The newspapers couldn’t believe their luck. Last autumn, Barry Smith, headteacher of the new Great Yarmouth Charter Academy, issued policies on behaviour to parents and children. The predecessor school, he wrote, was riddled with indiscipline, bullying and truancy. He would not allow such things. Mobile phones, if seen or heard, would be confiscated for weeks. Pupils must “only ever look at your teacher or where your teacher has directed you to look”. Smith specified “unacceptable” boys’ haircuts including “variations on the style often known as ‘Meet me at McDonald’s’”, a tousled mop with short sides.
Most remarkably, he told children not to feign illness to avoid work. “If you feel sick we will give you a bucket. If you vomit – no problem! … that’s probably all your body wanted.” After press headlines and angry parents’ protests, Smith modified his “behaviour guide”, parts of which were “tongue in cheek”, with the sick buckets being just “a colourful turn of phrase”.
For Dame Rachel de Souza, founder and chief executive of the Inspiration Trust, the chain that runs the academy, the storm was just a routine day’s work. For a small (14 schools) chain, founded in 2013, the trust attracts disproportionate publicity. Some of it is positive. Though several schools required improvement or were in special measures before they joined, the Department for Education puts Inspiration second only to a chain that includes two grammar schools in a league table of multi-academy trusts’ Progress 8 scores. A study by the Education Policy Institute rates its key stage 4 results ahead of every other secondary provider in England, including local authorities. Michael Gove, the former education secretary, was so impressed with De Souza, a steelworker’s daughter from Scunthorpe, that he said he would like to clone her “23,000 times”.
Yet she or her schools are always in trouble. Allegations emerged in 2014 and 2015 that two of the trust’s schools, and a third where De Souza was headteacher from 2010 to 2013, had several days’ advance warning of Ofsted inspections which were supposed to take place at half-a-day’s notice. Though two inquiries declared the allegations unsubstantiated, the second found some of her emails “troubling”. Earlier this year, Ofsted apparently agreed to a second inspectors’ visit to an Inspiration primary school – which is in the country’s bottom 10% for key stage 2 reading and maths – after a first visit led to a highly critical draft report. A kinder amended report duly followed, strengthening the critics’ view that, with the trust’s former chairman, Theodore Agnew, now an education minister (and, controversially, still a trustee), De Souza gets special treatment. The National Education Union claimed the school was “given a rehearsal before the real deal”.
De Souza points out that it’s normal for schools to be shown draft Ofsted reports and for inspectors to make second visits after representations. Ministers, in any case, have no power to influence school inspections. So why does she attract so much controversy? “Probably because I think change is necessary and do things wholeheartedly,” she ventures. But several hostile stories, I observe, are based on leaked emails, which suggests she makes enemies among her colleagues. “There were a number of difficult relationships. Perhaps some people’s noses were put out of joint.”
De Souza talks at 100mph; sentences begin but never finish, as she interrupts herself with new thoughts and anecdotes. “I’m jumping all over the place,” she says.
She taught at comprehensives in Oxford, east London and Luton before, at 36, landing her first academy headship, also in Luton. The school, replacing two local authority schools deemed to be “underperforming”, was so difficult that she told her senior team it would probably continue to fail and, at the end of the year, “we could all walk away and get on with our lives”. But for that one year, they should give it everything.
“We went totally over the top on every little thing. We would tell them to do their revision and then have a banana. Revise, eat a banana, revise, eat a banana. Year 11 had never had a qualified maths teacher. So I found one and put them all in the hall with him and a stereo mic for two hours each night.” She ordered new uniforms, sent teachers to get children out of bed in the mornings, and introduced assemblies with classical music. Exam results soared.
After four years, she moved to a Norfolk school that was controlled by an academy chain based in Birmingham. “It was as if I was working for a local authority in Birmingham. They top-sliced 5% for services, money I never saw. I really didn’t like it.” She thought of returning to London but the chair of her governing body introduced her to Agnew, who sponsored a small academy in the county. “We agreed that we should create a local trust so that Norfolk could provide its own answers for Norfolk children.” Wasn’t that the local authority’s job? “It was a bit lacklustre. It had only a small number of failing schools but a massive number requiring improvement.”
Inspiration Trust was born. All of its schools are in Norfolk except for one in Lowestoft, which is just inside Suffolk. “The DfE asked me to go and look at it. It was awful: the corridors were long and smelled of cats’ pee. I told my board [of trustees] ‘I have to do it’. When I see a failing school, I cannot walk away.”
She describes the trust as “a family” with “a feeling of community”, exemplified by an annual “great day” in early September “where we get all the staff together”. Inspiration Trust, like several other academy chains, has a central team of “brilliant subject specialists” hammering out rigorous curriculum content. If a local authority were doing it, it would be described as dictatorial, particularly since there is a heavy emphasis on “core knowledge”, the latest curriculum fashion, which De Souza embraced after visiting ED Hirsch, its guru, in the US. But de Souza insists that the team works closely with teachers and that “we see ourselves as a scholarly community generating new knowledge”.
Born in 1968, she had a “wonderful, colourful, interesting childhood”. Her father was Irish, her mother, half-Austrian, half-Hungarian. A Ukrainian step-grandfather encouraged her to learn the language at a Saturday school. At her Catholic school, she was a “very good” student up to 14 but became “quite sociable and not that interested in studying” until the second year at sixth form college. Her religious studies teacher had a degree from London University’s tiny Heythrop College, and De Souza decided to follow him. She met her future husband, now in the probation service, on her first day. “I thought: yes, that’s it.”
With a degree in theology and philosophy, “I was advised to shake off my northern help-the-world thing and go and make some money.” She became a trainee accountant. “I thought it was the end of life.” After two weeks, she left to take a teaching certificate at King ’s College, London.
Her career – five jobs in the past 15 years – suggests a certain restlessness. There were rumours in 2016 that she would succeed Michael Wilshaw as chief inspector. She laughs and denies that she applied.
So what about the “vomit school”? More laughter. “What Barry’s done there is unbelievable,” she tells me. “It’s one of the best examples of sorting out behaviour I’ve ever seen. The guy is super-talented.”