Great City Academy Fraud by Beckett Francis

Author:Beckett, Francis
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing
Published: 2011-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

7

Islington Feels the Wrath of

Downing Street

Islington – once home to Tony Blair, still home to Lord Adonis – was of special interest to the Government. But perhaps we would not have predicted the level of interest. The amount of direct interference in Islington’s affairs, often coming right from the top in Downing Street, has been extraordinary.

Islington Green School has had a rocky ride for more than a decade, at least with the press. Tony Blair, when he was opposition leader, lived nearby, and there was a political row when he decided instead to send his own sons to the other side of London, to the opted-out London Oratory which selected its pupils by interviewing the boy together with both his parents. Blair’s close friend and education guru Andrew Adonis, now Lord Adonis, still lives nearby, and the school, or whatever replaces it, could easily be the local secondary school for his children.

In 1997, Ofsted chief Chris Woodhead placed the school on special measures’, stating that it had failed its inspection, against the unanimous advice of his own inspectors, who visited the school and said it had passed. Mr Woodhead s role was not discovered until January 2005, when a teacher at the school and its NUT representative, Ken Muller, used the Freedom of Information Act to prove it.

The killer memo was from one of the inspectors, Barry Jones, to Chris Woodhead. He says the team ‘were of the unanimous view that the school was not failing’, even though they already knew that they were under pressure to say that it was. ‘A few days later we read in the papers that the school had been put into special measures.’ He made sure his superiors knew how unhappy he was, and was promised an explanation, but never received one. ‘Even after this passage of time I am still uneasy about the final judgement and the lack of feedback to the team members’, he wrote.

What on earth was going on? Here are a few facts, and a healthy dollop of speculation. Islington Green School has had enemies in high places ever since it embarrassed the Blairs by being the local school to which they did not wish to send their children. It would be politically convenient for them if it were a failing school; it would make their decision look less like mere snobbery. In 1997, Blair’s first year in power, Blair and Woodhead were very close, and Blair saved Woodhead’s job by preventing Education Secretary David Blunkett from firing him.

The idea that Woodhead might have failed the school as a political favour to the Prime Minister who saved his job seems so appallingly cynical that one recoils from it. It may be that Mr Woodhead has a perfectly good explanation for his actions, although none has been forthcoming.

The Ofsted judgement looked for a while as though it might be self-fulfilling, as such judgements often are. It certainly caused a crisis of confidence at the school. But the school recovered. It is

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