School Head’s Alleged Incompetence Seems Just a Load of …

nick cowen, 25 November 2008

John Loughborough School is a mixed comprehensive school situated in the London borough of Haringey. Originally established there as an independent school in the early 1980s, after a brief period as a grant-maintained school, it gained voluntary-aided status in 1998.
The school was established by the Seventh Day Adventist church with which it remains affiliated. It was founded to provide a high-quality Christian education for local children of African and Caribbean background. The school is comparatively small, having a roll of approximately 300 children.

For readers who might otherwise not know much about this particular church, it was founded in America at the time of the Civil War, and now has a world-wide membership today of 14 million. It is very pietistic. According to the BBC website, ‘Adventists live modest lives, with a strict code of ethics. They don’t smoke or drink alcohol, and recommend a vegetarian diet…’
In September 2005, after a sustained period without a head, it acquired a new one in the person of Dr June Alexis, who is a member of the Adventist church and of the same ethnic background as those for whom it caters.
Dr Alexis has just been fired by Haringey. Its Director of Children’s Services Sharon Shoesmith has recently been much in the news in connection with her refusal to acknowledge any members of her department were professionally at fault in not having noticed anything remiss about the steadily deteriorating condition of Baby P on their sixty-odd visits to his home made before his untimely death there last year.
Ms Shoesmith showed no similar sign of complacency, when, at the end of February of this year, she suspended Dr Alexis as head for failing to carry out a health and safety check in advance of a demonstration that took place at the school by parents of its pupils in support of Dr Alexis after her position at the school had come under threat from Ms Shoesmith.
By the time of this demonstration, it had become public knowledge that Ms Shoesmith considered Dr Alexis insufficiently competent to be able to achieve the necessary improvements in the academic performance and behaviour of pupils that Ofsted had demanded following its inspection of the school in February 2007.
Having failed to persuade Dr Alexis to stand down voluntarily, and also having failed to persuade the School’s Governing Body to remove Dr Alexis, something that at the time only it could do given the school’s voluntary-aided status, Ms Shoesmith then successfully applied to the DCSF to have control of the school wrested from its Governing Board and placed in the hands of what presumably she hoped would prove a more compliant Interim Executive Board.
By then, to be precise since the start of the 2007-8 school year, Ms Shoesmith had secured the agreement of the school’s Governing Body to have parachuted into it a team of senior executives of her own choosing. Initially, they were ostensibly put there merely to ‘help’ Dr. Alexis effect the improvements Ofsted had called for before it made a return inspection of the school later that year. By then, were the called for improvements found not to have been made, the school stood in danger of being placed under special measures that could have led to its closure.
When Ofsted revisited the school, as it did in October 2007 and in May 2008, it judged that improvements were evident, especially, so it made a special point of making in the later of these reports, after the new heads had taken running of the school following Dr Alexis’ suspension. However, Ofsted found that not enough progress had been made in the areas of achievements and standards and of teaching and learning. The school was given further notice to improve in these areas.
Last month, Dr Alexis was dismissed from her post. According to a report in last week’s Times Educational Supplement, the grounds for her dismissal were her failure to conduct a health and safety check prior to a demonstration by parents there in favour of her continued appointment as head. Dr Alexis is currently appealing against Haringey’s decision to dismiss her.
If the grounds for Dr Alexis’ dismissal were her failure to carry out that check, the decision seems a trifle draconian, seeing that the demonstration apparently passed off entirely peaceably and without injury to anyone.
Still more importantly, since Dr Alexis’ suspension last February and Ofsted’s last visit to the school in May 2008, something has transpired that seriously calls into question, not only Ofsted’s competence to judge how well schools are performing, but also that of Ms Shoesmith in having claimed Dr Alexis to be not up to the job of improving the school.
What has transpired is the publication of last year’s GCSE results. These results show the school to have been the most improved one within Haringey during 2007-8 in terms of GCSE results. 39 per cent of its pupils taking GCSEs there that year gained grades A* to C in 5 or more subjects, including English and Mathematics. These results place the school above several other secondary schools in the borough.
The results show dramatic improvement on the two previous years. In 2006, the first year at which Dr Alexis was at the school, only 13 per cent gained such GCSE grades. In 2007, there had been an improvement, but only 19 per cent had done, leaving it still the poorest achieving school in Haringey.
Haringey has been quick to credit the school’s improved GCSE performance to the pair of new heads that it placed there after September 2007. However, it defies belief to suppose that a major part of this improvement could have failed to be due to changes Dr Alexis had instituted before they took over from her.
