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New chief inspector of schools comes from academy group she will 'inspect'
From January, there will be a new chief inspector of schools: Amanda Spielman, the secretary of state’s choice, whose appointment was confirmed in the face of fierce opposition from the Education Select Committee. Spielman has never been a teacher; her background is in corporate finance and management consultancy. More recently, she was on the original management team of Ark Schools, the UK educational arm of Ark (Absolute Return for Kids), an international children’s charity set up in 2002 by a group of hedge fund bosses.
Ark Schools now runs 34 academies in London, Birmingham, Hastings and Portsmouth. Of the eight members of the board – which oversees the governors of all 34 schools – five are hedge fund managers. None has any background in education. The chair, Paul Marshall, is the co-founder of Marshall Wace Asset Management Ltd, originally domiciled in the Cayman Islands until, in response to an EU directive, the bulk of the fund was moved to Ireland; the firm was briefly in the public eye in 2008 as one of the hedge funds blamed for short-selling bank shares during the financial crisis. A previous chair, Lord Fink, was once a treasurer of the Conservative Party, and is reportedly among the party’s top twenty donors, having given more than £3 million.
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Paul Marshall’s hedge fund has a diverse portfolio – pharmaceuticals, IT, healthcare, retail – but education is a significant part of it. Marshall Wace currently has positions in Pearson PLC and the Scholastic Corporation, and last year it formed a ‘long-term partnership’ with the American private equity firm KKR, which is heavily involved at the cutting edge of the education business. KKR has big stakes in Cognita, a chain of private schools, and Laureate Education, which runs more than eighty for-profit colleges around the world. It also invests in Tarena International, ‘an innovative education platform combining live-distance instruction, classroom-based tutoring and online learning modules’ for students in China.
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Another growth area is data management – or the computer-based processing of all those test results and school performance metrics. Systems like the one offered by the Boston-based Intellify Learning – ‘a state-of-the-art cloud-based platform that provides learning analytics and data management services’ – are an integral part of Ark’s ‘school improvement model’. The trust’s sponsor profile on the DfE website describes a ‘data-driven culture’, in which Ark’s ‘central team’ regularly receives ‘granular school performance information’ from the 34 academies. The information is analysed on Ark’s ‘data dashboards’, and used to ‘drive improvement’. This highly centralised structure, in which ‘decision-making processes’ are reduced to the analysis of purely quantitative data – predominantly test and exam results – is in no small part the creation of Amanda Spielman, graduate of KPMG and Nomura.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n18/matthew-bennett/ed-tech-biz
Ark Schools now runs 34 academies in London, Birmingham, Hastings and Portsmouth. Of the eight members of the board – which oversees the governors of all 34 schools – five are hedge fund managers. None has any background in education. The chair, Paul Marshall, is the co-founder of Marshall Wace Asset Management Ltd, originally domiciled in the Cayman Islands until, in response to an EU directive, the bulk of the fund was moved to Ireland; the firm was briefly in the public eye in 2008 as one of the hedge funds blamed for short-selling bank shares during the financial crisis. A previous chair, Lord Fink, was once a treasurer of the Conservative Party, and is reportedly among the party’s top twenty donors, having given more than £3 million.
...
Paul Marshall’s hedge fund has a diverse portfolio – pharmaceuticals, IT, healthcare, retail – but education is a significant part of it. Marshall Wace currently has positions in Pearson PLC and the Scholastic Corporation, and last year it formed a ‘long-term partnership’ with the American private equity firm KKR, which is heavily involved at the cutting edge of the education business. KKR has big stakes in Cognita, a chain of private schools, and Laureate Education, which runs more than eighty for-profit colleges around the world. It also invests in Tarena International, ‘an innovative education platform combining live-distance instruction, classroom-based tutoring and online learning modules’ for students in China.
...
Another growth area is data management – or the computer-based processing of all those test results and school performance metrics. Systems like the one offered by the Boston-based Intellify Learning – ‘a state-of-the-art cloud-based platform that provides learning analytics and data management services’ – are an integral part of Ark’s ‘school improvement model’. The trust’s sponsor profile on the DfE website describes a ‘data-driven culture’, in which Ark’s ‘central team’ regularly receives ‘granular school performance information’ from the 34 academies. The information is analysed on Ark’s ‘data dashboards’, and used to ‘drive improvement’. This highly centralised structure, in which ‘decision-making processes’ are reduced to the analysis of purely quantitative data – predominantly test and exam results – is in no small part the creation of Amanda Spielman, graduate of KPMG and Nomura.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n18/matthew-bennett/ed-tech-biz
Kachinggg!
