Bleak Prospects for academies

Prospects Services, the big contractor behind the jubilee stewards scandal, also runs an academy school. Badly.

In March inspectors found the firm's school was "inadequate," "fragile" and needed further monitoring.

The way this firm can so obviously fail in two areas of public-sector "reform" raises questions both over Prospects Services and the government's wide-ranging business-oriented "reform" agenda.

Prospects Services has the £50 million Work Programme contract for the south-west.

It was in charge of the "trainees" forced to sleep under a bridge before stewarding the jubilee.

It subcontracted care of the trainees to Tomorrow's People, a charity run by a Tory baroness. It in turn passed the trainees to a private company, Close Protection UK.

Concern has rightly focused on Close Protection, with the revelation that company boss Molly Prince was convicted of perverting the course of justice in a serious assault case.

But Prospects is at the top of this food chain of contracting. It grabbed the cash while the trainees slept in the streets.

As I showed last week, Prospects' past record in employment schemes is mostly not good.

But its main business is education, not employment. The firm makes millions carrying out inspections under contract for Ofsted.

It sells "schools improvement" services to education authorities and is approved by Michael Gove's Education Department to charge for advice on setting up academies and free schools.

In 2010 Prospects became the lead sponsor of Gloucester Academy.

After years of judging other schools' performance, Prospects was helping run a school itself. It had cheerleaders.

Soon after being elected Tory Education Minister Nick Gibb went to Gloucester Academy to praise the "quality of the leadership and the educational vision."

Gloucester Academy is a small, 785-pupil secondary school. It has a higher than average number of pupils on free school meals, with English as a second language or with educational problems. So there are challenges.

But Prospects' leadership seems to have failed to deal with them.

A team of inspectors visited the school in March.

Their main finding was: "The academy has made inadequate progress. This monitoring inspection has raised serious concerns about the standard of education provided by the academy and I am recommending a further monitoring inspection."

Prospects hasn't built a proper team in the school itself because "senior leaders' and governors' evaluation of the academy's strengths and weaknesses is accurate, but capacity for improvement is fragile because leadership roles are still undergoing change and because evaluation has largely been reliant on external partners."

As a result, "although some good or better teaching was seen during the inspection, too much was satisfactory or inadequate."

Prospects hasn't helped teachers to get a grip as "classroom organisation and behaviour management are inconsistent. Teachers' expectations of behaviour are sometimes too low and lessons are not planned to establish and elicit good learning ... Warnings and sanctions are used but sometimes escalate rather than calm poor behaviour."

And under Prospects too many children are excluded and too many truant.

"Although the academy's expectation is that new and better systems of behaviour management will reduce the need for exclusion, their initial impact has been to increase both fixed-term and permanent exclusions, as boundaries become established. Attendance is low, although improving slightly in lower years. Persistent absence is high."

So a firm paid by Ofsted to inspect education cannot even pass an Ofsted inspection itself.

This failure is in Prospects' strongest "area of expertise" - education. So it is hardly a surprise that the firm also failed so badly in the Work Programme.

In the jubilee stewards case, attention has focused on the bottom of the contracting chain, on Close Protection. But problems start from the top, from the big-money contractors which promise so much, but do so little.

Universities Minister David Willetts had a £1,752 stay in a glamorous Scottish hotel at the end of last year courtesy of troubled bank JP Morgan, but he didn't properly register the hospitality with his department.

Willetts accepted a stay in the Gleneagles hotel with his wife to attend a conference on pensions organised by JP Morgan, a bank that recently lost $2 billion in a badly misfiring complex exotic trade.

JP Morgan is currently under investigation by the US Justice Department over the poorly managed trading at its London offices.

The deals have shaken faith in the bank and led to the resignation of one of its chief executives.

It is unusual for a minister to accept this kind of hospitality from a private company, and Willetts's trip isn't properly registered.

Every quarter, government departments publish a list of ministers' gifts and hospitality.

However, Willetts's Gleneagles trip is absent from the September 2011 list recently published by the Department for Business.

The lists, which are part of the coalition's "transparency agenda," are published six months in arrears.

Willetts did put the trip on the Register of MPs' Interests in February 2012, although somewhat late - he should have listed the trip within 28 days of being hosted by JP Morgan.

He also failed to list a "gift of wine - approx value £100" which he was given by JP Morgan for attending the same conference in Gleneagles in 2010 on the Department for Business register, although he did list this on the Register of MPs' Interests.

Willetts has been having a lovely time in Gleneagles thanks to JP Morgan for some years. In 2009 he was given "an honorarium of £4,000" and flights for himself and his wife to go to the conference. Willetts got similar fees from the bank in 2006 and 2007.

Willetts taking unregistered hospitality from JP Morgan is potentially controversial - first, a British minister is getting a freebie from a bank caught up in dubious trading.

Second, JP Morgan is a major investor in student debt in the US and has unsuccessfully bid to buy British student debt in the past.

As Higher Education Minister, Willetts has overseen a massive expansion of student debt.

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