Thu 13 Sep 2018, 05:44 AM | Posted by editor
LETTER from Mark Langabeer, Newton Abbot CLP (personal capacity)
Panorama’s investigative reporter, Bronagh Munro, believes that there have been companies which have been paid millions from school budgets, and asks whether it’s the pupils who are paying the price.
Fowey River school in Cornwall is one of 7000 schools that have become academies and no longer under the control of local government. They are ‘trusts’ that receive monies directly from central government. The chair of the school governors stated that he had no idea of the school’s finances. The Trust is financed by a businessman, Michael Dwan. This school, along with four others in the Trust, pays the highest overheads in the country.
Dwan also finances a trust in the North of England, in Whitehaven, in Cumbria. This school required renovation. The companies that undertook the refurbishment were all owned by Dwan. Munro revealed that much of the work was never completed.
The reporter interviewed Dwan, who stated that he had put over £2 million of his own money into the Trust and complied with the rules laid down by Government. One of the rules was that work carried out was on a ‘not for profit’ basis.
As an official of Unison pointed out, the Trust is not required to give the information that work is done on a cost basis only. A report which highlights serious flaws in the academy system was supplied to the Government in 2015. The Government’s response has been to defend the current set-up, claiming that 95% of Trusts behave responsibly.
Munro concludes that the Government should take urgent action to prevent big business from cashing in at the expense of Pupils and taxpayers. Labour must abolish the academies and bring schools back under the control of Local Government. I think it’s time that Direct Labour Departments were reintroduced, in order to end profiteering at the expense of public services.
