AN academy chain in London set up by the Tory schools minister Lord Nash is having its education curriculum drawn up by his daughter.
The chain of four schools is run by ‘Future Academies’, set up and run by Lord Nash and includes the Pimlico Academy. Jo Nash, who has a degree in history but is not qualified to teach, not only teaches at the school but is helping frame a new curriculum on the subject.
She is also involved in the recruitment of teachers all on a ‘voluntary’ basis; she receives no salary from her father’s company. This has led teachers in the Westminster area to question whether these schools are being run not for the benefit of pupils but rather as the personal fiefdom of the Nash’s.
Michael Parker, Westminster branch secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said he was ‘baffled’ by Jo Nash’s role at the school, saying: ‘I find it extraordinary that an unpaid, untrained and unqualified volunteer is being allowed to teach children. This is an example of what parents need to be prepared for if the deregulation of education continues.’
Of course, this scandal is much more than about the perception of nepotism. It highlights the extraordinary freedom these privately run academies have over the education of young people.
Since 2012, academy schools have been granted the freedom to employ completely unqualified and untrained people as teachers. They can dictate what is taught and the pay levels for staff. Crucially, when these private companies take over schools they also gain ownership of the land on which they stand and any playing fields they own.
These valuable land assets are confiscated from local authorities and handed to the privateers to do with as they will, making them a property speculator’s gold-mine. Not only that, but clearly some of the people running these academy schools are intent on making a fortune out of the freedom from local education authority control granted by the Tories.
On Tuesday, it was announced that the Birmingham multi-academy trust Perry Beeches had collapsed after an investigation into ‘financial mismanagement’, leaving the five schools it ran facing a mountain of growing debt and with no one in charge. The head of Perry Beeches academy chain, Liam Nolan, finally resigned (he had been on sick leave since Easter) along with the governing board, leaving the schools with debts estimated to be £1.8 million, a debt said to be increasing by tens of thousands every month.
Nolan was feted by Cameron and the Tories as a ‘superhead’. In 2013, Cameron called the trust’s academy ‘one of the most successful comprehensive schools in Britain’. He appeared at a Tory party conference as a glowing example of the benefits of academy status.
It was certainly a financial benefit for Nolan, who according to an investigation by the Education Funding Agency, was paying himself twice for his role. The EFA discovered that the trust made payments of £1.297 million over two years to a business called Nexus Schools Ltd, which itself sub-contracted another company called Liam Nolan Ltd, whose sole director is Liam Nolan.
These two scandals in just one week highlight just what is going on in education under a Tory government that is stuffed with privateers at the highest level and which is determined to drive through its privatisation of education through forced academy status at any costs. The fact that the Tories were forced into a humiliating climbdown on forcing academy status on every school in England shows the depths of the hatred the vast majority of parents have towards these privately run businesses.
But this retreat is not enough. The time has come to put an end to the privatisation of education and the financial plundering of schools by these academy chains.
This means getting rid of this Tory government. The teaching unions must demand that the TUC act and call a general strike to kick out the Tories.
