Tower Hamlets Council has applied to have the governors at a school in Whitechapel sacked en masse with “immediate effect”.
The entire board at Kobi Nazrul Primary will be replaced if the education authority gets the nod from Michael Gove.
It follows a row with the council about who was responsible for the school’s drop in standards. If the application to the education secretary is successful the school will be run by an Interim Executive Board (IEB) on a temporary basis.
Tower Hamlets Council said the move followed the school having the worst SATs results in the borough’s history last year.
It said the governors had refused to cooperate to improve standards, but thanked four who have voluntarily stepped down for their hard work at the school.
Robert McCulloch-Graham, Tower Hamlets Council’s director of education, said: “This council has an excellent track record of transforming under-performing schools and of taking tough action when the school does not cooperate.”
He added that only a few schools in the borough have been taken over by an IEB, and that the council expects Kobi Nazrul to “return quickly to the excellent school it was two years ago”.
Board chair Masoom Chowdhury last week blamed the council for the drop in standards by moving the school’s head teacher to another failing school for four days a week in 2012, and that the council has since blamed the school to hide this initial mistake.
Senior members of the board put out a statement before the purge saying: “At best the local authority has been incompetent and at worst wilfully negligent and complicit in the school’s regrettable decline.”
The board also rejected claims by the BBC of a “Trojan horse”-style infiltration of the board, similar to those at Birmingham Schools, concerning governor Mohammed Abdul Kuddus’s membership of Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir.
A board spokesman said there was “no evidence of anything related to Trojan Horse” and said the BBC was “demonising” Muslims and the school.
Read more:
School in Whitechapel hits back at council amid ‘extremist’ claims
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