Grindon Hall school founders resign fearing it will “lose its Christian ethos”
Three founders of the school have resigned over fears that its faith ethos and its pupils’ exam performances will not survive a takeover by a new sponsor.
Elizabeth Gray and John Burn, said they had no option but to resign from Grindon Hall Christian School, in Sunderland, due to concerns that “a secular sponsor will be left in the impossible position of trying to run a Christian school.” They are also concerned pupils’ results will suffer.
The founders are calling on the Department of Education to look into how the faith ethos of schools can be preserved when they are taken over by a multi academy trust (MAT) and to provide similar legal protections to those enjoyed by Anglican and Roman Catholic schools in the same situation.
Grindon Hall was placed in special measures by Ofsted last year and Bright Tribe was chosen as the sponsor to help the school improve its performance.
In a letter to Lord Nash, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools, the founders expressed their “deep concern for the future of education and wellbeing of the students” under the new sponsor.
Mr Burn, who was awarded an OBE in 1994 for services to education, said: “When we wrote to Lord Nash last September we raised our concerns that Bright Tribe had never run a school with a faith ethos. At Grindon Hall it has always been the Christian foundation that we and parents believe underpinned the school’s success and popularity. All of this owes much to the founder of the school, Mrs Gray.”
Matters came to a head when the founders were asked to agree to the school being formally passed over to Bright Tribe, and to the founding charity being dissolved.
Mrs Gray added: “Many children have benefitted over the years from the school’s strong academic education and Christian approach. As members we have done our best to fight to protect this. It’s very sad that the school we founded and which has gone on to be so popular with parents, including many who are not Christian, is being undermined.
“The decision made by the DfE last year is forcing us down a secular route. The school won’t even have its own local board of governors. There will be no-one who can effectively guard the ethos. We appeal to the new Secretary of State, Justine Greening, to review the decision of her predecessor.”
Mr Burn said the matter raised serious issues about the guardianship of schools established on the basis of faith.
He said: “There are protections for Church of England and Roman Catholic schools that, even in transfer to a MAT, they retain ownership of the land and a degree of continuing control which can be used to safeguard the school’s ethos. There is nothing like that for schools in Grindon Hall’s position. The DfE needs to look at this so that other schools in the future do not see the ethos on which they were founded undermined.
“We’ve ended up in this position because of the discredited 2014 Ofsted inspection which the DfE commissioned. It rated us as the worst state school in Sunderland even though our exam results showed we were among the best. This was after very intrusive and inappropriate questioning of pupils by Ofsted inspectors which left some pupils and parents very upset indeed.
“It felt like Ofsted had been ordered to find fault with the school by the then Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan. Their report was flatly contradicted by the excellent exam results, and the testimonies of parents. If Ofsted had been interested in academic success instead of political correctness, they would have recognized Grindon Hall for what it was: the top state school in Sunderland.
“I have severe doubts over whether anyone in Government really considered the best interests of the children at this school. The decision to hand our school over to Bright Tribe means one of Sunderland’s best performing schools being handed over to someone with undoubted commercial acumen but no consistent track record of improving schools.”