'Severe concerns' about Yorkshire academy boss lined up for top Ofsted job

The Outwood Grange Academies Trust runs 41 schools in the north of England and the East Midlands, and has previously made headlines as a result of a strong approach to discipline that had seen 41 per cent of pupils at one school suspended in the course of a single year.

It’s understood that Sir Martyn - who was knighted last year - has had his name put forward for the role of chief inspector, and that an announcement is due this week. He will then face a parliamentary select committee before taking up the role - which pays £165,000 a year - on January 1 next year.

But Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership was sceptical of his selection.

He said: “Ministers have been quick to heap praise on Outwood Grange Academies Trust but many of us in the North, who see how they operate, have severe concerns.”

“Back in 2019 Ofsted criticised the trust for its exclusion rates well above average across their schools, with the previous judicial review on use of consequence rooms and the wider issues of the so-called ‘flattening the grass’ approach. Despite promising to refresh its behaviour policy, life in their schools seems to have got no better.”

Outwood Grange was criticised for its use of “consequence rooms” in its schools where pupils had to sit silently in booths as punishment for bad behaviour. At Outwood Academy Danum in Doncaster, a former senior leader described how the trust had a policy to “pick on” pupils, and to use “intense shouting” in children’s faces for minor transgressions.

“It was humiliating - you wouldn’t talk to another human being like that,” they said in 2019.

Discussing an academy in Ormesby near Middlesbrough, Mr Murison said: “Problems were first raised five years ago by the Guardian newspaper and local MP Andy McDonald, yet the government’s Regional Schools Commissioner took till this year to threaten to take the school off the trust.”

Research by think tank the Behavioural Insights Team published earlier this year showed pupils who receive a suspension of any type in year 10 are more likely to receive a custodial sentence between the ages of 15 and 17, with permanent exclusion raising that likelihood by 33 per cent.

“It is inappropriate to consider the CEO of this MAT for chief inspector,” Murison told The Yorkshire Post. “Nor should he remain in his current post for that matter.

“Not only did he use these methods, but after the trust’s promise to change he continued to allow or encourage approaches like these across his trust despite the direct criticism of it for such methods from Ofsted itself.“We need a chief inspector to challenge the huge chasm in attainment between the long term disadvantaged and their peers, rather than one that uses tactics of suspension so liberally which the literature shows differentially is applied to and affects worse those from the poorest backgrounds.”