A school featured in the hit TV series Educating Greater Manchester was like a “zoo” with “dangerous” behaviour worsened by the head’s refusal to exclude pupils, a misconduct panel has heard.
Drew Povey, the former executive head of Harrop Fold School, Worsley, is accused of off-rolling three pupils before the January 2018 census to boost performance data.
But he denied “massaging results” as his Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) case opened this week. It was one of the first off-rolling cases to emerge.
It is alleged Povey caused or failed to stop data being amended to record that two of the pupils had attended when they hadn’t.
Pupils regularly sent home before the end of the school day were also not logged properly, according to claims put to the TRA panel in Coventry.
His then deputies, Ross Povey and Jennifer Benigno, face the same allegations, which relate to the 2017-18 academic year. Benigno denies wrongdoing. Ross Povey is not attending and is not represented.
Jonathan Storey, representing Benigno, said proceedings had been “hanging over” them for six years, a “very long time” in a senior leader’s career.
Off-rolling to ‘make school look better’
The hearing was told three pupils were off-rolled in an “inappropriate way” in a “certain window” ahead of the statutory census in January 2018, and then put back on soon afterwards.
Two were in alternative provision and the third was “missing in education”.
Andrew Cullen, for the TRA, asked the panel to consider whether there was “some calculation here…to make the school look better”.
In a statement this week, Drew Povey said he held his hands up for “administrative mistakes that were made involving two children, and as the leader of that school, I take full responsibility”.
But to conclude that there was a “deliberate plan to off-roll to benefit the school’s performance as a whole is completely wide of the mark”.
Povey, who featured in the Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall documentary in 2017, announced his resignation in a letter published on social media in September 2018.
He alleged a “heavy-handed” approach from Salford City Council, which he claimed had “completely ignored the best interests of the pupils, staff and school”.
Attendance figures ‘inflated’
Cullen claimed attendance data was “inflated to create a distorted picture of attendance”.
Gary Chambers was the school’s director of attitudes and learning in the 2017-18 year.
He gave a statement to a Salford-backed investigation, saying he was “vaguely aware” of some pupils being taken off roll around census time, the panel heard.
Ofsted has defined off-rolling as removing a pupil from the school roll without using a permanent exclusion, when this is primarily in the best interests of the school, not the pupil.
Chambers said in the statement this was done to “artificially amend the figures relating to school performance and I think that means artificially improve the figures”, said Andrew Faux, representing Drew Povey.
If pupils were not recorded in the January census, their GCSE results would not have counted for the school’s performance that year, Faux said.
However, he claimed Chambers was not being “wholly truthful”.
Povey’s “mantra” was about being inclusive, not excluding pupils and taking on challenging children from other schools.
Faux said Povey wasn’t “bothered” by taking on pupils who would “never” get five A*s to C grades, and asked why he would then off-roll children to boost statistics.
Pupil behaviour ‘like a zoo’
Phil Ince, a senior staff member, said in a statement to the investigation he’d heard Povey using walkie-talkies to order staff that “kids be sent home”.
Faux said that occasionally, when a pupil was “having a meltdown, in mental distress, parents would be called and with their agreement the child would go home before the end of the school day”.
Ince told the hearing Povey’s refusal to exclude pupils and alleged withdrawal to focus on external projects led to a breakdown in pupil behaviour.
“Towards the end it was a zoo,” he said.
He claimed the behaviour policy was not followed, and that staff had considered striking over safety concerns while Povey was in charge. These claims are disputed.
“From around about 2015 it started to deteriorate fast and first it would be small things but then it became a snowball coming down a hill.” Ofsted rated Harrop Fold ‘inadequate’ after inspecting it in October 2018 and it reopened as the Lowry Academy in 2021.
The hearing continues.
