The question on everyone’s lips seems to be about whether the Government will close the Al-Madinah free school or allow it to remain open.
Given what is known about the school so far, it is hard to see how it can stay open without considerable changes in both standards and personnel.
With a damning report from Ofsted – the Office for Standards in Education – already logged and with two further reports into the school’s financial situation due to be published soon, the action plan needs to be fairly watertight.
From the beginning, teaching unions were anxious about the school being set up because of its Islamic ethos and it taking pupils from other city schools.
This was long before it opened its doors in September 2012.
But the trustees, led by Shazia Parveen and head teacher Andrew Cutts-Mckay, were at pains to reassure people that the school would be multicultural, with 50% of the pupils Muslim and an emphasis on other faiths, as well. Pupils would be free to opt in and out of Islamic lessons.
The consultation document states: “The school is open to children of all faiths and none.
“For those parents who wish, there will be realistic alternatives to the faith-based elements of our school”.
The school satisfied the Government and was given the go-ahead, with £1.4m of funding, and opened with about 200 pupils in an office block in Friar Gate – not as originally planned in another office block in London Road.
Despite repeated attempts to get the management of the school to comment on various planning applications, including one for Midland House, in Nelson Street, where the secondary pupils are now sited, nobody came back to us once the school was running.
Even a controversial application to refurbish Hartley House, in London Road, earlier this year failed to elicit a response from the school.
By September, more than 400 children, aged four to 16, were based on the two sites in Friar Gate and Nelson House.
Rumours began to circulate that the school was being investigated over financial matters by the Education Funding Agency, through which public money is channelled to academies and free schools, bypassing local authorities.
Within days, non-Muslim female staff from the school made it clear that they were unhappy at being forced to wear a hijab – an Islamic head covering – and at having to be covered from head to toe.
They also said that they were appalled by practices which meant boys were allowed to sit at the front of classes, while girls sat at the back.
Ofsted, in its subsequent damning report following an emergency inspection, said it found no evidence of this practice, however.
But Schools Minister Lord Nash acted within days of reading the subsequent Derby Telegraph story to order the Ofsted inspection.
Ahead of the report, he ordered the school to cease segregating pupils and making staff cover their heads if they did not wish to do so. He also laid out a series of deadlines by which he wanted to receive specific information about the school and its procedures.
If this was a mainstream state school, which had been given a warning notice in a similar way to Lord Nash’s letter, failure to produce a suitable action plan would result in the governors being ousted and an interim executive board being put in place instead.
How easy it would be to parachute alternative trustees into place or how long it would take to close the school is not entirely clear.
Parents have now created a group to fight any closures and are actively petitioning the Government to keep the school open and give it longer to recover.
Another city group is calling for a change in leadership at the school.
The picture was further muddied last week when the former head, Mr Cutts-Mackay, stepped forward to claim he was the person who had reported the school’s financial situation to the Government.
He claimed the school was in a good position when he left his post before the summer holiday and was graded as needing to improve but working towards a “good” Ofsted rating.
Amid all of this, the school has proved an attractive piece of bait over which the main political parties are fighting on the issue of free schools.
Certainly, Prime Minister David Cameron told the Derby Telegraph hours after the Ofsted report called it “dysfunctional”, “in chaos” and “inadequate”, that he was prepared to close the school if it became necessary.
He was at pains, however, to say how well free schools had been performing generally.
It is to be hoped that whatever decision is taken by the Government, everyone bears in mind that it is the children that really matter in all of this.
There are 412 of them – and they will all need to be found new school places if Al-Madinah closes.
They all deserve a lot better education than they have been getting.