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).

COPLAND’S IMPROVED A LEVEL RESULTS: A LESSON FOR GOVE AND OFSTED?

Guest post by Mistleflower

By my reckoning, the successful Copland  6^th form students who  achieved creditable and  ‘significantly improved’  results at A level this year  enjoyed their 7 years of secondary  education presided over by managements made up of :  first,  a bunch of (alleged) crooks led by a man knighted for ‘service to education’; second, a local Head brought on for a few weeks when the alleged malfeasors had suddenly to be substituted; third,  another  local Head on temporary loan for a season; and, finally,  a longer-lasting Leadership team ultimately deemed ‘Inadequate’ by Ofsted and put on a free transfer after failing to restore the school to its former glory after a difficult 3 seasons in the lower leagues. (The current management duo were drafted in too late to have had any influence on the A level results in question).  Despite all this disruption and disturbance, these Copland 6th formers seem to have flourished in their time at the school.

 Could it be that  Michael Gove, ever on the lookout for a new wheeze and a cheap headline,  will see Copland’s  improved A level results  after the school’s  unusual management journey as a potentially winning formula which he will announce at the Tory party conference  is soon to be rolled out in (state) schools across the country?  Could it be that LA  Directors of Education are  at this very moment being urged by DfE clones  to headhunt gangs of  fraudsters to help begin the ‘turning round’ of ‘failing schools’?  Have all Ofsted inspectors been ordered to produce the names of 10 ‘Inadequate’ Leaders  by noon on September 1 or face being declared ‘Inadequate’ themselves to their eternal shame and that of their children, Yea Even Unto the Tenth Generation?  Are teams of these newly-rehabilitated ‘Super-Inadequate ’ Leaders to be parachuted in to ‘failing’ schools across the nation, to begin the process  of driving up their A level results in time for the next election but one? Could it be that South Brent will soon be held up as an example of  educational ‘good practice’ in the same way that Gove has previously cited as relevant exemplars the educational systems of  Singapore, Finland, Guam,  Kyrgistan,  Vanuatu,  North Korea and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in the days of Arthur Grimble (ask your grandad) ?

Or…………. might it just be, in fact, that these successful  Copland A level students worked pretty damn well over a period of 7 years in a school  that had been robbed blind by corruption, that was physically falling to bits, that was badmouthed by their friends and by some parts of the press (though nobly supported by others),  that was betrayed by its local authority, that was woefully mishandled by incoming ‘Leaders’ who seemed to have been briefed that the same staff who, on their own, had lanced the boil, were not really themselves  the victims of historic criminality  but were, in fact, the problem?

And could it be that these staff carried on teaching these students pretty well  over these same 7 years, trying not to be too distracted by having to spend time doing stuff the governors, the local authority or the fraud squad should have been doing   (detection, financial auditing, evidence gathering , taking witness statements,   accusation, publicising, and then union  action endangering their own livelihoods and career futures)  in order to bring to an end the haemorrhaging of millions of pounds of Brent taxpayers’ money?

 Could it be that these teachers continued teaching these students  by  using the same guiding  principles which had brought them into teaching in the first place: a respect for learning,  an affection for their students and a belief in the potential that learning has to change their students’ lives?   Could it be that they gave only weary lip-service to the  ‘Strategies for Delivering a  Good to Outstanding Lesson’  spouted at them on  INSET days by various  Leaders,  most of  whom were themselves demonstrably  incapable of producing anything approaching  the thing which they seemed to imagine  their status in the management hierarchy  gave them the authority to pontificate on?

Might we not ultimately conclude, therefore,  that the most important thing in any school has nothing to do with ‘Leadership’ and everything to do with the organic relationship between teachers and students. That the mantra taught in Leadership School ,  ‘I Am Passionate About Making a Difference ‘,  was never more than  a tired formulation , convenient for contestants on The Apprentice and  those who lack the imagination to invent their own platitudes, but one which barely conceals the barely-hidden fear of all Leaders  that maybe ‘Leadership’, in the sense that it is encountered in many of our schools, ie separate from and ‘above’ the organic teaching relationship which  is the essence of effective education , is no more than a self-serving dead end;  that most ‘Leadership’  ultimately doesn’t make  much difference at all to anything?  And might we not hope that  at least a few of the more talented individuals who have gone down the Leadership road might now see the error of their ways and  find their way back into respectable employment: as teachers?

Well done to those Copland students. You did a great job in exceptionally difficult circumstances.

Well done also to those Copland  teachers.       And, if you’ve still got a job, keep up the good work.

Summer Blues for Copland staff and students

Copland Community School's summer term ended on a rather depressing note yesterday despite the news that the school may get money for a rebuild. We are no longer surprised when money suddenly becomes available when a school converts to academy status- all part of Michael Gove's agenda of carrot and stick (bribery and bullying).

A whistle blower commenting on the rebuild money on the Kilburn Times website:

Excellent news for students, parents and staff that a new school is to be built. However, builders can only build a school in the bricks and mortar sense. Anyone present at the final staff assembly today, when up to 60 staff left, would be aware that the pair of wrecking balls who have just taken over management of Copland will have to develop skills of a rather less agricultural nature if they are ever to hope to build a school in the sense of a community of shared interests working in an atmosphere of trust and support towards a shared educational end. Significantly, the new head and his assistant absented themselves from today's goodbyes.

Earlier I had been sent a message that put Cllr Michael Pavey's report of a 'refreshing and uplifting meeting with parents at Copland tonight. They want change for their kids: better teaching and better results' into context. 

Of course any group of parents would want the latter, and why not. As the message said:

Must be new regime fans then because everyone else wants worse teaching and increasingly terrible results, of course. Obviously everyone wants the same thing: the question is whether alienating the entire staff indiscriminately, acting on the tittle-tattle and prejudices of the  outgoing failed management, shedding 40 odd teachers and not replacing them, etc etc is the way to achieve this. Reality is, eg, Art was being dropped completely and leaving staff not replaced. When it was pointed out by staff that Art  got good results the decision was changed and they said they'd recruit new staff. Job was advertised, only one candidate turned up, completely unsuitable, post is unfilled. Shambles. Many similar examples. Good staff are being driven out. Most so demoralised that any alternative is preferable to coming back in September.

Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted said: 'If I hear staff morale is bad, I know I'm doing something right.' These over-literal clones/clowns seem to have taken this to mean:  'Complete demoralisation of staff is an absolute prerequisite of doing anything right.' It's obviously an attractive notion as achieving demoralisation of staff is a lot easier than achieving any positive good.

The source said that the meeting with parents was badly organised and union members leafleting the meeting had to show parents in and guide them through the security system. Teachers were not represented and a stand-in for one of the most active and vocal parents, who was on holiday,  was not allowed to speak as she was a teacher and 'this would not be appropriate'.

On the rebuild my informant commented:

There are Harlesden residents who are now grandmothers who were promised a new school by Sir Alan Davies when they were in Year 7. I suspect a Good News smokescreen: Lions, Ashes, Tour de France, Royal Sprog, Copland Rebuild.

More to the point was that I heard today of another young Head of Department who has decided to leave.

 It clearly won't be a relaxing holiday for many Copland staff and students.