The highly charged rhetoric of the Michael Gove era may be fading in many memories, but the legacy of his turbulent reforms lives on in a village in rural West Sussex, where one of the most eye-catching of the Govian education projects is now entering its second year.
State boarding schools are nothing new but the Durand academy senior school was to be radically different from any that had gone before. Billed as the “Eton of the state sector”, its aim was to lift hundreds of pupils out of inner London and provide them with a free weekly boarding education that Gove claimed would “equip them for the future every bit as effectively as any private school”.
But a year after the first intake started their education in what was previously a small special school nestling in the South Downs, how has the reality of this much-vaunted project lived up to its preceding claims?
The original plans were ambitious. The school would provide weekly boarding for 625 pupils in years 9-13 at the rapidly expanding all-through (for children aged 3-18) Durand academy in Stockwell, south London.
The majority of pupils at Durand, which was then led by one of Gove’s favourite headteachers, Sir Greg Martin, are from black African and Caribbean backgrounds. More than a third of pupils speak English as an additional language and half are eligible for free school meals. In 2011 the government pledged more than £17m to develop the St Cuthman’s special school site in West Sussex as a state-of-the-art boarding facility, which the Department for Education promised would be a “unique and pioneering project”.
Related: Academy trust served with financial notice warning
But the original building project for the boarding school failed to get planning permission from South Downs National Park Authority, even after the school agreed to abandon its sixth form and scale back the numbers to 375. A planning appeal was withdrawn a year ago and last week the school admitted that, rather than the 250 pupils who should be at the school this term, it has only 75 pupils on roll in years 9 and 10 and is unable to expand beyond 79 pupils at present.
Durand academy’s overall education provision is still deemed “good” by Ofsted, which said that all pupils make good progress, including those with special needs. But a social care inspection in June judged its boarding provision to require improvement on all counts. Findings included poor safeguarding documentation, lack of compliance with the school’s own health and safety policy, lack of appropriate fire safety, children not being routinely able to contact parents in private, risk assessments not being consistently adhered to, and insufficient oversight of policies and procedures by the leadership team.
Despite the challenges the school faces, including uncertainty about how next year it can educate the 80 pupils currently in years 7 and 8 at Durand’s middle school in London, the school’s chair of governors, Kevin Craig, remains upbeat about the future: “We strongly refute the findings of the [Ofsted] report and it is now the subject of a formal complaint against Ofsted. We won’t be commenting further until that process has run its course,” he says.
A new planning application is to be submitted in the new year to provide adequate provision for September 2016 and facilities for sixth formers. “We are experiencing a very high level of interest in the boarding school from parents, with record numbers attending a recent open evening for year 7 students,” says Craig.
“Our exciting development plans will enable us to continue to offer our pupils opportunities that are normally only available to those with considerable wealth via the private sector or through selective education.”
However, critics of Durand’s boarding plan say the situation reflects poor oversight of academies by the DfE and its funding arm, the Education Funding Agency.
‘The antics at Durand academy illustrated the difficulties the DfE has in overseeing public money’
Margaret Hodge MP
In 2013 the National Audit Office said the DfE had not adequately assessed the risks and viability of the boarding school. Local residents are angry that the site was purchased and that funding was agreed and pupils admitted to the school without any understanding of the problems associated with development in a national park area.
The DfE confirmed last week that the £17m in capital funding had been withdrawn as it was dependent on planning permission. However, the school is still receiving start-up funding of about £800,000, given to all new schools to cover diseconomies of scale as they increase their intake, even though Durand has provided only a small proportion of the places planned.
Alasdair Nagle, who lives half a mile from the academy site, says the DfE needs to think again: “The primary concerns of the local community are that from the outset Durand’s planning and execution of this boarding school project have been ill conceived and poorly executed.
“We believe Durand has chosen entirely the wrong location for its proposed boarding school of 375-plus pupils and it does not have planning permission to expand the school from the current provision for approximately 75 pupils. The inappropriate location and Durand’s inadequate expansion plans have been confirmed by various institutions, including the planning committee of the South Downs National Park Authority, the National Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
“It is our hope that the Department for Education will exercise due control and halt this flawed project before additional taxpayers’ funds are wasted.”
The mixed fortunes of the boarding academy have coincided with ferocious scrutiny of the Durand Academy Trust and an associated charity, the Durand Education Trust, in the past year by the National Audit Office (NAO) and the public accounts committee.
An NAO report in November 2014 raised concerns about the Education Funding Agency’s weak oversight of conflicts of interest and financial transactions between the Durand Academy Trust, several other companies in which governors and trustees were involved and a separate charity, the Durand Education Trust, which owns the all the school’s land and buildings (including the boarding school) as well as a health club, swimming pool and residential property on the London site .
The public accounts committee [pdf] subsequently heard Martin had also registered a dating agency in a leisure centre at the school’s address and received management fees in excess of £160,000 a year from one of the private companies that ran the leisure centre. This was in addition to his annual head’s pay and pension package of £229,138, making him one of the highest paid executive heads in the UK.
The Charity Commission is now investigating the Durand Education Trust. In March the academy was served with a financial notice to improve, and in August Martin retired as executive head, though he is still a member of the school’s governing body.
In a letter [pdf] to the then public accounts committee chair, Margaret Hodge, before the general election, the DfE permanent secretary, Chris Wormald, admitted that neither the Durand Education Trust nor the Durand Academy Trust had provided sufficient detail about how the West Sussex site was purchased in the first place.
Elsewhere in the state boarding sector there remains incomprehension that the Durand business model is viable without charging fees, which average £9,000-£11,000 a year in other state boarding schools.
Durand has always maintained costs would be subsidised from the proceeds of its controversial London business interests [pdf]. But Jonathan Taylor, principal of Wymondham college in Norfolk, one of England’s other 38 state boarding schools, says: “Given the complexities of providing boarding provision, wide-ranging care and enrichment activities, we find it very hard to see how this low-cost model is sustainable and why the existing outstanding state boarding schools, many of which are full, haven’t been given the chance and the funding to expand too.”
In spite of the controversy, the Durand model still has its undying fans. The school’s local London MP, Kate Hoey, claims it is making a huge difference to families in her constituency. “Every time I visit the boarding school I am inspired by the drive and commitment of the staff, as well as the enthusiasm of the children and their appetite to learn. They are thriving in a new environment, and I look forward to seeing the school grow and continue to prosper.”
But getting a clear picture of where responsibility lies for the future of the school and its pupils remains hard. The DfE told the Guardian last week it was unable to comment on any of the wider conflicts of interest flagged up by the NAO report, or the purchase of the St Cuthman’s site, or how it viewed the future of the boarding project, until the Charity Commission report is published.
It added: “The ongoing education of the pupils currently at the school is a matter for the Durand Academy Trust, which is responsible for determining the numbers of boarding pupils, in accordance with existing planning consents and the school’s ability to provide safe, secure and fit for purpose teaching and boarding accommodation.”
But Hodge, now retired as chair of the public accounts committee, believes there are still questions for the government to answer: “The antics at Durand academy illustrated the difficulties the department has in properly overseeing public money. The conflicts of interest which arose there, when those involved either in the governance structure or in the management and running of the school benefited financially without any adequate transparency about the potential conflicts of interest, has wider implications. The government has yet to address this. DfE oversight is still not fit for purpose in effectively protecting taxpayers’ money.”
Source:‘State sector Eton’ for inner-city boarders fails to live up to the hype