A man with a mic: David Weir and his CronxWatch YouTube channel has been out and about in Croydon, investigating the privatisation of the borough’s secondary schools
You might not have noticed. After all, any process done by “stealth” is, by definition, being undertaken in the hope that no one notices.
But since 2007, the state education system in Croydon has effectively been stealthily privatised, with every previously council-run secondary school in the borough now academised.
They’ve been handed over to MATs, multi-academy trusts, including one with its HQ in Croydon town centre, where their chief executive is paid almost £500,000 per year – money that is provided by tax-payers who have virtually no say in how the schools are run.
Across the country, 80% of state secondaries are now run by academy trusts, with the last Tory Government having set a target of 100% by 2030.
Most MATs are described as not-for-profits, which is a deliberately misleading discription, on a par with “affordable housing”. For while the MATs, such as Harris and Oasis, don’t ever declare a “profit”, they are able to spend vast sums on back office staff and executive salaries, while building up reserves funds – mostly from the millions handed over to them by the Department for Education.
David Weir’s entertaining CronxWatch YouTube programme gallops through the state of education in Croydon, and arrives at some worrying conclusions about how the MATs, led by the organisation founded by carpet multi-millionaire Lord Harris of Peckham, have been allowed to create grammar schools through back-door selection practices.
Weir says: “Everything about the academy system is motivated by the idea that putting the profit motive into education will improve things but by almost all metrics, it hasn’t and all the while a few dozen people in key leadership positions plus their expensive consultants continue to make bank.”
At least we think he says “bank”.
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
As featured on Google News Showcase
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
- Inside Croydon works together with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as well as BBC London News and ITV London
ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
If the government remove the VAT exemption for private schools, AND for the “privatised, academy” state schools, how much VAT will that generate for the government?
We could live in hope that all these new tax funds were spent wisely on something like public infrastructure projects (railway and bus service expansion, NOT more road building), but it will probably get splurged on overseas travel junkets for politicians and civil servants, along with the academy ‘fat cats’ ?!
The amount of money raised from VAT on school fees each year will be the same size as Croydon council’s outstanding debt.
It will not be raising money that can pay to build a railway.
Whilst I agree with the principle of the Tories screwing up education by effectively privatising it, and also that some academies are putting profit first, I take issue with Oasis being mentioned here in a potentially disparaging way. Oasis turned round Coulsdon High School as Oasis Academy Coulsdon and is a Christian charity who put serving the community at the heart of its existence. Oasis has a presence in multiple countries helping the poor and needy and is not in the business of making excessive undisclosed profits – that would be against their ethos. I have no formal connection with Oasis Trust but know it is there to serve.
Oasis Academy and it’s “core mission” was exactly how the Harris “trust” now “federation” began. The self-made man that was Lord Harris of Peckham, who started with “nuffin” and later made his fortunes by selling carpets, who suddenly wanted to embark on a mission to “give back to the community”. Whilst also doing a bit of “give and take” with his Labour chums. It’s the same rhetoric, albeit one that operates under the “christian charity”.
But here’s where I take issue with your argument: 1) the lack of oversight for these trusts who operate primary and secondary schools, 2) the inevitable transformation of such trust/charitable entities eventually expanding into self-sustaining operations which undoubtedly require a need for profit margins, and 3) the fact that faith schools/free schools are now key actors that have replaced the state in its traditional area of operations (by traditional: post 1945 I hasten to add).
Whatever the faith or entity, I am not comfortable with the fact that it is slowly becoming the major operator of schools. This is happening because, effectively, the state has been disengaging from its responsibilities – whether it be education, communities or funding local government budgets – simply because of shortsightedness and the fact that it’s just too expensive and not sexy enough to win votes or make headlines.
I was “lucky” enough to be in secondary school in the 2000s. It was a very interesting period; local education authorities were being dismantled by “academisation” which was brought on by Labour. Harris CTC was expanding into what is now the “federation”. Yes, we ended up with shiny new buildings. But we also ended up with teachers who were not allowed to unionise as part of their contracts, and a curriculum that prioritised the “business” and “entrepreneurial” spirit….rather than, you know, education. So much so, that the running joke was that Lord Harris had established the “Tesco express” of secondary schools across South London.
The sad thing is, ultimately, is that we are denying the younger generations the education system fit for a “modern and secular” country.
Oh puhlease… Oasis Community Learning and Oasis Charitable Trust Ltd are charities in the same way that Eton School, or Winchester, or the Whitgift Foundation (which is sitting on unallocated funds of £200million) are charities.
They all use charitable status for the significant business, and tax, advantages that they confer.
Oasis Community Learning employs 5,000 staff in the UK alone, while also relying on the unpaid help of thousands of volunteers.
It has an annual wage bill of £150million.
Steve Chalke, the founder, has held directorships in 28 different limited companies, many of them registered at Oasis’s Kennington headquarters.
Oasis Community Learning is a subsidiary of Oasis Charitable Trust Ltd, because, of course, every charity needs to be part of a complicated (for tax purposes) corporate structure.
Among the directors of Oasis Charitable Trust Ltd is Ola Kolade, a Conservative Croydon councillor and one of Jason Perry’s cabinet members (for “community safety”). This arrangement has not been accurately declared in the councillor’s official declarations. And this at a time when Oasis is keen for Croydon Council to hand over a significant chunk of public-owned property, all in the name of charity…
Kolade, you may recall, is notorious for having been accused by three bishops and other church leaders of deliberately misleading voters – or as most people call it: lying: https://insidecroydon.com/2018/05/03/tory-candidate-in-norbury-caught-out-lying-honest-to-god/
According to its latest set of accounts filed at Companies House, Oasis Community Learning operates 54 schools, 20 of them secondaries (five of which are in Croydon).
