Collapsing academy trust asset-stripped its schools of millions

[T_i_B]

Worrying stuff

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/oct/21/collapsing-wakefield-city-academies-trust-asset-stripped-schools-millions-say-furious-parents?CMP=share_btn_tw

Wakefield City Academies Trust now stands accused of “asset stripping” after it transferred millions of pounds of the schools’ savings to its own accounts before collapsing. On 8 September it released a statement announcing it would divest itself of its 21 schools as it could not undertake the “rapid improvement our academies need”. It said that new sponsors would be found to take them over. While Ofsted rates four of those schools as good or outstanding, 11 out of the 14 primary academies and six of the seven secondary schools the trust was running are below the national average. Parents, teachers and governors have now called on the Department for Education to ensure that the trust’s collapse will not leave the schools out of pocket .

Hemsworth Arts and Community Academy, a mixed secondary school in Pontefract, had £220,000 of funds, raised by volunteers at Christmas markets and other school events, transferred to the trust’s accounts earlier this year. It also saw a further £216,000, which had been held back for capital investment, moved over. “It’s not the trust’s money. It’s our money,” said a former governor at the school, who did not want to be named. “It’s money for the people in the area, their children and their grandchildren. It wasn’t for them to take.”

Heath View primary school in Wakefield had £300,000 transferred to the trust in September 2016. Another school, Wakefield City Academy, had more than £800,000 transferred towards the end of 2015. In both cases the trust told the schools’ governors that the transfer was a loan. Wakefield City Academy even received a number of small repayments. However, since the trust’s collapse both schools have been told that it no longer acknowledges the transactions as loans.

For Wakefield City Academy, the money had been held back to provide a financial cushion for when a particularly large cohort of children – born during the early 2000s baby boom – arrive in the secondary school system. “This money was our rainy day money,” said Kevin Swift, chair of the school’s local governing body. “It wasn’t just left under the mattress. It was money that we had anticipated we would have a very definite need for.”

[TubbersUK]

1. Worrying, indeed.

and begging for a thorough investigation.

ETA:

Murkier and murkier

Yorkshire schools protest at Westminster in academy row

A year before WCAT collapsed, in summer 2016, the Department for Education’s (DfE) Education Funding Agency launched an investigation into the trust. But Ms Kincaid said that despite frequent attempts to requests to see the final report, it has yet to be published. She said: “We don’t know what has happened to the money and people are very angry about this. “In January and February WCAT removed all the finance officers from schools. It meant that if you wanted to order anything as a teacher, you had to go through the trust. “This is why we want the schools back in local authority control because we don’t trust any of these people.

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/education/yorkshire-schools-protest-at-westminster-in-academy-row-1-8822589

[LeftishBrit]

2. Very worrying

Entrusting children's education - and sinking government money - into poorly-regulated and poorly-vetted businesses was always going to be risky. Gove was so keen on free schools and academies for their own sake, that they were doubtless often not even subjected to the same government vetting and oversight that one would expect for private schools.

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Encouraging multi-academy trusts destroys the concept that academies were promoted with

Academies were put forward as a way to give greater control to headteachers and governors - and, by implication, parents - of individual schools, who were supposed to be more responsive to the local needs. But an academy of 21 schools is just another bureaucracy, but one without the accountability that local authority control gave. So we end up with, from the OP link:

The draft raised concerns that the chief executive, Mike Ramsay, had been paid more than £82,000 for 15 weeks’ work, despite the fact that the trust was facing a large budget deficit. The DfE has so far refused freedom of information requests to see the final report.

The previous month, it had emerged that the trust had paid almost £440,000 to IT and clerking companies owned by Ramsay and his daughter. In a statement at the time, the trust said internal vetting procedures had found that the contracts represented the best value.

It seems outrageous that money raised by school volunteers ends up in a central pot that seems to have little outside control. "Internal vetting procedures" aren't good enough when a chief executive gives himself and his family contracts and a huge salary.

[T_i_B]

4. I think multi-academy trusts have been about for as long as Academies!

Oasis Community Learning have been running a number of Academies since 2007. I think they started off with 3 and now run about 47/48 of them.