Anon for a reason.
I work in schools. The Academy programme, and the "superhead" side of it, is basically one large backhander.
Worked in a school that was taken over to become an Academy. Sure it wasn't the best school in the world, but it was just a school.
Within weeks of the "takeover", the whole IT department were Googling like mad to find out what other dirt we could find. Every tradesman that entered the school over the Summer was somehow related to the "superhead" (who we saw once because he worked at another site). Brothers. Cousins. Army pals. Neighbours. You name it.
Our Cat5 was put in, not through our normal contractors, but through some externals. Army guys, all from the regiment he was in. They destroyed our walls, pulled fibre and broke it, and then painted over it rather than encased it (which broke it more). Even the damn glaziers and carpet-layers, he was related to or getting a percentage. They tried to outsource the IT but his IT guys were crap and we showed them up. Again, a company part-owned by him. They had to back down because we had an old-hand in charge of our IT and every metric they claimed to win the contract, we beat them on in-house.
It was very profitable for him, though. Extremely. But because they did what the school always needed doing (throw out all the little gits that you weren't allowed to throw out as a normal school), results and behaviour improved and the parents were happy. The kids were playing with sponsored hardware, they got taken to BETT to show off his other company's products (a bit of a failure, there, because the demos failed spectacularly and the kids all told everyone how rubbish it was when they asked).
Superheads don't do anything that anyone else couldn't do, given the same permission. Fact is that schools weren't allowed to throw out students, but superheads are. Schools aren't allowed to just take backhanders, Academies are (not officially, of course). Superheads can wander in and sack staff, throw all the "bad" kids out, use all their own companies, take their percentages, then leave after the first results improvement with their 10% and their stupidly high wages for someone else to clear up the mess.
Hell, their IT guys approached me and told me I could get £600 a day to work with them doing the same stuff to OTHER schools that would become part of the same Academy (because they figured out that our IT team was smarter than theirs when we sent their salesman crying to the head - who then tried to discipline us for doing our jobs - he just wanted us to "approve" whatever the guy said no matter how rubbish and outrageous the lies told to us "We can get highly-AD-integrated software working on Linux through Wine" back in the days when Samba could barely do anything AD at all, because he got a percentage from their sales).
Back then, it was a Lord Adonis in charge of education. We knew why. I reported it to the BBC and offered proof, never even got a reply.
Haven't worked in an Academy since, on principle.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
