Supporting schools to generate income and use it to support systematically disadvantaged children.

Letter to senior leaders and school Governors

Dear governance team,

I’d like to come and talk to you and your leadership team about how profit-driven private companies are stripping thousands of pounds out of your school through out-of-school-hours physical education provision - and how you can get that money back into your budget and use it to hire more staff, as other schools I have worked with are now doing.

Over the past few years I’ve conducted research at schools in this area, initially through Sussex University and then via a case study at a junior school in Brighton.

My research has specifically looked at alternative models that support schools to directly provide these services: crucially, taking this approach will generate significant income for your school.

The case study school now generates £340,000, per year from directly providing out-of-school-hours services, through a range of activities, all geared towards supporting holistic wellbeing, and one of the many outcomes is dramatically reduced childcare costs.

This case study clearly demonstrates the overwhelmingly positive impact of in-sourcing services.

As you’ll be aware, many primary schools outsource PE and/or out-of-school services to private providers. From football to childcare, these services are not only lacking in governance but have been widely criticised for their lack of quality, pedagogy, ethos and value, with further questions being asked as to why companies are directly generating profits that could otherwise be used to support school communities.

Within Lewes there are a number of such providers: Zigzag Childcare, Pioneer Childcare, Premier Education and Real PE are the ones that are easiest to find.

One of the impacts of enabling these providers is the direct movement of qualified teachers out of teaching and into private organisations. When PE teachers move out of teaching and set up privately, while the service may be of quality, the money they’re paid still leaves the system and can be used to generate profit instead of supporting the school.

Having gone through this process myself - trained as a primary teacher, set up a not-for-profit Community Interest Company to cater for rural deprivation of access to facilities - I realised the inequality being driven by these providers.

It has been the past fifteen years of my work to bring about greater employment through not-for-profit operations and to show that these community services need to be realigned with schools, as hubs of the community, creating services, value, outreach and support. My not-for-profit community interest company now supports schools to do exactly this.

Outsourcing works well for private companies, but is costing schools dearly. Outsourcing is not necessarily the issue, it is the way that it is currently operated that enables companies to extract from the education system rather than provide additional value.

I’d like to meet with you as soon as possible to discuss this and see if I can support you to bring these services back in-house, with all the benefits they bring for your school community - and budget.

Kind regards

James Gardiner

People In Commons CIC

Changing systems

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