Keep Camden Local / Go for Greenshaw has been on BBC London news again today.
Journalist Marc Ashdown interviewed Camden parents, Tom Brake MP and Leader of Sutton Council Ruth Dombey this morning outside Camden Juniors.
Look out for the report on BBC London News at lunchtime and this evening.
The Callidas report has incorrectly stated that ‘the Greenshaw Education Trust submitted a petition to the Minister’.
The petition of 1300 signatures was collected and submitted to the Department for Education by Go for Greenshaw – Keep Camden Local campaigners. It was not organised by Greenshaw.
The petition was delivered directly to Lord Nash’s office and did not go through Callidas.
Whilst the consultation responses were overwhelmingly in favour of Greenshaw, they do not tell the whole story.
As well as the consultation forms that were sent to Callidas, there has also been
calling on the Government to appoint Greenshaw as sponsor for Camden Juniors, which have been handed in directly to the Department for Education.
In addition letters have been sent directly to Lord Nash by a number of local stakeholders, including our two local MPs, Sutton Council, many local primary headteachers and all Sutton’s secondary headteachers, that state their support for Greenshaw’s sponsorship proposals.
All of this together demonstrates the strength of support for Greenshaw, which surely cannot be ignored.
Keep Camden Local – Go for Greenshaw made it into the news again this week.
Keep Camden Local – Go for Greenshaw featured on BBC London News at lunchtime today.
Go for Greenshaw parents, Tom Brake MP and Will Smith, headteacher at Greenshaw High School, were interviewed by BBC journalist Marc Ashdown on Friday.
A brief piece showing Tom Brake was aired earlier, with a longer story at lunchtime.
The BBC plan to run the story again at 6.30 this evening – royal birth permitting!
Along with all the returned questionnaires in Greenshaw’s favour, the 1300 signatures on the petition and the hundreds of letters, this should help to show Lord Nash the strength of support for Greenshaw to become the sponsor for Camden Junior School.
Please make sure you fill in and return the official consultation form before 19 July.
The consultation form is in the Harris Proposal document; please also read the Greenshaw Proposal document before making up your mind.
For a summary of why we think Greenshaw is the best option for Camden Juniors, see this leaflet.
Consultation forms can be returned to Camden Junior School and the school will ensure they are forwarded to be included in the consultation.
You can download a copy of the consultation form here.
Pupils from Camden Juniors and Greenshaw have signed the new ‘Go for Greenshaw’ banner in Denmark Road.
The original ‘Go for Greenshaw’ banner on the railings opposite Victor Seymour School was removed by persons unknown earlier this week.
Campaigners acted quickly to get a replacement banner which was put up on the railings and signed by pupils from both Camden Juniors and Greenshaw High School.
The Department for Education (DfE) seems a bit ‘confused’ over which kinds of organisations should be the sponsors of schools that need support.
Education Minister, Lord Nash, at a national conference in April this year said that he very much believes in school-to-school support, and local clusters of schools. And he urged existing academy schools to help by supporting underperforming schools near them.
Dr Elizabeth Sidwell, who was then the Government’s Schools Commissioner, told the same conference: I want more school-to-school cooperation. Good and outstanding schools have so much to offer; we are going to outstanding and good schools and asking them to be a sponsor, and they might not want to become a big sponsor.
Department for Education officers have spoken to headteachers of academy secondary schools and promoted the idea of them sponsoring primary schools. The officers indicated that the DfE wanted to offer alternative sponsors to the big chains like Harris or Oasis. And that they believed that smaller operations could provide a quality bespoke alternative to the larger one solution-fits-all provision of the larger national sponsor organisations.
Greenshaw’s proposal to be the sponsor of Camden Junior School seems to fit perfectly with what the Minister and his DfE officials want. Greenshaw is a successful academy school that wants to help a school near to it; that offers a quality bespoke solution for Camden’s improvement.
But other DfE officials say they would prefer Harris as the sponsor of Camden Juniors, and are suggesting that they favour organisations that wish to expand for the sake of it, and take on a great many schools even though they may not be able to offer them all the same high level of support.
The Times on 7 January 2013 ran an article under the headline: ‘Academies growing too fast, say experts’.
The Times said that some of the organisations running academies may have expanded too quickly, reducing their chances of turning around failing schools.
Education experts had analysed the performance of schools taken over by academy chains. They recognised that the whole point of the Government’s sponsored academies policy is that a sponsor can help to improve weaker schools by taking them into their academy chain. But they questioned whether a sponsor was able to achieve the required improvement in a large number of schools at once.
The Times concluded: ‘It will help no one if academy chains over-reach.’
We share this concern.
The Harris Federation is currently expanding rapidly by taking over a number of primary schools at once. But they have no track record in improving primary schools, and could be over-stretching themselves, taking on more schools than they can really cope with.
It will be of little help to the children of Camden Juniors if, after they have taken over, we find that the resources and expertise of theb Harris Federation are too thinly stretched across all the schools they control, and they are not able to devote the resources to Camden that it needs.
The Greenshaw Trust, on the other hand, has the capacity and capability to provide the support that Camden needs; it will be focused on just Greenshaw High School and Camden Juniors, and is not trying to take on too much at once!
Greenshaw has the capacity, skills and experience required to make real and immediate improvements to the standards of teaching and learning at Camden Junior School.
Will Smith, Greenshaw headteacher says: ‘The development and improvement of standards of learning and teaching are part of our core work at Greenshaw. Whether it be our support for teachers at Greenshaw or our support of teaching standards in other secondary and primary schools, we are focused on modeling the very best practice and raising expectations and outcomes.’
Greenshaw High School has a large capacity to ensure and improve the quality of teaching, with a range of highly skilled and experienced ‘expert teachers’, including in literacy and numeracy, and a well-developed and successful coaching programme with primary and secondary expert coaches who support teaching staff one-to-one.
Greenshaw’s expert and advanced skills teachers work alongside and support teachers in the classroom. This includes paired planning and teaching, demonstrating best practice and offering support and guidance, informal and formal lesson observations, and an appraisal system which rewards continuous and sustained development.
Between them, Greenshaw and the Avenue have 8 advanced skills teachers who are available to support classroom teachers at Camden. They would dedicate the equivalent of a minimum of 3 days additional advanced skills teacher support per week to Camden to enable immediate and sustained development of standards of teaching and learning.
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