Taxpayers funding high salaries, perks, expenses of academy chiefs

[Ignitionnet]

So this is a surprise.

I'm shocked I tell you.

https://www.theguardian.com/educatio...P=share_btn_tw

The leaders of academy schools are spending taxpayers’ money on luxury hotels, top-end restaurants, first-class travel, private health care and executive cars, a joint investigation by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Observer can reveal.

Expense claims released under the Freedom of Information Act lay bare for the first time what critics claim is an extraordinary extravagance by some academy chain chief executives and principals, at a time when schools are struggling financially.

The taxpayer is paying Ian Cleland, the £180,000-a-year chief executive at Academy Transformation Trust, to lease and have joint insurance with his wife on an XJ Premium Luxury V6 Jaguar car, it can be disclosed. Included in nearly £3,000 worth of receipts is payment for servicing the car and the purchase of new tyres.

Cleland has also spent £3,000 of taxpayers’ money on first-class rail travel, while dining expenses racked up on his taxpayer-funded credit card include a meal with other staff at Marco Pierre White totalling £471, and the Bank restaurant in Birmingham, at a cost £703.45.

There can't have been many staff at that Marco Pierre White dinner if the bill come to £471....

The logic behind getting private sector involvement in public sector work is always a bit dubious to me. I can see it working where competition is real but can people really make something run so effectively that not only do they run the service for less money but they also manage to make a profit themselves? It seems the efficiency is at the lower end of the organisation, i.e the staff, but at the top they're even more wasteful than the public sector.

[denphone]

We are all in it together of course.

In all the academies I've worked in the changes are usually cosmetic. A name change, some buildings get refurbished,some are new,the uniform alters,maybe a new library. However the intake of children is the same as before and pretty quickly it becomes apparent that little has changed. Grades improve for a while but soon slide back..but that's just my experience.

[Stuart]

A friend of mine is a secondary school teacher. She isn't long out of college (only a few years), and has had a few jobs, including in Academies. Apparently, when one particularly awful school in Kidbrooke was taken over, grades did improve massively. She worked for that school, and then went on to work for the Harris acadamies. She left a couple of years later, saying basically the same as Maggy. She actually now works for my old school, and reckons that is still the best school in the borough. Made even better by the fact the local council recently spent a small fortune building a new school with state of the art facilities for it.

[Taf]

The founder of a flagship free school and two members of staff have been found guilty of defrauding the government out of £150,000.

Sajid Raza, 43, Shabana Hussain, 40, and Daud Khan, 44, made payments from Department for Education grants into their own bank accounts.

The grants were given to set up Kings Science Academy in Bradford in 2011. It opened in 2012.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-36943526

At least with LEAs there can be proper oversight..Gove is an idiot.