TV school staff face disciplinary hearings
EDUCATING GREATER MANCHESTER HEAD QUIT AMID CLAIMS OF ‘PERSONAL VENDETTA’
TWO members of staff from the Educating Greater Manchester school are to attend disciplinary hearings.
Four staff, including headteacher Drew Povey, were suspended in July last year from Harrop Fold High, in Little Hulton, Salford, which featured in a hit fly-on-the-wall documentary.
The Channel 4 TV programme, Educating Greater Manchester, captured life at the school that Mr Povey had transformed, after being named one of the worst in the country.
Last summer, Harrop Fold was plunged into crisis when Mr Povey and three other members of staff were suspended.
In September, Mr Povey announced on Twitter that he was leaving, claiming he was the victim of a “personal vendetta”, which Salford council has denied.
Another of the four suspended staff has also left the school.
In November, the school was put in special measures as it was deemed to be failing in every category defined by Ofsted. The secondary was deemed “inadequate” in all five inspection areas by the watchdog.
The 948-pupil school will now move out of local authority control and become an Academy.
An Ofsted inspection report, published on Monday, reads: “The school is failing its pupils. Significant and wide-ranging weaknesses have developed over time. “These require urgent improvement.” The chair of governors resigned in October, and four governors quit in November and December. Cllr Lisa Stone, the council’s lead member for children’s and young people’s services, who endured flak when trying to deal with the crisis, also quit.
An investigation was launched in July into allegations that children were removed from the school register - a practice known as “off-rolling”.
This could potentially give the impression that the school is performing better than it is, if the children expected to do poorly academically are taken off the register.
Mr Povey has insisted he has done nothing wrong. Parents and pupils demonstrated to get him re-instated.
As a result of the investigation, two members of staff are facing disciplinary hearings - one this week, and one next week. A panel made of governors from a school outside Salford will hear both cases.
The Ofsted report reads: “Over recent years, Year 11 pupils have been deleted from the school roll shortly before the date of the Department for Education’s annual census of schools each January, only to be readmitted at a later date.
“This type of action means that the examination results of pupils taken off roll temporarily do not appear in school performance tables.”
It adds: “In addition, pupils’ safeguarding has been compromised by the inappropriate and informal exclusion of pupils and by the deliberate misrecording of attendance.
“There has been insufficient emphasis on particular risks and challenges that pupils may encounter - including drugs, knife crime and gangs.”
The report says schools’ records of pupils’ attendance have been inaccurate, in part because some pupils who have known to be absent have had their register mark deliberately changed so they appear as present.
Damian Owen has been appointed acting head of the school until it is formally taken over by an educational trust. He is in charge of the Greater Manchester Learning Trust, which runs Parrs Wood High School.
Salford council declined to comment on the disciplinary hearings.