A Failure of Leadership

Overall effectiveness : Inadequate

Leadership and management : Inadequate

Having been slammed in the local government review of her leadership and finding out that her budget has been wrecked with a £25 million pound overspend in temporary housing. It has been a bad two weeks for the Mayor of Newham.

Yet, it has just got worse with the news that an OFSTED inspection of Newham Sixth Form College (NEWVIC) has been judged to be ‘Inadequate’. This is the lowest rating OFSTED can give. NEWVIC is now the only sixth form college in the whole country to be judged ‘inadequate’. 

NEWVIC has over two thousand students mostly aged between 16-18.

We know the mayor likes to blame others for any failures of her leadership. For the local government review she has been blaming the officers of the council. For the budget overspend she has blamed the national situation. Nothing she could do about it.

Now we know the mayor will blame the leadership of NEWVIC and certainly they have been found wanting. The OFSTED report states:

“Leaders and Governors do not have a suitable skills strategy, and governors do not have a good enough understanding of the skills agenda.

“Governors and senior leaders have not done enough to tackle the poor quality of education that learners experience. They presided over a decline in standards.”

Yet where was the mayor when this decline in standards was happening over the last six years? Where was her leadership when the most significant post 16 provider in the borough was going from a ‘good’ provider in 2018 to the sorry state it now finds itself in?

One of the mayor’s allies is deputy chair of the board of governors. Did Cllr. Jane Lofthouse bring the looming problems to the attention of the mayor? If not, why not? If she did, what did the mayor do? It appears that the answer is nothing. 

If the intelligence Cllr Lofthouse was providing, was not sufficient to alert her to the problem, then the two years of strikes by the National Educational Union should also have given a clue. The students of NEWVIC lost thirty days of tuition in 2023 alone.

Yet not a word of leadership and direction from the mayor. Her failure to show any leadership on behalf of the community is disgraceful. Yet even worse, is allowing under her watch, thousands of young people with whom she claims to be an advocate to receive an inadequate education. Those young people have been let down by NEWVIC, by Newham Council and by her lack of leadership.

Now, NEWVIC’s fate rests with the national FE commissioner who has already imposed a new chair on the NEWVIC board as they look at a takeover by Newham College for Further Education.

The chair of the NEWVIC board took responsibility when the OFSTED report was delivered last week and resigned. It will be asking too much that the Labour Group holds the Mayor and Cllr. Jane Lofthouse for that same level of integrity.

Afterall, a massive budget blackhole and damning report from the Local Government Association are all someone else’s fault according to the mayor. Her response will undoubtedly be the same to this dreadful OFSTED report.