Parents at a primary school in Greenwich have appealed for council help to mediate talks with an academy trust after a communication breakdown over job cuts.

Maritime Academy Trust, which runs Brooklands Primary School in Kidbrooke, came under fire earlier this year for placing jobs at risk.

It follows strikes at The Halley Academy and the ongoing saga at The John Roan over forced academisation.

The MAT has been criticised for placing a pair of office staff at risk of redundancy, with a special needs assistant having already left.

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Parents say they were blocked in Twitter after a breakdown in communication with the trust, and asked cabinet member for children’s services Jackie Smith to mediate talks with the MAT at a meeting on Wednesday night.

Brooklands Parents’ Action Group says it cannot appeal to the trust’s board as they are “accused of politicising the debate”.

Brooklands parent Rima Patel pressed the cabinet member, saying: “The relationship between BPAG and specifically Maritime Trust has been further eroded when Tiffany Beck, chair of Maritime trustees, formally wrote to the group to implement stage one of the harassment policy.

“This has been followed by an upsetting letter sent to the entire parent body. This inflammatory approach pits the trust and parents as advisories. We cannot appeal to the chair, we are accused of politicising the debates. It is not political these are our kids.”

New cabinet member for education, Jackie Smith, said a meeting was being organised between the council bosses and the trust, but parents were going to be kept out of it to allow talks to progress.

Cllr Smith said: “The council are not allowed to mediate. It is an academy that feeds directly into the Department of Education.

“We have agreed that we will go and meet the trust and we will talk to them about the problems that have arisen.

“If that is ‘mediation’,  that is all we can do. If parents can’t get any sense from the trust then you have to write to the DoE – that is what happens when you become an academy.

“I would hope that a future Labour government have a process where schools could return to their previous state.”

The MAT runs schools across London and Kent, having taken on Brooklands Park in 2013.

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Academies are funded by the government, not the local council, and have more control over curriculum, admissions and pay.

The day to day running of the school is with the head teacher or principal, but they are overseen by charitable bodies called academy trusts.

Tiffany Beck, the MAT’s chair of trustees, told the local democracy reporting service: “We have extensively engaged with the BPAG, responding to their concerns in both correspondence and a meeting moderated by an independent third party.

“BPAG continue to raise the same unsubstantiated issues (notwithstanding our replies), make demands that the trust cannot legally fulfil and submit prolific correspondence causing a high level of disruption to the trust.”

The chair said that there have been complaints about the “tone of the actions” taken outside the school, adding that members of the trust have allegedly been “subjected to unwarranted harassment on social media”.

Two jobs at Brooklands Primary School have been made redundant, the chair said, with the employees invited to apply for vacant posts within a new structure.