Guest blog by Save Roke Campaign, Parents at Roke Primary in Croydon have been campaigning against their children's school being forced to become an academy. They have been working with the Save Gladstone Park campaign. The process at Roke is further along the line and Harris Academies (run by Lord Harris the Carpetright millioniare and Tory Party donor) has been chosen by the DfE as sponsor. Harris have been carrying out a 'consultation' with parents...
The results of the Harris consultation have finally been published. It
is a government commissioned document that will enable the Secretary of
State to make his final decision on Roke. The consultation cost £5k of
taxpayers money. Yet it contains biased reporting of statistics and
omission of data that is unfavourable to Harris. It is alarming but not
surprising because the consultation was not run by a neutral or
independent arbitrator but by Harris themselves.
Harris have
twisted their stats making it look like 62.5% parents support a Harris
academy, when in fact only 19% of respondents said this, meaning that
81% did not voice support for them!
So how strong is the
support for Harris at Roke? Support is miniscule. Only 15 parents from a
school with 442 pupils voted for a Harris academy. If we go by one vote
per child, this is a measly 3% of parents. This means 97% of parents
were either against, undecided or did not bother to express an opinion
by abstaining from the vote. Many parents felt it was a fait accompli
and a fake consultation. They did not believe that we would be listened
to, so they did not bother to fill in their consultation forms.
Harris will argue that there only 80 people returned their forms. They
will state that only around 17% bothered to vote and will deduce that
most parents are indifferent. We beg to differ. Of course there is
always some indifference or apathy, but we think this figure actually
captures two things: 1) the powerlessness parents feel at controlling
the outcome and 2) the fact that no one has actually explained in an
accessible way what academisation actually means. There were no verbal
presentations or explanation. Some parents just don't feel informed
enough to have an opinion. What is clear is that there was absolutely no
ringing endorsement of Harris.
Given that there has been such
a spirited campaign against the forced academy at Roke, this was the
opportunity for pro Harris parents to really make their voice count in
an anonymous ballot, the fact that only 3 % came out to support Harris-
speaks volumes about how welcome they are at Roke.
Incredibly,
Harris manage to present the results in such a way that makes it appear
that 62.5% of parents support them sponsoring Roke. They achieved this
by only including the responses of the 24 parents who voted 'yes' to a
question asking if they supported academisation at Roke, of these just
15 went on to say they supported Harris as sponsor. These are tiny
numbers. Harris completely ignored the opinions of parents who voted
'no' to an academy. Their opinions on whether Harris should sponsor the
school were not included in the analysis. It means everyone who voted
that they did not want to be an academy - had absolutely no voice about
whether or not they wanted Harris to be the sponsor.
The
school ran their own poll to gauge parent opinion which had a much
larger response than the Harris poll (129 families- only one vote was
allowed per family), probably due to greater faith in the way the poll
was being run. As a final blow to transparency, only half of these
results were included in the consultation report, despite these being
submitted by both the school and the Save Roke committee. Results
pertaining to whether parents wished to become an academy were included,
but a question about whether parents supported Harris as sponsor should
we become an academy, was completely omitted. We can only think that
they were omitted because the results were clearly unfavourable to
Harris. It showed that 83% of respondents were against a Harris academy
and preferred Riddlesdown Collegiate as sponsor. We know which survey we
trust. We are dismayed that Harris have completely written out
Riddlesdown as a legitimate alternative, from the consultation.
Here is the missing information.
Q2 If the school does become an academy, who do you want as the sponsor?
Riddlesdown Collegiate 83%
Harris Federation 17%