UBAT to Go: Schools to be Transferred to Other Academy Chains
In dramatic news for Hastings schools, The University of Brighton Academies Trust (UBAT) is to cease running eight Hastings schools and has asked the Department for Education to assign them to other Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs). MATs are the corporations that now run most schools.
Helena Dollimore MP for Hastings said “Today it has been confirmed that UBAT will no longer run our local schools. This is a victory for the young people of Hastings and Rye, and a vindication of what pupils, parents and teachers have been campaigning for.”
The National Union of Education (NEU) warned that “future employers taking over UBAT schools will have a great deal of damage to repair. Financial mismanagement, a lack of transparency, and insufficient funding of frontline services have damaged UBAT schools and made our members’ jobs harder for many years.”
UBAT’s board of trustees have asked the DfE to arrange for all 14 schools in the trust to be assigned to other academy chains. It is unclear whether other MATs can be required to accept the schools, and no MATS have been named.
Not everybody is happy with this turn of events. A parent at The Baird Primary School said, “We liked the curriculum of UBAT and short of transferring it back to maintained status we just wanted them to put their house in order. What’s coming is going to be upsetting and stressful for both parents and staff. Possibly financially costly for staff too.”
The NEU are concerned that this is a deeper issue that affects all children in schools run by MATs: “There are ‘UBATs’ out there that haven’t yet been exposed. The NEU wants all schools to return to local authority control (‘maintained status’), and for the government to properly fund local councils to allow them to provide the kind of education services that our students deserve. We want all UBAT schools to be returned to local authority control and for the wider school community, including all unions, to be included in the discussions about the future direction of these schools.”
In an answer to HIP, the DfE said: “We will now work closely with the Trust, schools and local authorities involved to select the strongest alternative providers for each of the schools and to ensure a smooth transition”. They declined to answer any further questions.
The dispute began when Sally-Anne Hart, the previous local MP, made a freedom of information request, followed by a further and more detailed one from NEU, that revealed that UBAT was reserving an extremely high percentage of funding money for ‘central services’. When the DfE released this information, staff across the academy chain declared a dispute. When the DfE and the UBAT trustees did not act on the excesses, staff took strike action which spread to other academies in the MATs. This brought the issue to national attention, forcing the DfE to act.
‘Central services’, such as HR, IT and training, used to be supplied by the local education authority, but now each MAT has to run its own central services, typically at a retention rate of around 8% from money assigned to it from central government on a per-pupil basis. UBAT, shockingly, was reserving up to 20% for central services from some schools. UBAT is not successful – the money reserved has not resulted in great improvements in the secondary schools as a look at the Ofsted reports will show.
Like all MATs, however, there are a large number of executives on high levels of pay, far higher than the local authority equivalents would have been paid, higher than MPs, for example. It’s not clear how many of these jobs help children, however, these salaries compete directly with money spent on children’s education. If there was a cap on their salaries, fewer posts & fewer expensive cars, MATs would have more money to spend on children’s education.
Hastings’ second biggest MAT is a national chain called ‘Ark’. They have salaries that are so big – more than half a million per year – that six individuals have to be named on their tax submissions to HMRC. This is money taken out of children’s education. Ark prides itself on being a charity, which it is, but the top-heavy tranche of executives nationally and regionally surely undermines their ability to run well-funded schools.
The NEU says urgent steps need to be taken: “It is imperative, that as a minimum, amendments are made to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, currently going through parliament, to allow a route for academy schools to be returned to local authority control and for greater oversight and regulation of academy executive pay and the amounts trusts take from frontline school budgets to fund central services.”
There are many further questions to be asked. Given all MATs have high executive salaries, what, exactly was UBAT spending the money on? What has happened to the CEO? How much will be spent in golden handshakes to UBAT executives? What will happen to the staff working in central services? What happens if other MATs don’t feel able to absorb further schools? How disruptive is all of this going to be? What’s the timescale? Why didn’t the DfE monitor the situation?
A deeper question is why is there a way to turn a school into an academy but not to return an academy to local democratic control?
Hastings Independent Press will continue to follow this story.
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