Schools break law, no one does anything

According to government figures one in six schools in England is breaking the law on admissions policy - despite the severe warnings given by the government’s Dept for children, schools and families, a year ago.

Not only is this highly embarrassing for schools - and for the school organisations that denied that there was anything wrong with their processes - it also reflects very badly on the internal organisation of those schools that are breaking the rules.

It is one thing for a single person in the school to bend the rules - but the fact is that once the illegal action starts, all the senior staff, the administrators and the parents must know about it.

For example, if you are a parent and you are asked to give a donation to a state or Local Authority school, you know there is something very wrong going on. If you are the deputy head you can’t fail to notice even if no one told you about the policy. If you are the bursar and you are banking the money you must be totally aware of what is happening and where the money is coming from. After all you can hardly keep something like this quiet.

What is totally worrying is that no one seems to have been blowing the whistle. Everyone in senior positions who must have known what was what colluded.

It suggests that there is something deeply rotten within a minority of our schools - something that is so rotten that a whole group of senior staff and parents will work together to keep the conspiracy going.

Whether the government will do anything about this remains to be seen - and the suspicion is that the scenario is so awful, and so embarrassing for the government (given the huge scale of the illegal activity within schools) that no one will want to touch this. But what should happen is that those schools found guilty of breaking the law should be tackled and those members of staff who are shown to have been involved either directly, or through turning a blind eye, should be removed and now allowed to work in schools for a number of years.

This entry was posted on 02/04/2008 at 11:04 pm and is filed under Recent posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.