Mossbourne Academies: investigations into alleged emotional harm and abuse. Why are needlessly strict academies unaccountable?

[ParentOfOne]

The Guardian has published a story https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/dec/07/london-academies-emotional-harm-mossbourne-schools-observer-investigation

about allegation of emotional harm and other forms of mistreatment at "one of the country's leading academy trusts", which runs the following schools in Hackney, North London: https://www.mossbourne.org/our-schools/

It is a follow up to a similar story, on the same topic, published a couple of weeks ago: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/nov/23/teachers-at-mossbourne-academy-in-hackney-screamed-at-and-humiliated-pupils-say-angry-parents

The previous story was based on testimonials from 30 parents, but now 70 parents, more than 30 former students and eight former teachers have come forward

"A dossier of allegations, shared with the Observer and sent to the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, included Mossbourne teachers being trained in “healthy fear” and “screaming” sometimes “centimetres apart” from children’s faces, several reports of children fainting in line-ups while being shouted at, and children with special educational needs and disabilities (Send) being punished unfairly and “pushed out” to other schools. Many former students said they had suffered mental health issues due to being afraid in school which had lasted long after they left."

Here there were some discussions about how notoriously strict these schools were https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/secondary/5019841-mossbourne-community-academy-any-experiences but no one mentioned this kind of emotional abuse.

My opinion remains that:

• I hate how so many schools have become academies. That's a backdoor privatisation, with teachers being paid less, while the CEOs of these academy trusts earn more than many University vice-chancellors
• I hate that academies are de facto unaccountable to anyone
• It is false that academies do a better job. Some work well, some don't, but lack of transparency and accountability remain big issues. E.g. see academic research by the LSE https://www.lse.ac.uk/social-policy/Assets/Documents/PDF/Research-reports/Academies-Vision-Report.pdf .
• Academies are simply good at showing Ofsted what they want. If this kind of s* happens in a school rated Outstanding, it means ratings are useless
• I am all for strict discipline, and I will absolutely stand by the school if they punish my child for misbehaving. But I absolutely dread needlessly draconian rules, put together by sexually repressed headteachers who didn't get enough love from their mums, and who get off on exercising this kind of authority to crush their students' spirit. I had made some examples here: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/secondary/5168466-how-common-are-detentions-at-secondary?page=9&reply=138524258 where I also talked about a secondary school in London banning bicycles and giving detentions to students caught cycling to school

The school is above the law because she was able to solve her issue with the school with a letter and a phonecall, not by going to the press, her child and her friends were ok there, no trauma, child at a nice college, all grown up. We wouldnt want to shatter those lovely memories. The lack of empathy is frightening. It is true that before joining the school families are told the rules are the same for everyone. But they are also told how wonderful its pastoral care is and in reality it hasn't been so for everyone.

I don't think @Jodeg posts are overly emotive, quite the contrary - she seems very composed in a situation where she's being constantly attacked by posters who've gone completely deranged (I must add I don't mean you).

I find it appalling that girls roll up their skirts up to the belt and their parents defend this! 🤯
Clearly people on MN have very different standards for their kids behaviour 🙄

Your language is appalling too btw.

I love it when people say things like this, because it’s a signal that you can stop reading whatever shit they spill onto the page.

Right. That's very profound and absolutely a reason to try and get a school closed down or ruin its reputation.

My emotiveness is based upon the emotiveness of the discussion here and some of the allegations and the lawsuit which is being pursued.
I am not sure if you will remember but the idea that something like this can force a school to close is not based on empty beliefs. I have seen it happen in the past with other schools in the area (Homerton Boys springs to mind).
I am interested to hear that you have been right through the whole process before going to the Press. That puts some of the blame in the camp of the education department who absolutely are equipped to deal with safeguarding complaints. I put in a safeguarding complaint to Ofsted about another school (a free school which is theoretically even harder to enforce outside of the DofE) a few years ago and Ofsted and Hackney Education were in there like a flash and the whole school was overhauled.
This is why I question whether either there are real grounds for complaint or whether the whole process has been followed through.
My experience of the system tells me that it didn't need to go nuclear. And I am cross about a lawsuit being pursued because that is an absolute waste of time and money which could be spent sorting out whatever problems there are instead of which money and time will be spent on lawyers and court cases and how does this help educated Hackney children?

