Sir, – The final report into complaints submitted by me as former chair of governors at Richmond School in connection with events leading up to the issuing of the warning notice in February 2014 acknowledges that governance arrangements were sound and governing body actions taken via appropriate channels at all times.

No local authority officers involved in the notice decision had ever attended governing body meetings, no governors were interviewed, no governing body documentation was reviewed and no meeting with governors was suggested prior to and in connection with the its issue. Evidence, almost exclusively verbal, was taken only from leaders in school. All eleven planks of the notice are proved unsafe.

The list of failure is long. Time and again the report demonstrates incompetence on the part of officers who currently advise the interim executive board (IEB) and will appoint and advise new governors. It highlights particularly a key relationship between the local authority and school, unhealthy to the point of collusion, which disseminated false impressions of school affairs. The recent surprising Ofsted judgement maintains a position at odds with our experience, the published facts including the October LEAD report and evidence in this report, and puts any future governor in an unenviable position.

Fifteen governors, elected and appointed independently, with no incentive to act other than in the interests of students and staff and the school as a whole, resigned in February 2014 rather than continue working with senior leaders in school in whom we had long collectively lost trust and in protest at a warning notice which was unrecognisable.

In a blinding glimpse of the obvious, governors would not have resigned en bloc had the problem been me, and the IEB’s work would have been complete months ago had the problem been governance in general.

Good governance in local authority maintained schools in North Yorkshire, therefore, is also rendered unsafe. An arrogance - along with a paucity of understanding amply illustrated in the report - exists amongst local authority officers with regard to governance; an abject failure to recognise that governors are often skilled professionals with not just the school’s, but their own reputations to protect, when carrying out their considerable legal duties - an incentive to get it right that simply does not exist in the local authority where secrecy and cover-up have routinely disguised manifest failings.

I would like to thank the author of the report, Justine Brooksbank, for her patience and the chief executive, Richard Flinton, for his letter of apology.

ANNE SKEOCH

Gilling West.