Open, transparent – yet confidential

he school governors and Kent County Council are determined to ensure that relationships can be restored under a new climate of openness and transparency.” This sentence appears in a letter to parents in July following months of turmoil generated by the Simon Langton Girls’ Grammar School’s aborted attempt to become an academy.

As an independent inquiry looks into the facts of this debacle, we ask how that unequivocal commitment to openness and transparency is going.

The answer is to be found in the pages of your Gazette. KCC spokesman Ella Watkins reveals that a letter to parents “confirmed that the report to be produced by the investigation team would be confidential to the chair of governors who would then decide whether any action was needed in light of the findings of the report”.

In other words, the authority is saying that the chairman of governors will be judge and jury over whether that information is released.

But this ignores the fact that the information contained in the report, which – if it is thorough – will detail who did and said what during this sorry episode, is not the sole property of KCC or the school.

It is ours. It belongs to staff who have a right to know about their workplace. It belongs to parents whose ties to the school are absolute through their children. It belongs to the tax-paying public who must – at the threat of going to prison – fund the education of future generations.

So what part of being open and transparent don’t the school’s governors and Kent County Council understand?

All of it, apparently.