Oasis Community Learning Ltd is so large, it has to use the services of three firms of solicitors (including Browne Jacobson, the company so often hired by Croydon Council).
Where it differs from Eton, and Winchester, and Whitgift is, according to Companies House records, that Oasis Community Learning Ltd’s “principal source of funding received by the company is from the Education and Skills Funding Agency in the form of General Annual Grant.
In 2021-2022, Oasis Community Learning received £237.5million.
In 2022-2023, it received £260.6million.
Oasis Community Learning’s combined revenue reserves as at August 2023 were £23.9million, up £2million on the previous year.
Oasis Charitable Trust only uses two firms of solicitors to help manage its affairs. It exists, it says, “to ensure Oasis is strategic in its development, cohesive, mutually supportive and inter-dependent”.
This company has five subsidiaries, including Oasis Community Learning, plus a youth and community development company (which itself had income of £5.4million in the last financial year), and a housing and property arm (2023 income: £4.5million).
According to is own figures at Companies House, Oasis Charitable Trust had consolidated income in 2022-2023 of £277.3million (up from £250.6million in 2021-2022). The vast majority of this income was received through its education business.
Total group expenditure in 2022-2023 was £277.3million. That’s right, exactly the same as its income. That, however, only disguises the many ways in which it chooses to spend all that cash. “The vast majority of this was spent on OCL’s provision of academies £260.4million,” they say.
According to its own figures, Oasis Charitable Trust has current assets of £80million.
Oasis describes this as “charitable activities”. These “charitable activities” include employing 1,821 teachers, plus 196 staff in “central management and support”, 80 on fund-raising, but “only” 247 on “charitable activities”.
Of all staff, 131 are paid between £60,000 to £70,000 per year.
38 Oasis staff are paid more than £100,000 per year.
One of them is paid more than £240,000 per year.
It is registered as a charity for tax purposes. In most other respects, it operates as a very large education business, receiving huge subsidies from the state.
Oasis is certainly there to serve someone.
Thanks for the write up! Reading the comments on others’ personal experiences with the academy system has been eye opening apart from anything else.
The Academy system, for which there is no and never was any justification, is the outcome of an obsession by the oleaginous and poisonous Michael Gove.
The old LEA system, which represented local democracy at its best, was really very good by and large. Many were exceptional, most were better than ok and a few were terrible…..a better distribution than academies.
Gove, toxic ferret that he was, was driven by the need to achieve change for the sake of change and had to find a model, any model, to achieve this and, super omnia, to do all he could to get rid of Labour controlled LEAs. According to Durham University’s research the best estimates, “taking prior attainment and all relevant school and pupil characteristics into account, suggest that there are no systematic differences between school types. There is no evidence that either academies or local schools produce better results with equivalent pupils. As more and different kinds of schools become academies, they become less disadvantaged than many local schools. Now some areas with more academies, especially those that have more recently converted to become academies, take more advantaged pupils. This means that the intakes of council-run schools become more disadvantaged. This kind of social segregation is undesirable for a national school system. It damages average attainment, pupil prospects, and social cohesion.”
Salaries for bosses have become vastly inflated, Teachers have lost many working rights, costs are way above the old LEA system and the whole thing is a venomous farrago which betrays children, parents and local democracy.
Let’s not forget, as toxic a little ferret as Gove no doubt was, and is, the whole academisation handover of public assets to private interests began under Noo Labour’s Lord Adonis.
Yes, that’s true but even 11 years ago in an article about Andrew A the Guardian said, early on
“More important is that there is no miracle academy effect. The evidence on the original, sponsored academies is now powerfully contested: the more prosaic truth is that systemic reforms – from more dynamic heads, improved teaching to inter-school collaborative schemes – have raised the quality of many state schools over many years. These slow but steady changes are now threatened, not enhanced, by the academy revolution mark two, unleashed by the coalition.”
It has been known for some time that academies “play” the system, from selective entries disguised to look like something else, to the exclusions of any pupils who just might drag their average figures down…
But it was Adonis who opened this Pandora’s box.
The Grauniad?! What did you expect?
What’s that supposed to mean? Disparaging stuff just because it appears in the Guardian is worse than childish, its Trumpian!
The old LEA system was ‘very good’? Are you sure? The town hall LEA departments were massively over-manned bureaucracies that often duplicated national functions, like inspection. They could weigh down heavily on head-teachers and demand much of their time. I would suggest that removing the dead hand of the council has mostly been a good thing. Obv the Corbynist left think that profit is always a bad thing, but so is diverting money that should be spent on our kids’ education to line the pockets of an army of town hall functionaries
Rubbish…..I challenge you to find one provable example where money for education went into the hands of functionaries….just one! You should be joining the Trump campaign. he likes that sort of scurrilous nonsense.
The Education Reform Act of 1988 introduced Local Management of Schools (LMS), delegating budgets to schools so that they can be ‘much more responsive to the needs of the society they serve.’ In any normal world this would have thinned out the LEA fat cats
I personally feel its high time someone investigated the wholesale selling off of the grounds surrounding the former Gilbert Scott Primary School (now Quest Primary) for peanuts. Perhaps its a job for an investigative journalist.
and in the same article, 11 years ago, the Guardian said
It’s the same story overseas. From the free schools in Sweden – anyone heard Gove mention these lately? – to the charter revolution in the US, more privatisation, increased testing and a narrower curriculum are delivering decidedly mixed results but increasing social and ethnic segregation and inflicting huge collateral damage on publicly funded, publicly accountable education.
The cat is definitely out of the bag now about Gove’s free schools.