GCSE grades are based on a child’s performance as tested over a two year period. It is inconceivable, therefore, that learning and teaching at the school had not begun its dramatic improvement before the new team of heads had arrived there, and that improvement must be credited at least in good part to measures Dr Alexis had begun to put in place.
One of the reasons that GCSE performance at the school dipped by 2 percentage points at the end of her first year there was that, after having joined it in September 2005, Dr Alexis stopped entering pupils for GNVQ’s, doubting their genuine vocational benefit in comparison with that of GCSEs gained in mathematics and English. Despite GNVQs each being counted as equivalent to 4 GCSEs, she had wanted her pupils to concentrate on what were, in her judgement, more vocationally important subjects.
A further change had Dr Alexis made that was beginning to show dividends was to enter the school’s more advanced pupils for GCSE before they reached year 11, the year at which these examinations are normally completed.
When comparisons are made between her school and others in Haringey in terms of the level of pupil performance at GCSE in English and mathematics, the improvements Dr Alexis had started to achieve before she was suspended become still more dramatic.
According to a website of friends of the school, in September 2008, 40 per cent of its pupils joined year-11 already having gained some GCSEs at grades A* to C. In the case of some of them, they had entered that year already having gained as many as 3 or 4 GCSEs. Likewise, in September 2008, 45 per cent of its pupils entered year 11 already having gained GCSEs at these grades. Some who did had gained as many as 5 or 6 GCSEs. As is rightly observed on the website: ‘JLS has begun to exceed national standards and is on track to rapidly eclipse the top schools in the borough.’
There are many aspects of this case that make it highly significant. Indeed, in terms of national importance, it arguably ranks alongside the case of Islington’s notorious William Tyndale School in the early nineteen seventies. In that earlier case, however, a local education authority was seemingly willing to support a manifestly maladroit school head. In the present case, by contrast, one of them appears to be doing the very reverse: undermining a manifestly able school head, who, at worst, was guilty of a minor infraction that does not merit dismissal.
Without speculating as to motives in this case, one cannot fail but be struck by the apparent craziness of a local education authority in dismissing the head of a school catering for largely disadvantaged black children of a particular religious denomination, who is herself black, female and of that same denomination. She also holds the highest possible academic qualification in having gained a PhD from the University of Leicester. If ever there was an admirable role model for such children, one would have thought her it.
In her place it has instated to run the school on a day-to-day basis someone who is neither black nor of that denomination. Neither of the two school heads appointed to run it in place of Dr Alexis has a PhD either, although that in itself is clearly not very important.
We know that there are those in high places who, despite protestations to the contrary, seem hell-bent on undermining the autonomy and integrity of faith schools. They seem hell-bent on this course, because, in their view, the selective admissions policies of these schools unfairly favour children from middle class backgrounds over those coming from less privileged backgrounds.
In no way can such a claim remotely be made about the children attending the John Loughborough School, save in that those coming from devout Seventh Day Adventist homes can be said to be privileged thereby through the temperance and piety of their parents.
Were John Loughborough School to continue to succeed academically, its success would spoil the narrative that portrays faith schools as cherry-picking more socially advantaged children.
One hesitates to think that such a consideration could have played a part in the move by Haringey to get rid of Dr Alexis. However, according to the website of friends of the school, ‘since Dr Alexis’ suspension [in February 2008], her early-entry policy has been reversed: year 9 pupils earmarked for 2008 were not entered and we understand that year-10 entries, if at all, will be drastically reduced in 2009’.
Let us hope that these friends of the school are wrong in claiming what they do here about the reversal of its policy to enter its pupils early for GCSE.
For readers wishing to learn more about this whole matter, at the end of last year the church with which the school is affiliated commissioned an independent enquiry into the running of the school from Professor Gus John who is a fellow of London University’s Institute of Education and a visiting professor of education at the University of Strathclyde. His painstaking, and seemingly entirely impartial, report, compiled without the cooperation that he had sought from the school’s Chairman of Governors and from Ms Shoesmith, entirely absolves Dr Alexis of any blame. It makes salutary, if not uplifting, reading.
Let us also hope that, irrespective of whether Dr Alexis ever returns to the school, her reputation as a competent and able school administrator is restored. Even if, as I for one hope, she wins her appeal, but she understandably decides to take early retirement or another form of golden handshake, it seems that Ms Shoesmith’s accusation against Dr Alexis that she was incompetent as a school-head is nothing other than a load of… cobblers.