Another headteacher down, staff walking out: The north west’s best school plunges into a new crisis
Another headteacher down, staff walking out: The north west’s best school plunges into a new crisis
The Post can reveal new details about what is happening inside The Blue Coat School
Dear readers — at the end of March, Blue Coat headteacher Scilla Yates walked into an urgent meeting with union representatives. She walked away having been accused of assault — something the school strongly denies — and with her career hanging by a thread.
Despite the school having been named the best in the north west only a few months prior, large numbers of its staff were planning industrial action. Yates had hoped the meeting might prevent strike action at the eleventh hour. Very quickly, things went wrong.
On Wednesday, Yates stood down as head teacher at Blue Coat after three years in the role. She is the second successive head to be forced out amid controversy and the second successive head to be investigated by the government’s Teaching Regulation Agency.
Yates’s departure marks the latest in a long line of scandals at the highly prestigious school, much of which The Post covered in depth last September. Back then, we broke the news that former deputy head teacher Nick Barends had been arrested on suspicion of rape and sexual activity in the presence of a child.
Today, we return to that reporting, asking why, despite its academic success, Blue Coat continues to be mired in scandal. We also reveal for the first time a concerning allegation made by a mother at the school about the treatment of her daughter — a claim that raises serious questions for Blue Coat’s new headteacher, and which the school strongly denies.
Apart from the first section of the story, today’s piece is for paying members only. That’s because The Post is reader-funded: without paying subscriptions, we would not be able to continue to produce high quality journalism without intrusive ads popping up all over your screen. It costs only £7 a month to sign up — giving access to two extra deeply-reported editions a week.
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It was an interesting night over at Aintree Racecourse as the election for Sefton got underway — here’s some of our highlights.
Neil Doolin has become the first ever Green councillor to be elected in the borough, taking 1,412 of the votes compared to Labour’s 1,307 in Church ward. While the news may come as a surprise to some, the Greens have grown in popularity over the last eight years, with the 2023 election seeing the Greens earn an impressive 40% of the vote in Church. When he spoke to The Post, Doolin cited the long-running battle to prevent a dual carriageway being built through Rimrose Valley as a major sticking point for residents that helped swing the result — an issue Jack wrote about last year. “We know people care about the issues locally in terms of the environment,” he added. “We’ve worked really hard and that’s why our support has doubled since 2021.”
That wasn’t the only excitement Doolin was caught up in last night. Over on X, he alleged Labour councillor Daren Veidman had been “unpleasant” towards a Green voter outside Cambridge Road polling station, adding that Veidman was “shaking with rage” and his behaviour had been reported to Sefton Council. Bootle MP Peter Dowd waded in, accusing Doolin of throwing a dead cat on the table to distract from the election. Doolin quickly clapped back: “Do I get on your nerves Peter?”
Despite the Doolin drama, Labour managed to maintain its hold on Sefton Council. They took 17 out of the 22 seats up for grabs in the borough — an increase of one seat after beating the Conservatives in Harington. One of the seats they held comfortably was in St Oswald, a ward which has been subject to some controversy this week after a series of pro-Trump and Boris Johnson tweets resurfaced from its Labour candidate Joe Johnson. Despite this, Labour received 78.5% of the vote, while Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate Conor Anthony O'Neill took nearly 8%. When we asked O’Neill about the recent controversy surrounding Johnson, he told The Post it was “ultimately indicative of the Labour Party for someone with these views would be allowed through the selection process”. Johnson is yet to make an announcement about his win.
The results are trickling in for Halton and Knowsley, with plenty of political drama to sink your teeth into. Both St Gabriels and Roby in Knowsley were suspected to be a close race between Labour and Greens, with Labour hopeful Megan Dever leaving a bit of a sour taste in the mouths of other prospective candidates. According to Green Party leader Kai Taylor, Dever — who is the daughter of councillor Colin Dever — received huge amounts of support from the party during her campaign. “Labour absolutely threw the kitchen sink at Roby,” he told The Post. “It’s caused murder because some councillors feel they've been left to fend for themselves.”
