission to the top universities. Faculty members have recently been active on the school’s governing body, in liaising with outside social and cultural organisations, with taking students on visits to English courts and residential visits to European Community centres in Brussels, in forging links with moderate Muslim organisations and in establishing a ground-breaking anti-homophobia group which brought Copland huge media coverage and national recognition and respect; in general, striving to broaden the horizons of students in one of the country’s more deprived boroughs.

It would take very little time or effort to collect tributes from a huge number of former students who would attest, with affection and respect, to the way in which Copland’s Humanities Faculty ‘made a difference’ to their lives. It would surprise no one at Copland if a Facebook page to this effect was under construction at this very moment.

So why would the new Copland management led by Mr Marshall want to attack (and that is precisely how it is being described) this apparently exemplary faculty? 

Here’s why. The Humanities staff’s qualities of care and involvement in the school and the progress of its students are the same qualities which mean that 2 of the school’s Professional Association reps come from the Humanities faculty as does one of the longest serving staff representatives on the school’s governing body. The Humanities faculty was also particularly bravely involved in the risky whistleblowing which resulted in Sir Alan Davies imminent fraud trial. The efforts of these teachers helped halt the alleged hemorrhaging of Brent taxpayers’ money into the pockets of a corrupt management. 

But while they’ll applaud such qualities at a distance, authoritarian managements really don’t like such independence of thought and such readiness to question their ‘tough’ decisions, (especially those which seem to make no sense or to be transparently vindictive). And a vindictive attack on the school’s professional associations is precisely the interpretation of the Copland management’s action which was expressed very clearly at a packed Joint Union meeting of Copland staff on Friday when it was decided unanimously to support the Humanities Faculty in whatever manner was deemed necessary. A vote of confidence in the union reps, their principled resistance to the recent use of bogus capability procedures and the dignified part they played in resisting the recent ‘sickness’ absence fiasco described elsewhere on this site, was also unanimously passed. 

Maybe the new Copland management wasn’t aware of the qualities the Humanities faculty embodies. Maybe they would be more aware if they hadn’t rejected all attempts at dialogue with the staff using the established JCC and other channels which have avoided this kind of unpleasantness in the past. Maybe the IEB or Brent’s Children and Families Lead, Michael Pavey could have a word.

Meanwhile we face the prospect of an undignified standoff next Tuesday between security men and Copland Humanities teachers which would really enhance the school’s reputation and the new management’s respect in the eyes of the rest of the staff. Especially if footage of it were to become the biggest YouTube success since Fenton the deer-chasing dog. The likeliest outcome seems to be that this ridiculous plan will (like Sports Day!) be ‘postponed’ and then clandestinely carried out during the school holidays. As a way of continuing this ‘war against the teachers’ into the next school year, that would take some beating. Which, under the current regime, makes it all the more likely to happen.

It really is time for someone to have a word.

No Olympic legacy at Copland as Ofsted leads to sports day cancellation

Just the day before Copland Community School was to hold its eagerly awaited sports day it was cancelled by the interim headteacher who has been in post for just two weeeks. The PE department, staff and students had been planning the event for weeks.

One year after the 2012 Olympics it appears that the idea that the Olympics 'legacy' would motivate young people and enhance the status of sports in schools has been trampled into the ground.

In a letter circulated to staff  on Dr Richard Marshall's it was  stated  that because of Ofsted the school's priorities had  to change and that it was now busy 'on this new agenda'. This had made it necessary to postpone sports day until next year.

In my view, one issue that is often missed is the impact of negative Ofsted judgments and schools being put into special measures on students at the school. Feeling bad about your school and its teachers and facing negative comments from friends who attend other schools impacts on the morale and self-esteem of students.

I understand that Copland students have been circulating a petition in support of their teachers in the face of this negative publicity. The sports day decision is likely to alienate them further and perhaps will be interpreted as some kind of punishment for the school's difficulties.