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.
