A councillor wants backing in her call to extend Woodingdean Primary School’s consultation period as it looks to join an academy trust.
Labour councillor Jacqui Simon, who represents Woodingdean on Brighton and Hove City Council, has prepared a motion to be debated by councillors on Thursday (10 July).
She wants council officials to listen to governors’ feedback and find a package of support to encourage them to stay within the council’s “family of schools”.
Woodingdean Primary School started its public consultation on Monday 9 June in a governor’s letter announcing plans to join the Eko Trust which currently runs 10 schools, including two in Brighton and Hove.
The consultation was due to end today (Friday 4 July) after a series of public meetings held by the school and the council.
Her motion asks members to note that there is “significant concern” about the principle of council -maintained schools becoming academies from staff, parents, carers and the wider community.
Councillors are also asked to note that Eko Trust is in the process of merging with another multi-academy trust, the Compass Partnership of Schools, which runs 15 primary schools.
Councillor Simon’s motion asks
- the leader of the council to write to the co-chair of governors to seek to extend the consultation until autumn, supporting parents’ wishes
- officials to consider how best to ensure that Woodingdean school governors are fully aware and briefed on the school improvement work undertaken in recent years and the totality of the council’s offer to schools prior to the next full governing board meeting where feedback from the consultation is to be discussed
- officials and cabinet members to listen and respond to feedback from the school and to consider whether bespoke packages of support are available and committing to always innovate and evolve the council’s offer
- officials to consider how they can seek out schools considering academisation and present a robust case to them for remaining as a council maintained school
She noted the Labour administration’s position which she said was explicitly to oppose new proposals for schools to become academies on principle.
When the school announced its plans, Councillor Simon said: “We have two fantastic schools in Woodingdean and energies would be better spent sharing and developing expertise together rather than engaging in competition over enrolling the community’s children.”
The school, in Warren Road, has been rated good by the education watchdog Ofsted since 2012, with an outstanding early years section. The whole school was rated outstanding in 2006.
Woodingdean Primary is one of fewer than half of state schools in Brighton and Hove which is not operating in the red, according to figures released to the Schools Forum last month.
In the consultation document, the governors said that joining the trust would give the school a better chance of achieving an “outstanding” Ofsted rating, improve teacher recruitment and retention and help with budgeting because per-pupil funding had not kept up with costs.
The consultation document said: “We have given the first two options a great deal of consideration, including receiving a presentation from the LA (local authority) setting out how they could support the school.
“However, we concluded that remaining as an LA school, whether standalone or federated, would not enable the school to effectively address the three key considerations.
The council proposed reducing the school’s published admission number (PAN) from 60 to 45 in 2022 and last year as the number of children living in Brighton and Hove continues to fall.
But after overwhelming local opposition, the council decided against reducing the school’s intake although, this year, on national offer day, the figure for this coming September was 35 pupils.
The school can appeal any PAN reduction by the local authority, but once it is in a MAT, it will have to do exactly as it is told by that MAT. No process of appeal there!
It would be terribly sad to see a good local community school handed over to Eko Academy Trust who takes £1.8million pounds out of just 10 schols to pay just six senior staff.
It’s a disgraceful misuse of school funding.
Very interesting point—because the school itself pays to fund that. Rough maths suggests that joining the Trust costs the school around £257,000 per year, just to cover central executive salaries. That’s before factoring in any other top-sliced costs like HR, IT, or finance.
As it is the school and other maintained schools buy such services from the LA or whoever they think is well placed to provide them. That may include another local authority rather than B&H. That includes HR, IT among many others – a MAT is not that different – though whether its ‘more expensive’ or ‘value for money’ are valid discussions. The challenge for primary schools is they don’t have the economies of scale that a large secondary has nor the bandwidth, expertise or resources to tackle many of the challenging demands placed on them. “Coming together’ as a federation or joining a MAT has its appealing aspects, which is what has largely driven moves in this city. There have been various discussions around ‘federating’ of schools which was announced to much fanfare last June and died within months. With so many schools under pressure – the primary sector in particular is running out of time and patience for a model that would work. The question to be asked is why a school or any school feels their future is best placed outside of the maintained school framework.
Economy of scale is a very fair point, one that absolutely could be done through local authority.
It’s in the federation’s interest to “sell the dream” to the school considering it. There’s no pressure to be accurate about the negatives.
At the very least, understanding the downsides are extremely important, because an academy can no longer be scrutinised through the council, there’s a risk of a lack of oversight.
Where do you get those facts from? I just looked at companies house accounts for eko and their top 6 salaries are all under 150, therefore nothing like the 1.8 million you are suggesting. The problem with things like this is the crap people say that is untrue which leads many people to then believe them as fact.
It’s a good question, and it highlights the importance to check the source documents properly The £1.8 million figure is correct as per Eko Trust’s signed 2024 accounts on Companies House, but it’s not just base salary. It includes their, Salary, employer pension contributions (which are high, up to 23.68%), Employer National Insurance and any taxable benefits.
The top six executives did all earn under £150k in salary alone, as the accounts show. But the total cost to the public purse for those six people was £1,802,000 in 2023-24. That figure is from page 58 of the Trust’s own signed accounts.
So yes, no one is being paid £1.8 million as a salary, but also yes, it’s costing that much overall to employ them.