"The Observer" lifts the lid on Mossbourne Federation: both secondary academies accused of subjecting pupils to "emotional abuse"

Founded in 2004, The Mossbourne Community Academy (its current title) in Hackney was one of the first of Andrew Adonis's brainchild "City Academies". Under the leadership of Michael Wilshaw, its swashbuckling and very much "hands on" Headteacher, the school thrived and took just one generation of pupils to achieve "flagship" status by demonstrating the wrongheadedness of the (commonly held) idea that "nothing much" could be expected of inner-city pupils, when its sixth-formers obtained a startling number of places at leading universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. The incoming Conservative government soon began to put forward Mossbourne as justification for a large expansion of the academy movement and Wilshaw was rewarded in 2012 by being made OFSTED's Chief Inspector and by being given a knighthood. The success of the school led to the expansion of its academy trust into the Mossbourne Federation. A new academy, Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy, was opened and two primary schools were added to the trust.

Twenty years on from its first origins, the Mossbourne Federation is in bad trouble. A series of lengthy and detailed reports in The Observer by Anna Fazackerley, now into its third week, has accused the two secondary schools of not only tolerating but actively encouraging the "emotional abuse" of children. Since Fazackerley's first report a large number of parents, former teachers and former pupils have come forward to accuse the schools of what amounts to deliberate cruelty that, in some cases, has caused lasting damage to children's emotional well-being. Their evidence has been corroborated by local GPs and child psychologists. Many of the complaints are about the practice of teachers deliberately screaming into the faces of children but there are also complaints that children have wetted or soiled themselves and that girls have menstruated through their clothing rather than ask for permission to use the toilet because they have been too afraid to do so.

Following Fazackerley's second report on December 8th, the independent safeguarding commissioner for Hackney, Jim Gamble, has announced the highly unusual step of subjecting Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy (MPVA) to a local child safeguarding review. Normally such reviews are only instigated by reports of individual child abuse or neglect so this is a very serious matter for MPVA and for the trust as a whole.

A group of parents at MPVA has written to The Observer to express satisfaction with the school, which they describe as "brilliant," and CASE has written to congratulate The Observer and Fazackerley for their work, while expressing the hope that "The Observer" will extend the scope of its investigation as CASE has reason to believe that abuses of the kind described by Fazackerley are much more widespread within academy trusts than is generally realised. However, no readers' letters have appeared in either "The Guardian" or "The Observer" this weekend (14/15 December), no doubt because of the ongoing industrial dispute about the latter's future.

It is more than possible that underlying the problems now faced by Mossbourne Academy Trust is the way that politicians and many administrators have always tended to attributed a school's success to its "methods" and "policies", rather than to the way in which teachers engage with and relate to their pupils. For policy makers this is an attractive idea, because it means that "successful methods" can be transferred and widely spread, but the history of post-war state education is littered with discarded examples of this practice, usually referred to as "initiatives". Anyone remember TVEI? Anyone remember "resource-based learning"?