It seems that tactic has paid off. Just minutes ago Dever won the seat with 1,383 votes; her Green party rival Carmen Escalante-Callejo earned just short of 1,000. St Gabriels also remained Labour, though with only 71 votes between them and the Greens it's clear Labour held this seat by the skin of their teeth…
We’ll be giving you the full run down of the results, and the results of the metro mayor and police commissioner elections, next week, and also some analysis from pollsters, experts and insiders. Make sure you’re subscribed to stay up to date.
Blue Coat is in crisis — again
By Jack Walton
Less than three months passed between Blue Coat being named the best secondary school in the north west, and headteacher Scilla Yates having to step back from her duties.
At the end of March, Yates called an urgent meeting. Unionised staff at her school were on the verge of going on strike. Among other things, they took issue with what they saw as the school’s culture of cover-ups and poor leadership following a succession of public scandals. The meeting had been called by the school’s senior leadership team who wanted to speak to union organiser Bora Otkas as a last ditch attempt to prevent strike action.
The school and Oktas already had an icy relationship. Weeks earlier, Blue Coat had contacted the general secretary of his union, the National Education Union (NEU), claiming he was an agitator who should be taken off the case. The NEU stood firm, and the school seemed to be changing tack, offering Oktas what appeared to be an olive branch by calling him in.
But if the meeting was intended to smooth things over, it couldn’t have gone more spectacularly wrong. The next day, the BBC ran a story saying police had been called to the school and an assault claim was made against “a senior school leader”. What the BBC didn’t mention was that the teacher in question was the head: Scilla Yates.
The Post has been told that after a frosty meeting with Yates and Director of Resources Alison Hughes, Oktas left to attend a meeting of NEU members who were gathered outside the front reception, waiting to enter the building. After words were exchanged, Yates allegedly pushed one of the members according to a first hand witness. A Blue Coat spokesman told the BBC at the time that the school "strongly refuted" any suggestion of assault. Indeed, the school’s view was that they had met Oktas in good faith to find a resolution to issues raised, but his actions had provided a risk to student safety, prompting them to call the police before things calmed down. Either way, Yates' position as headteacher was fast becoming untenable.
Unsurprisingly, the meeting failed to change the minds of unionised Blue Coat staff. Last Friday, NEU members voted for six days of strike action. By this point, Yates had already announced she would be stepping back from her day to day duties at the school. Then, on Wednesday, news broke that Yates had stood down with immediate effect.
As ever, the school’s beloved student-run Instagram meme page Sosigatbreak, which you might recall from our past reporting on Blue Coat, had a field day. “Found where Scilla’s new job is gonna be after the strike,” one post read, with an accompanying picture of the abandoned Yates’s Wine Lodge on Moorfields. “Ding dong the witch is (half) dead,” read another.
In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for The Blue Coat School told us:
“The Board of Trustees is working diligently to address the issues that our school community is facing. They are working at pace, and at each stage are seeking to work with staff to keep them informed of the actions that are being taken.”
Speaking to The Post, Oktas says he is unable to comment on the bizarre events that took place on the day of the meeting because the police are still investigating. What he does say is that the culture at the school needs to change: “There are historical problems in this place – it goes way back”.
Sometimes it feels like there are two Blue Coats. There’s the Blue Coat on paper: an aspirational, even intimidating school, where strict rules are the accepted price for elite results and high rankings on Sunday Times leaderboards. There’s a reason an analysis of the north west schools with the most Oxbridge offers between 2017 and 2019, had Blue Coat leading Merseyside comfortably.
But then there is the Blue Coat as experienced by an insider. A place that for the past few years has played host to a series of rows, scandals and a permeating sense of chaos, including one concerning allegation about the school’s new headteacher that we can report for the first time today.
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