' At Woodcote High School, I raised apparent issues of institutional racism with the governors as I uncovered them. Rather than address these issues openly and transparently, the governors, who are also the trustees (100% of control of the school sit with them as that is the academy system we now have in the UK, so the local authority has 0% influence on the school) instead chose to ignore issues or lay the blame on the departed headteacher who had been in post 18 years before my appointment. The three governors (yes, only three governors) decided to suspend me two days after I had uncovered the latest incident of institutional racism and questioned it. This was the last in a list of issues that I discovered and brought to their attention.
I was accused of a safeguarding breach, and the chair of governors came into school and escorted me off-site after informing me of the suspension on the 18th of November 2020, but via a Freedom of Information (FOI) request that I sent to Croydon Council, I discovered that no safeguarding referral had been made to the Local Authority Designated Officer (LADO) about me. The LADO is the only person that can investigate a safeguarding allegation against a teacher or Headteacher, yet my employers had not referred me to the LADO. This is probably because they knew there was no safeguarding breach but used safeguarding as a smoke screen to suspend me. Subsequently, the school dropped the safeguarding allegation three months later without ever being investigated. Keeping Children Safe in Education (KCSIE) is very clear about the responsibility of schools to refer safeguarding issues to the LADO. However, if there were genuine safeguarding concerns, Woodcote High School failed to carry out this statutory responsibility. '
[Text copied and pasted for background from Go Fund Me crowdfunding page. From reading it I figure we need more teachers like this in our schools, prepared to take a stand , that's the only reason I'm posting this, beyond this there's no conflicting interest]
https://www.gofundme.com/f/sup....port-paul-mundycastl
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