Between September and April this year, 33 children at Oasis Academy Isle of Sheppey (OAIS) have ‘left’ the school to take up Elective Home Education (EHE), some having reportedly been encouraged to do so, which would be unlawful. This figure is almost twice that of the next two Kent schools, Cornwallis Academy and Ebbsfleet Academy, which both saw 17 children leave to be ‘Home Educated’.
Other OAIS pupils were sent to the Swale Inclusion Centre, and removed from the school’s Register, the removal having the effect of deleting the pupils GCSE record from school examination performance, as explained in a previous article, here.
The school also sent some Year 11 pupils home early in May for compulsory ‘Study Leave’ without tuition, whilst the others continued to be prepared for their GCSEs in school. This action amounts to what is often called an ‘informal exclusion’, which is unlawful.
Some of these children will previously have endured the Reflection punishment, which requires pupils to sit in a room and ‘Reflect’ on their behaviour for a whole day, an utterly unrealistic expectation that a day of boredom will improve matters. The reality is that Reflection is utterly destructive, inevitably producing antagonism towards and alienation from the school, is almost certainly unlawful as the child has been forcibly deprived of education without provision for catching up, and indeed could be regarded as child abuse.
Reports of bullying are rife.
The Kent District of Swale is in the top 10% of mostdeprived areas in the country (along with Thanet), with Sheppey having seven of the 20 most deprived local council wards in the county, so ‘tough love’ is an understandable strategy. However, simply dumping problems elsewhere without caring about where the child finishes up is no solution, and heaps up future problems for society.
Unfortunately, on the Isle of Sheppey with alternative secondary schools on the mainland in Sittingbourne all oversubscribed, these approaches to improvement are seriously flawed, and so pupils forced out are left without a school. As a result, private tuition flourishes on the island, but should not be an alternative to school.
Ofsted in March found the school Requires Improvement. Oddly, although Ofsted is very positive about the new leadership and the changes it is introducing, the Inspection downgrades the effectiveness of Leadership & Management from Good to Requires Improvement. Whilst there are reports of supply staff being laid off, to be replaced by teachers sent in by Oasis, and some children being sent home for the day as they arrived at school, this practice also happens in some other schools being inspected. The failure of Ofsted to pick up these practices is very concerning although, with two of the Inspectors leaders of the underperforming Griffin Trust, perhaps not so surprising.
Kent County Council is rightly and seriously concerned about the extraordinarily number of EHE children leaving some schools in the county, but has no powers over academies. A national comparison showed 1112 children leaving Kent schools for EHE in 2013-14, nearly twice the next largest figure of 593 in Essex. A third of Local Authorities had less than 50 new cases. For 2015-16, the Kent figure was again extremely high at 987 new cases. Figures across the county suggest that the situation is worsening sharply for 2016-17. Permanent exclusion is less popular across the county than a few years ago, as it brings with it obligations for the excluding school for the child’s welfare.
Of course Oasis' track record in Kent, although limited, is also very poor elsewhere. Two years ago, at very short notice, they simply closed down Oasis Hextable Academy, apparently, as it was running out of pupils - poor management of a school that had a few years previously been oversubscribed. No interest where pupils would go, nor those offered places for Year 7 who mainly finished up being accommodated in Bexley schools. They were going to run what eventually became the new Thistle Hill Primary Academy on Sheppey, until it was taken away from them and in a masterstroke, handed over to the useless Lilac Sky Academy Trust which closed at Christmas. Also two years ago, Oasis Skinner Street Primary Academy in Medway was served with a closure warning notice because standards were so poor.
However, the situation in Kent appears out of control from the data, with some rogue schools taking advantage to remove troublesome pupils. The situation at OAIS should already have raised serious questions about what is going on before this year. In 2015-16, fourteen of the 20 new EHE children leaving the school (second highest figure for any school in the county) came from Years 10 and 11, proportionally far more than for any other school, so unlikely to be a principled decision by parents at this late stage. This pattern is typically a move to remove poorly performing children from the school’s GCSE results.
The OAIS pattern for children being withdrawn for EHE during 2016-17 has changed under its new management. There has been a further and astonishingly sharp rise in numbers to 33 children leaving up to Easter and four months still to go. These are now spread out across all year groups, with particular problems evident in Years 7-9, where astonishingly 22 children, two thirds of the total, were withdrawn from the school by their families in the first two thirds of the year to educate them at home, a phenomenon I have never heard of elsewhere, nor replicated in the county data. These are often drawing on private tutors to try and make up any deficiencies. I have spoken with several families who claim that the reason they withdrew their children to be Home Educated is because the school recommended this as an option to exclusion, which is both unethical and unlawful. Why did Ofsted not pick this up; why has the school's Academy Council not noticed what is going on under its nose?
The next five Kent schools with highest EHE numbers have all had problems in one way or another, as identified elsewhere on this website, but none anywhere near this scale. Kent County Council has a responsibility, but little power, to monitor each child being elected by parents for Home Education, and should be highly concerned about the escalation this year at both OAIS as it is across the county.
It is astonishing, and I would argue negligent, that Ofsted failed to pick this up in its Inspection in March especially as, a short while previously the Chief Ofsted Inspector instructed schools to look out for off-rolling, the practice of illegally persuading children to withdraw from school to improve GCSE performance.
There are just two Pupil Referral Units in Kent with a significant number of pupils ‘single registered’ at them, so transferred permanently, sometimes used as a device that gets the pupil off the school roll and so not counted for GCSE performance. These are Swale Inclusion Centre, which saw the number of pupils increase from three to 26 in the four months October 16 to January 17, and the North West Alternative Provision Service, mainly serviced by several Dartford schools, which saw an increase from two to 20 over the same period.
For the three other Kent PRUs, there was actually a decline of one pupil in Year 11 Single Registered Pupils between October 2016 and January 2017, to a total of 14 young people between them, underlining the wrong use of PRUs in Swale and NW Kent. .
I lodged a Freedom of Information Request with the school, by enquiry form, asking for the statistics regarding Reflection and acknowledgments of my requests on May 5th, over a month ago, now past the limit for supplying the information, and have now had to submit a more formal request. Why am I not surprised at this further indicator of lack of accountability?