This school fiasco shows why the outsourcing agenda doesn’t work

They’d secured a primary school place, bought the uniform – then six weeks before their child’s first day at school they were told: “Sorry, there’s no school.”  Today in the Commons local MP Jim Dowd leads an adjournment seeking answers to why the parents and carers of 60 Bromley girls and boys were left high and dry in late July.

Today’s adjournment will hopefully left the lid on the real perils of mass ‘outsourcing’ of our schools to those without a stake in the wider education system.

Harris Primary Beckenham was denied planning permission weeks before children were due to start. To anyone with experience of the school application process, the story beggars belief. Without planning permission, Harris Primary was approved to go on the list of schools for parents to nominate in autumn 2013. Without planning permission, children were initially allocated places at the school in March 2014. The school remained unapproved through to the end of the appeals process when final allocations are made.

But to top it all, it was the council that invited Harris to build the school in the first place.

Bromley Council loves outsourcing. It seized on Michael Gove’s reforms in 2011, immediately forcing primary and secondary schools to accept Academy status. Education staff were quietly scaled back from 2011. It seems we have reached a point were we have schools, but lack a functioning school system.

Bromley is council with a track record of neglecting key services. To make £33 million cuts from 2011-14 they kept £52 million of reserves untouched and drew up a list of cuts designed to maximise damage on the most vulnerable: Stopping in-house homecare provision; slashing funding to sheltered housing; ending grants to poor families for school uniform to name a few (and that’s before we get to SureStart).

The question is how many more children and parents will fall victim to irresponsible councils in other parts of the country?

Of course Bromley Council is not the only guilty party. The Harris chain, chaired by carpet barron, Lord Harris of Peckham, appears to have a policy of taking short cuts to get its schools up and running.

In a letter to parents of Harris Primary children on July 25^th the Harris Federation said: “Other Free Schools in London (including within Harris) have been getting planning permission for September over the course of this week and last, and both the Education Funding Agency and we had been given every assurance that Harris Primary Academy Beckenham would be straightforward.”

So in other words – ‘As ever, we guessed or assumed our plans would be rubber-stamped by a compliant planning committee at the last minute, but this time we did get not get away with it.’ Lord Harris aims to instil the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ in children, which is a fine aim. But this is perhaps a case study from the complacent, lazy end of the entrepreneurial spectrum.

I hope that this case serves as a warning about the short-sighted rush to move schools out of local-authority control – especially in boroughs that eagerly grasp any opportunity to shed their responsibility for key services.