Guest blog from 'Deleted'
Another 25 teachers at Copland have been
notified that they are on a new redundancy hit-list for sacking at the end of the
summer term. This follows the dozens of staff who have already been sacked
since last July when Brent Council sent in an Interim Executive Board (IEB) to
run the school (down).
Why is the Copland IEB now being called the
Copland Lie EB?
In the autumn they said there would be no forced
redundancies. Just weeks later they are
‘consulting’ (telling) 25 staff that in the (new) next stage of ‘staff
reorganisation’ (sacking), 14 of their
‘posts will be deleted’ (14 people will be sacked). You can apply for ‘voluntary’ redundancy (ie sack yourself and get a bit of compensation)
or wait for the school to sack you. Whichever way, it’s forced, it’s compulsory
and it’s the sack.
What do the Lie E.B give as their reasons for
the sackings?
They say they’ve got more teachers than they
need. Well, they would have really, wouldn’t they? It’s a measure of the Lie
E.B’s success in practically closing down the 6th form and producing an Austerity Curriculum for
the rest of the school. Since last July they’ve scrapped all the 6th form vocational
subjects, loads of successful A level
and GCSE subjects, got rid of support teachers and mentoring staff and the latest statement from them scraps
Business Studies, effectively scraps Yr 7,8 and 9 Information Technology and gets rid of Art. They turned away good potential 6th
Form students last August when they told them at the last minute they’d have to
go elsewhere as they’d scrapped their subjects. They’ve narrowed the school’s
curriculum offer to make it so unattractive that only 40 parents put Copland
down as first choice for Sept 2014 (even less than Michaela ‘Free’ School, and
they don’t even have a viable building).
Then add to that the continuing flow of inept
and embarrassing decisions (scrapping Sports Days, charity events, prize-giving evenings, progressive student
associations, etc etc) which have produced columns of print in the local and
national press, campaigns on social media, and disbelief among current and
former students and staff. So,
dismantle the curriculum, halve the intake and, hey presto, you’ve got too many
teachers!
This is called ‘vision’.
It’s basically the same technique as the Tories
have used against the NHS. Regard the institution and its staff as the enemy. Run
it down, highlight all its defects. Cut staff, provide worse services to the
point where no one will want to bother to fight to save it. Then flog it off to
a chain.
But isn’t Copland becoming an Academy in
September? Won’t they need teachers?
Of course, and no one believes that an academy
chain intends to run a school with no subjects and no decent curriculum offer.
After they’ve thrown away all this experience and knowledge in this year’s sackings they’ll start
advertising for new teachers, with all the expense and waste (and risk) that
entails. But the new staff will be young and cheap and obedient, advised not to
talk to other staff out of their rank and not to join the union. They’ll be on
short-term, hire-and-fire contracts and staff turnover will be high. In a few
years’ time they’ll all be agency staff and many will probably be on zero-hours
contracts. Most will give up teaching in less than 5 years. This is not a
prediction; it’s already happening. This is Gove’s ‘future’ (with the acquiescence of the Copland management, it’s
imported IEB, Brent’s Michael Pavey and
Mohammed Butt). And it’s what Copland staff are resisting.
Ok. But the ‘no compulsory redundancies’ promise was
only a small untruth and maybe was meant only to refer to the last sacking
round, no reason to call the IEB the Lie EB is it?
Yes, because the last sacking round was supposed
to be the final sacking round (apart from a Leadership cull which now seems to
have been postponed until next
year). The proposed review of TLRs has
not appeared and these new sackings have come out of the blue.
But there’s something else. The sacking letters
Copland staff now regularly receive have always referred to financial
reasons for the sackings and regularly trot out the excuse of ‘the accumulated budget deficit which is
currently in excess of £1.5 million’.
2 points about this:
The ‘budget deficit’ dates from the time when
the recently-convicted –in-the- courts (and earlier-knighted-by- the-Queen) ex-Head
Davies ran the show. Brent Council only acted to stop his activities after
being embarrassed into intervening by
union action, have never made any
attempt to retrieve the alleged £2.7 million taken from the school and did not
even seek costs at his trial. (Why not?
The judge didn’t know either. Choose your own conspiracy theory).
More importantly, this is what Ark Schools, in a
written answer, told Copland staff
would happen to this deficit when the school becomes an
academy in September 2014:
It is normal practice for the deficit to be set to zero by the local authority when a school becomes an academy.
Copland staff should not have to rely on
outsiders like Ark Schools for
information affecting their futures which their own governing body should supply them with. It would appear that, at the date the
current sackings take effect (end of academic year 2013/2014), the deficit will
be ‘set to zero by the local authority’.
So in August, yet more Copland
staff will lose their livelihoods in order to reduce a budget deficit which will not any longer exist. The IEB’s
reference to the ‘accumulated budget deficit’ as a justification for dismantling the school and sacking the
majority of its staff is therefore disingenuous,
an obfuscation.
Or, in plainer English, a lie.
I EB?
Or Lie EB? Or does it just amount to the same
truth-twisting thing?
