Karen spoke on Newsnight this evening to highlight the problems that were being faced by pupils at the new Paddington Academy.

Karen told Newsnight, “We have got to make this school fit for purpose for an additional term, we have to deal with this deficit [£0.75m] and back up the staff who are under these pressures.”

Newsnight’s synopsis on the programme reads:

An academy school run by Britain’s biggest private sponsor of the new system is in trouble. Planned refurbishment of the building is in crisis. And the temporary school that the children are studying in was strewn with rubbish and graffiti at the start of term.

Newsnight has seen documents suggesting that the schoolchildren’s education is suffering. We speak to the sponsor of the school to ask what has gone wrong. We also ask is if there is a wider problem with the academies themselves .

Watch Newsnight’s Exclusive Report online (from BBC website)

The clip starts 19mins 10secs into the programme.