This particular instance concerned a girl whose skirt was a little short. Kids grow. Uniform is expensive, especially in Academy schools. Her parents may have been waiting for pay day. And the school's response was to slut shame her. You clearly approve of this, give your use of the word 'harlot'. The rest of us aren't misogynists.

You obviously haven't read what I said. I can't be bothered to repeat it for your benefit. Leaving it here will act as defence of my position which is not as you describe it.

Swearing is allowed on Mumsnet. Put the pearls away.

Perhaps if the school had been less rigid, intractable and unapproachable, all this could have been avoided. But they weren't. That is 100% their responsibility.

I think this is an interesting perspective. I lived in Hackney for 20 years - and left because of schooling.

I also work in education, and have some experience with settings raising expectations for children who would, in a lot of schools and areas, be failed by society and the system.

In fact, before I started working in those settings, I used to believe that absolute zero tolerance was the only way because of some of the reasons you laid out above.

But I don’t think that way now, because of the psychological impact that kind of treatment has been proven to leave.

The problem we’re left with is that if you take the “zero tolerance” away, it needs to be replaced with something or you do get left with the Stokeys and the Haggerstons - fine, but not giving any child a result you wouldn’t expect based on their parental involvement.

It’s depressing but, at the moment, I only see innovation in the private sector bar maybe one interesting example in south London.

Anecdotally, I went to a school just as draconian as Mossbourne, but they weren’t interested in giving us an excellent education - just shaming, shouting and belittling. It’s why I knew my child would not thrive at Mossbourne.

I welcome this attention Mossbourne is getting. It’s time for a new type of innovation in education. Perhaps it will inspire one? There are plenty of models out there to look to. Mossbourne doesn’t need to become another Stokey / Haggerston, etc, if it steps away from its current “healthy fear” model.

Harlots to the barricade😊
I am going to stop posting, as things are going a bit mad. Hopefully, the enquiry will help us all understand what works and what doesn't. It will be good for the school and the community.

Someone posted earlier that their DC chose to stay on for sixth form, citing that as proof that it's a good school. Baldyandproud's comment explains why that's not true. Mossbourne kids have to buy into the strict regime to cope. If they're there from year 7 it's all they know. They're told that they're at the best school and in terms of academic results that's true, so of course a lot opt to stay for sixth form. Baldy's daughter's only realising now that her experience was awful. She knew nothing else at the time, so it's not surprising at all that she opted to stay for sixth form. I've heard similar from DS's friends who went there too.

No, what recent history has taught us is that if one or a few individuals are brave enough to speak out against abuse by those in a position of power, more will often follow, because the abuse turned out to be more widespread than we thought. And so injustice is exposed and addressed.
"injustice" "abuse". Once again for those who are hard of reading, this is not the Catholic church. We are not talking about actual abuse. We are talking about, at most, some individual teachers being heavy handed in a strict school. These accusations have been made before, Ofsted went in and found no real evidence of "abuse". So in one sense I should cool my boots because ultimately I feel quite confident that this is what will happen again. However in the process I fear that this pile-on will effect the school and the students currently trying to do their exams, and students in general feeling pride in their school. Erroneously.

No one is asking for the school to be closed. They want it to get better, not disappear.
Am glad to hear no one wants the school to be closed. However my point remains that if enough mud is thrown this may well be the outcome. And you will be without a decent local school or any local school once more. I can't see the Council fending off the developers again.
Also am interested in your use of the word "better". This is not a very scientific word. It can be interpreted in many different ways. I am wondering whether what you actually mean is "more the way I would want it". The balance with a school is always, as I tried to point out above, between those who can easily access education and understand how it works, and those who don't and can't; between those who would rather emphasise extra curricular over those who value wonderful exam results; between those who feel kindness should take precedence over discipline; etc, etc.
This is why I prefer to leave these decisions to the professionals who can understand the research and judge what is best in a particular community and what fills a gap in the local borough provision. We mere mortals have no access to these pieces of information and even if we did we probably wouldn't fully understand it.
Maybe your idea of better is not mine. Why should your idea have precedence? Why should mine?

