Rye Academy, which runs the town’s schools, is having to take some hard decisions, including scrapping plans for a new building, and Rye News’ founder Kenneth Bird talks (below) to the Academy Trust’s new Chief Executive about the changes.
Tim Hulme, Chief Executive Officer of the Rye Academy Trust, has been in position since September 1 2016, nearly five months, he told me when we met last Monday, January 23.
He brings with him a background not in education, but in business. Having qualified as a chartered surveyor, he worked in the pharmaceutical industry with Pfizer and more recently has developed skills and practised successfully in business recovery roles. He was recruited following Ann Cockerham’s retirement with the specific task of restoring the Trust to sound financial health.
He is responsible to a new board of trustees headed by Cllr Ian Potter as chairman. The governing body has been expanded to combine Rye College and the Studio School, reflecting their closer alignment. Further appointments are being canvassed following recent resignations of Jacqui Lait and Sue Schlesinger. There have been changes too in other key posts. Jo Townshend has retired owing to ill health from head of the Studio School (one of 30 experimental schools which was opened by then Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2014) , being replaced by Ian Gillespie in addition to his role as head of Rye College.
Despite good results achieved in recent years, the Trust has reached a watershed in financial terms. A report by the National Audit Office indicates schools face cuts of 8% in real terms by 2019-20 with increased costs in relation to higher contributions to national insurance and teachers’ pensions, the introduction of the “national living wage”, pay rises and the apprenticeship levy. There is no additional funding for these and funding per pupil is not rising in line with inflation. Government proposals for a new funding formula for schools in 2018-19 is expected to redistribute money from inner-city schools to rural areas but in the meantime, this small multi academy trust of three schools in a rural area, must ensure its operating model gains best value from public funds in relation to outcomes for all learners.
Also before Christmas came an adverse Ofsted report which found that the Studio School “required improvement”, a rating just above that given for an institution placed in “special measures”.
The need for change was evident. Tim Hulme’s first important task was to prepare a new business plan, reviewing objectives against the resources available. This has been submitted to the Department of Education and the Education Funding Agency, as part of an application for £2 million of urgent additional funding. A response from government, expected by the end of February, will determine the future of this £6 million turnover business.
The plan seeks to ensure that the core subject curriculum, the staffing and available resources are all fit for purpose. A period of consolidation is envisaged from 2017/2019. A new curriculum pathway will provide learning access to the creative industries and employment in the sports and leisure and front of house hospitality industries, with two year apprenticeship schemes being introduced.
There is a need too for bringing the older buildings in the centre of the college complex up to date with a refurbishment programme estimated to cost £500,000, the subject of a separate grant application. Realistically, he accepts there is no prospect of enlarging the basic school footprint onto the vacant Lower School site as had been once mooted.
In promoting transformation, Tim Hulme recognises fully the important role played by stakeholders, primarily the staff, the parents, and local employers, but also the whole community. With the goodwill from these quarters, he has the determination to see the Academy Trust rise to new heights as a beacon of excellence.
Photo: Kenneth Bird
The untidy inception of ‘Academies’ first as ‘partial solutions’ from a Labour Government, then as ‘privatisation vehicles’ from the Conservatives, have served students very poorly. We now witness the damage, aggravated by 6 years of unprecedented cuts from central government.
In some ill-defined way (softly-softly lose the monkey) the management of education has dissolved. The Local Authorities (in our case the East Sussex County Council) have involuntarily relinquished control of supervision, advice, audit and administration. Schools themselves (our Academy Trust) now have to finance that themselves out of their education budget, buying that old and considerable government expertise from outside, mostly private, often inexperienced companies or organisations – a wholly inappropriate use of resources. The profits of those private companies leak money from our children’s education, and a great deal of it ends up in the USA.
England has long been unique in its psychosocial psychosis about education – the anxieties of parents (unhappily transmitted to children) about selection of school and perceptions of achievement that are not mirrored in most other countries, where you simply attend your local school and parents involve themselves in helping to improve that school and holding it to its standards. Here parents are always terrified the grass is greener somewhere else.
All stemming of course from England’s sad fixation with private (so called Public) schools. It was a Tory Minister of Education (Sir Edward Boyle) who declared in the 1960s that there could never be an accepted solution to state education in England until Public Schools were abolished. He was, not unnaturally, a supporter of Comprehensive Education, which he believed the only vehicle to offer equal opportunity, insofar as that was possible.
Unfortunately the English parent looked and continues to look for easier solutions – instant answers and achievement, instant betterment. And ‘instant’ in education does not exist.
So we ended up with a series of government initiatives trying to pretend state education was worthy of comparison with the private sector, when it should never have ever considered itself in competition.
And it should of course never have allowed the financial charity-benefits (tax) that are offered to private schools.
Regularly state education has been under-funded – at the moment, since 2010, to the tune of many hundreds of pounds per pupil each year. The damage is to some extent mitigated by the dedication of staff who regularly work beyond their remit (as they do in our NHS and Social Services).
And just to add to the absurdity in education, this hapless government now intends to expand Grammar Schools – to accentuate with the ridiculous 11+ the strain on already hysterical parents and shortly to be hysterical children.
(For what it’s worth as an example, I failed the 11+; but eventually reached the privilege of a place at Oxford – it is criminal to label children failures before they even reach adolescence).
Whatever the problems that face the Rye Academy Trust (and we all wish them well – the dissolution of English education was not their idea), the rest of us should be campaigning for an increase in general taxation to save not only the infrastructure of our education, but our health service and social care. In those respects this country (under-taxed in comparison with most other First World economies) really is teetering on the edge of disaster.
Yet still no one seems to notice sufficiently. If this extent of social decay was happening in Canada, New Zealand or Germany, there would be riots in the street.