Staff and parents have now been given notification about the result of last night's Fortismere governors vote on a move to foundation status for the school.
With a vote of 14 to 3, the governing body approved the move. The statutory consultation period hadn't thrown up any new concerns, but it was reassuring to have received a large number of letters from parents in favour of the move - the 'pro' and 'con' camps ended up roughly balanced.
Later I'll blog in more detail about my reasons for voting in favour, the behaviour of Haringey Council and the standard of reporting in the Ham & High over recent months.
If anyone wishes to comment on this now, they can of course - but if you have substantive comments to make it would probably be more helpful (to me and to you) if you waited until I do the longer piece and comment on that one instead.
10 comments:
Matt you are totally incorrect in stating that parents have been notified. No such notification has been received by myself or any of the other parents I know with children at the school.
The number of responses was more or less even, was it? Including all the responses from local stakeholders? David LammyMP(against)? Lynne Featherstone MP (against)? The petition signed by 750 students of the school? (The vote against by about 90 percent of the school's staff? Or do the staff and teachers count as just two responses? Please publish the responses, or else no one will ever believe you.
-Fortismere parent.
Dear Matt Davies
I am very disappointed to read that you chose not to go along with your local party line regarding this issue.I am certain this lack of regard will have huge repercussions for your party locally.Whatever happened to democracy.....
Matt - surely the period for representations threw up the concern that the Governing Body hadn't consulted properly in the first place? I understand that all the governors were served a legal letter before the meeting telling them that.
I'm surprised you think the pro and con responses were roughly even. Did you count the 750 students who signed a petition against foundation? Or were they just one response? And the staff (90% of them voted against foundation status). Are they one response, too? How many individual letters did you actually receive during this process?
Why didn't you have a ballot?
Please can you publish the responses, otherwise your lack of transparency will lead to a continuation of the bad feeling this whole process has generated. A terrible shame.
-Fortismere parent
Sorry for the delay in publishing comments, I have been visiting family this weekend (still am, in fact).
I will write the more detailed post I promised, but in brief to answer points raised in the comments above:
18:39 - Staff and parents were notified on Friday by letter and in addition staff were emailed in the morning and parents were also informed through the school newsletter, the usual channel of communication, on Friday.
19:06 (and the 21 July comment) - I did say that the split among *parents* of the school was roughly even - difficult to quantify exactly as some family units sent in multiple responses saying the same thing. Incidentally, it should be noted that the petition you mention of pupils was clearly *NOT* a petition against foundation status. And pupils were given a variety of reasons for signing it.
20:20 - to clarify my position as a governor, I am a "local authority" representative - so in effect am nominated by the local Lib Dems. The local Labour party nominates three governors at Fortismere - I think this is a hangover from before the last elections when the ratio of Labour to Lib Dem councillors in Haringey was a little under 3:1 (whereas now it's roughly 50:50, with a small Labour majority). But on the governing body, I act independently in the best interests of the school, as all governors should - not on behalf of the Lib Dems or the council.
20:28 - There was what I would describe as a threatening letter from the NUT, yes. What we also received was a letter from the Secretary of State dismissing complaints about the consultation and saying that his intervention was not necessary. More about that in my more detailed post.
There has been one other comment, which I haven’t published yet as the person included their address and I am checking with him if he intended to have that appear on my blog. But I will hopefully cover the points he raised anyway in my more detailed post about foundation status, which I am just about to do, along with any others I might have missed. And if he does want the comment published, it will appear above this anyway when he gives me the nod.
Incidentally, personally I am more than happy for the responses to the consultations to be published in full, if made suitably anonymous.
It is simply untrue to say that parents had been informed when you wrote your blog. If that is what you were told by the chair or head you should ask them to explain what happened.
-a letter to parents 'dated' 20th July has now been received. However, our copy along with every other parent we know arrived on the 27th July. I don't think they were posted until after the holidays started. Do you?
-the last Newsletter on the website is that for he week before the decision was reached this does not of course mention the decision. The children were not given a newsletter in the final week of term.
As to your comment that responses were evenly split even the letter from Jane Farrell doesn't make such a claim. But we as parents don't know do we because you haven't published them. Why not and why no ballot? All we get are the rather glib remarks in your blog. A fine way to find out the our childrens' school was moving to foundation status. Who 'elected' you Mr Davies to make this kind of decision about my childrens' education?
Thanks for your comment - and the follow-up email with your name.
As I've just emailed, I checked re the notification. The newsletter *did* go home with pupils on Friday 20th - if any parent did not get that, then they should contact the school so that they can check why.
I have found out that the school lost all power due to flooding on that Friday - so although the letter was written (and dated) the 20th, the post office couldn't collect the bags until after the weekend, so you're right that it didn't go into the mail system until the following week, so it would have been later arriving than expected.
For the same reason the website wasn't updated on the Friday with that newsletter either, which it has been now. It's unfortunate that there was only one day after the decision to inform everyone before the summer holidays and that the rain delayed the hardcopy letter.
I was involed in the petition signed by those 750 pupils and you are correct in stating that it is not opposed to Fortismere's trasition to foundation status as there was not enough information given to us on foundation status to form any sort of opinion. It was this lack of information given to pupils about the future of their school that led to the petition being formed. There has recently been a breakdown of communication from the school to parents and pupils and a general feeling that any opinions passed through the school council were ignored and not even taken into account.
There was a huge feeling that pupils were simply being ignored as major changes rocked their school which appeared to be in effect before we knew anything about them.
I don't need to remind you that all of Fortismere School's pupils futures are decided by these decision and at least they need to be informed about them.
Many pupils when asked to sign the petition refused to sign for fear of the trouble they might find themselves in.
I do not feel that the demands of the petition in question were radical but simply a right of pupils to know what is going on in their own school.
Fortismere pupil.
One of (over) 750
Thanks for the comment.
For whatever reason pupils signed the petition, it's a very impressive number - and it would be great if that sort of interest/participation resulted in pupils at governors meetings and otherwise actively involved in the running of the school.
Did you go to the special 'surgery' that the governors ran about foundation status specifically for pupils?
I can see that some pupils might think they would get into 'trouble' signing a petition, but they needn't worry. And it didn't put the 750 off!
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