Your "consequences" argument. If Mossbourne did fold, would Hackney's other schools really say to themselves, "oh, so discipline doesn't work, may as well throw away the rulebook then" ? No, because that's clearly ridiculous.
If Mossbourne was to fold the most enormous gap would open up in provision. It would be a disaster regardless of what any other school thought.
I didn't say that every other school would throw away the rule book. I didn't say that anywhere. My consequences argument is that you will be without decent education for the next generation of Hackney kids. There would be insufficient provision. Perhaps the schools would be taken over by a different provider. Who knows? But the whole provision is the thrown up in the air.
You are very confident that this is some kind of hyperbole. I remember very clearly how poor the provision was before, how difficult it was to establish decent standards. Do you remember this? Mossbourne was a gamechanger. They led the way.
It is actually quite precarious. We currently have a real healthy mix of different educational options. Parents who don't like the Mossbourne regime can go somewhere else which is decent.
It's like being Mary Whitehouse again and trying to stop certain things being shown on the TV when you can just change the channel and not deprive others of things they enjoy watching.

Even in the unlikely event that it could close and the council's educational policies change as a result, how is that a justification for not investigating these allegations? You can't just bury accusations of maltreatment because of "what might happen".
No one is trying to bury anything. The objection is to the method taken by the parents making the accusations and the hyperbole around the accusations. Schools make mistakes all the time. There are systems in place to deal with those mistakes. Use those systems. Don't go to the press who have nothing to gain but clicks. They don't live in our area. They couldn't care less about consequences. It's just a story to them. Don't launch a lawsuit and try and get money out of the school. This is money that is then taken away from educating students. This is my money as a taxpayer. And yours.

What's most important now is that we listen to the pupils, parents and staff who have come forward.
Well lots of parents saying how much they love the school are now coming forward. Thousands of children have been educated, done better than expected, gone onto good universities from Mossbourne. I hope you will extend the that sense of the importance of listening to those people too as they step up to support the school and its methods (individual cases of heavy-handedness notwithstanding).

😂Your takes are hilariously so wide of the mark I can't be bothered to reply.
You have a talent for taking something reasonably nuanced and boiling it down to something so black and white it becomes unrecognisable.

I am not dodging anything at all. I am trying in good faith to answer.

I know that you aren't talking about "psychological abuse" because my child went there. Am prepared to concede occasional heavy-handedness but every school has instances of people over-stepping the mark here and there and taking out a lawsuit is not a normal response. I doubt anybody outside of London would consider doing such a ludicrous thing.
The school does not instil an atmosphere of fear. It is strict. That is all. I have explained the reasons for the strictness quite clearly but you have ignored those reasons because I am assuming they are not relevant to your child. They weren't relevant to mine either. She wasn't in danger of joining a gang or falling through the cracks in education or not understanding the importance of school. The strictness wasn't there for her. It was there for the large number of children who don't come from her background. 50% of the kids at MVPA were from disadvantaged backgrounds when she was there. This was actually quite a low percentage for Hackney. The percentage at MCA was far higher.
I would suggest that this means that the strictness was not needless for at least 50% of the school.
I love how you cite gentrification as a factor which should therefore mean the school no longer needs to be strict. Has Hackney changed that much? Have the number of middle class families increased so substantially that we can discount the children from disadvantaged backgrounds? That's quite heartless and ill informed of you.
I don't need to prove these methods work. There is a ton of research out there that says they do. Google "does strictness improve academic success and discipline in inner city schools" and have a read of the hundreds of papers for and against which will pop up. I am not an educational expert. And neither are you.
There is also a ton of research on the impact on mental health. My advice? If your child does not get on with these methods send them to a different local school. Why is this so difficult? Why does the world have to change to accommodate you?
The fact that a large percentage of children go on to Russell Group universities from Mossbourne i think indicates that they are taught critical and analytical skills at the school. University is very different from school and they simply wouldn't get in if they were taught everything by rote, which is what you are implying. My child got into one of the top Russell Group universities. I would suggest that she is over-endowed with critical thinking skills as she takes no one's word for anything and quite right too. Neither do I.
The idea that her spirit has been crushed is frankly laughable.
I am not however belittling the idea that this school suits everyone. Nothing suits everyone. But it suits quite alot of people as it is. So leave it alone and seek out something that suits your child better than this. It is out there.

