Turner Schools, a small academy Trust with a CEO being paid the disproportionate £140,000 – £150,000 a year, has appointed a Deputy Chief Education Officer, on a salary likely to be above £120,000, to enable the CEO to focus on curriculum matters. His salary will be met by a Grant from the government’s Multi Academy Trust Development and Improvement Fund, at no cost to the school, as explained in a letter to staff. Such grants are only available for MATs which have a “proven record of working with underperforming schools to improve performance” . This should surely have ruled Turner Schools out, given the damage they have wreaked on Folkestone Academy, as demonstrated in various articles on this site, most recently here
The letter provides three reasons for the appointment, explored below:
- To join our mission to deliver a powerful education that overcomes educational underperformance.
- To provide executive principal function when and where needed in our trust schools
- To create additional capacity to enable the CEO to focus on curriculum.
Turner Schools has already been awarded a previous £100,000 sum from the same source in 2016-17, on the basis that it was taking on two new schools (Folkestone academy and Turner Free School) in the following year, even though Shepway does not appear in the list of priority areas for funding at that time. Although there appear to be no fresh published rules for 2019 starts, the original criteria would suggest that Turner Schools is being considered for further expansion, in spite of its appalling record! The current DfE view is that: “Applications for the Multi Academy Trust Development and Improvement Fund were considered through a robust process and funding and was awarded to trusts that provided sufficient evidence in relation to the assessment criteria.The Multi Academy Trust Development and Improvement Funding has enabled the Turner Schools Trust to accelerate the pace of school improvements ."(Schoolsweek). It is obviously unfortunate that all the assessment measures, such as the falling GCSE performance, soaring exclusion levels, sharply declining pupil rolls (notably Year 7 and Year 12) show school decline rather than improvement.
It would appear that Turner Schools has the clout to attract largesse out of all proportion to performance, ahead of so many worthy and financally struggling establishments without such influence. Presumably in time this disproportionate investment will see the tide turn and signs of improvement appear, which will indeed show that with much greater resources any school can flourish. As observed by Professor Lygo, Chairman of Turner Schools: 'Jo Saxton and her team have also worked extremely hard to bring in additional funding to Turner Schools with the explicit aim of this funding supporting all four schools. The additional funding Jo personally applied for amounts to over half a million pounds, and comes from a combination of government grants as well as charitable donations'
Jo Saxton, who has considerable high level experience in curriculum matters, now plans to focus on it, being the original reason she took on the Turner Schools post (we learn for the first time), being freed up from other strategic responsibilities by Mr Murphy. She wants Turner Schools to be known for its expertise in what is frequently posited as an academic subject based curriculum, although there is little mention of this aim in the numerous previous extravagant claims and quotes cited by the Trust. It is surely questionable that a highly paid CEO technically responsible for strategic oversight now has such a narrow focus.
The letter defines the Turner Schools latest mission, it being difficult to keep up with the number of versions. The previous version was: The Trust’s mission, ‘sea-change’, envisages contributing to the next phase of the regeneration of the area and overcoming disadvantage by running schools where children thrive and knowledge matters. The change of direction follows the poor recent performance of the Trust’s schools since it took on responsibility, especially at Folkestone Academy which appears to have declined on all measures. The Trust’s solution since September has been to blame everything on the previous management. A classic example was when I recently exposed the exclusion record of Folkestone Academy (1211 fixed term exclusions in 2017-18, 400 more than any other school in Kent), and Martello Primary (second highest in Kent) on new ‘high expectations for behaviour’, completely contradicting previous assertions such as that exclusion indicates 'Behaviours that lead to exclusions happen when students perceive there to be no limits and no expectations and no rules.'
It actually sounds peripheral to the running of a small well ordered Trust, which causes one to wonder what the Regional Schools Commissioner saw in the appointment when he approved it, unless either there are new schools in the pipeline or else Turner Schools is well connected.
Perhaps surprisingly, when one opens the Home page of the Turner Schools website, there is just one article on show, a TES profile dating back to November 2018, of Dr Saxton, mainly her life and career and philosophy. Surely the introduction to Turner Schools should be about those schools, not just one person!