The Head of Ryde Academy, Dr Rory Fox, who was last in the headlines for tackling pupils at the school over the length of their skirts, has hit the Nationals again.
The latest, claimed to be his thoughts laid down in a letter to a teaching union, savages the teaching staff at Ryde Academy and their unions.
The Times (sub req.) first reported it claiming a copy of the letter was leaked to them. OnTheWight have contacted both the school and members of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) in an attempt to verify the Times’ claims – Dr Fox is out of the country and the union say they’ll respond tomorrow – completely reasonable given it’s Sunday.
Highlighting his concerns
There are many targets for Dr Fox’s attention:
- 50% of teaching at Ryde “is not good enough.”
- “Some 22 teachers who need to improve their performance.”
- Claims some of the senior teachers at Ryde – had turned up late for classes, or not at all; opposed lesson observations; bullied junior staff; refused to set homework and were petty and aggressive.
- He claims one teacher told him that his working day ended at 2.40pm and that he could not mark children’s work because he was going sailing.
- Fox talks of “teachers complaining about being asked to set homework”
- He also claims, “We are finding practices in classrooms that could easily lead to disciplinary action, but I am choosing not to go down that route.”
“A form of educational abuse”
The letter to the union appears to be about what Dr Fox views as its interference with his ability to carry out lesson observations, labelling “avoidable union-related activity is unfair and unacceptable” as “a form of educational abuse”.
Dr Fox is concerned that improvement that were made earlier in the year were being undone claiming a “new fresh union militancy is once again starting to put improvement at risk.”
Previous problems
In the letter, The Times also says Rory Fox refers to past problems at Ryde Academy – marking routinely ignored, poor staff attendance, teachers turning up late for lessons and child protection issues handled badly.
Image: booleansplit under a CC BY 2.0 license