Institutions don't change to fit every person in them. It doesn't work like that. Part of why one sends one's child to a local school is to teach them that they are not the centre of the world in every circumstance. This is a very important life lesson. It is important that the next generation is able to centre other people sometimes. Children who can't do that find life very hard indeed.
I believe in community and in the idea that as part of a community sometimes things are uncomfortable for oneself but you can see that they benefit others.
Perhaps if some of the parents sending their kids to Mossbourne didn't think the world should be changed to accommodate them above all else, and everyone else this situation wouldn't have happened. Perhaps if parents had believed the multiples times they were told about the school system they would have decided not to send their child there but instead to somewhere more suited to their child.
There is a choice in Hackney. Mossbourne is not the only school.
Go somewhere else.

So thank you for an interesting comment on this.
I agree with much of what you have said. I think that there will be a move away or a changing of approach because that's the way education works. I am not surprised that there are interesting things happening in the private sector; they have the means and the class sizes to experiment. Sometimes of course this goes wrong, example Summerhill. But sometimes it can teach us things in the state sector.
I don't approve of academies or free schools on some issues. I have always preferred local authority controlled education where the local authority is up to the job.
Hackney was most definitely not up to the job and Mossbourne was an absolute trailblazer.
I am sure that the zero tolerance approach could be improved. Everything can be improved. But I think that local state education in inner cities has to centre the children from disadvantaged backgrounds. I firmly believe that most advantaged children will do fine in whatever school they attend. That was our approach to schools in Hackney and meant that my daughter attended a fairly terrible primary school which we then worked hard to improve (and incidentally we worked with the educational specialists, not against them and we achieved significant success alongside the headteacher and all the staff).
However the extraordinary thing that Mossbourne has achieved is that it caters for both advantaged and disadvantaged children. But it can't cater for all children.
Which of course leaves parents looking at the alternatives which may not be as good academically. So there is definitely a need for other methods and no one should ever be sitting down and declaring that we have achieved peak education because we haven't.
I don't welcome this attention for Mossbourne. It is not constructive. I strongly object to the involvement of the national press who have no skin in the game and I strongly object to lawsuits being taken out against people who are genuinely trying to create something which works in a very challenging area of the country.
But thank you for raising the tone of the debate. This is the way forward.

Oh absolutely. I remember when it opened - a trailblazer indeed. The head was heralded as an inspiration. I thought the model was great too, at the beginning.

But yes, change comes.

I do see what you mean about the press not in it for the right reasons - it’s a juicy story.

I would also hate to see teachers being scapegoated etc.

Not sure what the answer is, really. Except that hopefully the light at the end of the tunnel might be that Hackney gets a new inspirational model? One that’s more of this current time.

I think it could - it’s Hackney after all! A place full of people with energy who want to innovate.

(Also agree with you on Summerhill!)

hopefully the light at the end of the tunnel might be that Hackney gets a new inspirational model? One that’s more of this current time.
I think it could - it’s Hackney after all! A place full of people with energy who want to innovate.
I hope you're right. I hope those innovators are not put off by the roasting currently being handed out to the last innovators.
🙂

@jodeg - interesting to read your views and experiences. I can't help noticing that all the negative attention seems to be directed against Mossbourne VP, rather than MCA.

Do you think that this is because Mossbourne VP is more draconian than MCA? Or because there are more middle-class parents at the former?

There are quite a few strict academies which focus on disadvanted students (e.g. Harris, Ark, etc) which haven't had the negative press Mossbourne VP has experienced. So I do wonder if on some occasions the staff at the latter have taken their approach too far.

Yes. I am surprised as well because when MVPA opened it was regarded as less draconian and since the current head was there then (as were quite alot of the current teaching staff) albeit as a Deputy Head (and I know him as both a head and DH) I don't think it can be because the school is stricter. I am unwillingly leaning towards the fact that the intake contains a larger percentage of middle class parents. The 50:50 split is unusual for Hackney. It tends much more towards a 70:30 (with the 30 being middle class).
I think the other academies get away with it more because Mossbourne is seen as the first school to really embed this zero tolerance approach. And it started with MCA.